July 21, 2009 (A Full FCC today?)
BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for TUESDAY JULY 21, 2009
Here's today's news... we'll play catch-up today and this week at http://www.benton.org/taxonomy/term/6
AGENDA
FCC Nominees To Get Vote July 21
Oversight of the FCC
Senate Commerce Committee Hearings on Kids' TV, Advertising
BROADBAND/INTERNET
Data-Driven FCC in Overdrive
Crawford: FCC Will Tackle Media Ownership Early On, Broadband A Priority
Levin: Broadband Comments Don't Move Ball Forward
Why Not Force Incumbents To Show Which Areas Are Served?
Connecting Broadband Networks and Applications in NTIA Proposals
Broadband group aims at developing nations
Coming soon: mobile, immersive, interactive entertainment
GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
US Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving
Still wrong on wiretapping
QUICKLY -- Barnes & Noble Plans an Extensive E-Bookstore to rival Amazon; British High Court Sides With Google in Libel Case; Boston Globe Union Approves Wage Cuts
AGENDA
FCC NOMINEES TO GET VOTE JULY 21
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The US Senate has scheduled a vote for Tuesday, July 21, on the nominations of Mignon Clyburn and Meredith Attwell Baker as Federal Communications Commission commissioners. The pair are expected to be confirmed after a fairly uneventful nomination hearing July 15 at which both were praised.
http://benton.org/node/26500
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OVERSIGHT OF THE FCC
[SOURCE: House of Representatives Commerce Committee]
The House Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet will hold a Federal Communications Commission oversight hearing on Thursday, July 23, 2009.
http://benton.org/node/26499
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SENATE COMMERCE COMMITTEE HEARINGS ON KIDS' TV, ADVERTISING
[SOURCE: US Senate Commerce Committee]
The Senate commerce Committee will hold a hearing, "Rethinking the Children's Television Act for a Digital Media Age," on Wednesday, July 22, 2009. Broadcasting & Cable reports that the witness list includes Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, Gary Knell, President, Sesame Workshop; John Lawson, EVP, ION Media Networks; Sandra Calvert, drector of the Children's Digital Media Center at Georgetown University; Cyma Zarghami, president of Nickelodeon & MTVN Family Group; and James Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media. earlier that day, the Committee's Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance Subcommittee hearing on Advertising Trends and Consumer Protection. The witnesses for that hearing are: David Vladeck, director, Bureau of Consumer Protection. for the Federal Trade Commission; Sally Greenberg, executive director, National Consumers League; Dr. Urvashi Rangan, director of technical policy for Consumers Union; C. Lee Peeler, president of the National Advertising Review Council; Greg Renker, co-chairman Guthy-Renker LLC; and Jon Congdon, president, Product Partners, LLC.
http://benton.org/node/26498
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BROADBAND/INTERNET
DATA-DRIVEN FCC IN OVERDRIVE
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
It's going to be a long summer at the Federal Communications Commission -- at least according to broadband guru Blair Levin. At the first public FCC meeting under new Chairman Julius Genachowski, Levin apologized in advance to staffers who schedule vacations for the historically dog days of August. That's because the FCC has an ambitious schedule of broadband hearings, including at least 20 next month, as part of its charter to deliver a national broadband rollout plan. Levin is coordinating the effort. "This is going to be this year's DTV transition," said one FCC staffer. According to FCC spokesman David Fiske, the commission has made four or five new outside hires to help with the broadband plan, and expects to announce more new hires next week. The bulk of the workload, however, will be handled by bureau staffers, given that broadband increasingly cuts across traditional boundaries.
http://benton.org/node/26497
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CRAWFORD: FCC WILL TACKLE MEDIA OWNERSHIP EARLY ON, BROADBAND A PRIORITY
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
At the Minority Media & Telecommunications Conference in Washington, Susan Crawford -- special assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy -- said, "Millions of Americans rely on over-the-air broadcasting. The administration understands the important role traditional terrestrial broadcasting continues to play," pointing to the high radio listenership of minorities, as one example of that importance. But Crawford also said that the FCC's broadband plan is the future of diversity. She said that the plan would be drafted "out of the K Street orbit," saying they were trying to open the process up. "This is the chance to talk about our future as a country...and the importance of the diversity of voices informing those policies." She said the FCC very much wanted to make sure all the voices are heard in the debate.
http://benton.org/node/26496
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LEVIN: BROADBAND COMMENTS DON'T MOVE BALL FORWARD
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Blair Levin, leading the Federal Communications Commission's efforts to write a national Broadband Plan, is not impressed with the submissions from the public and industry, suggesting there was too much pie in the sky and not enough pie chart on the page. He said the comments lacked helpful data, analysis of tradeoffs and "seriousness of purpose." Levin said he had been immersed in reading the first round of comments over the past week and was "much less optimistic" than he was when then FCC Chairman Michael Copps asked him to come in and head up the broadband plan effort. "While there is a lot of interesting commentary and a lot of agreement on the opportunities that the plan presents," he told his audience, "there is also very little in the 8,500-and-some pages that moves the ball forward." In fact, he said, there was a lot of agreement on various issues, like the need for adoption, but he said the comments don't get the problem the FCC faces, which is to come up with a way to get from here to there, that is cost efficient and doable.
http://benton.org/node/26495
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WHY NOT FORCE INCUMBENTS TO SHOW WHICH AREAS ARE SERVED?
[SOURCE: App-Rising.com, AUTHOR: Geoff Daily]
The broadband stimulus grant rules are troubling because the data applicants need to gather to prove an area is un- or underserved is expensive and time-consuming to gather -- plus the rules seem to prioritize protectionism over progress by giving incumbents 30 days to respond to and refute any application that touches upon their service territory. But at the same time, the data needed to determine un- and underserved doesn't necessarily have to be recaptured as it's already readily available in the hands of incumbent carriers. Additionally, we know the incumbents are very interested in preventing government subsidies from going towards project that will introduce significant new competition to their legacy networks. Now combining these two threads together, Daily proposes an alternative solution: why not force incumbents to show which areas are already served by threatening to consider all areas unserved that they don't produce verifiable data for showing that they offer service there?
http://benton.org/node/26494
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CONNECTING BROADBAND NETWORKS AND APPLICATIONS IN NTIA PROPOSALS
[SOURCE: BroadbandCensus.com, AUTHOR: Don Samuelson]
[Commentary] A July 9 discussion with the National telecommunications and Information Administration's Tony Wilhelm offered three key messages: 1) The overall design of the new Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) seems to track the design of the old NTIA Technology Opportunities Program (TOP), which is not surprising given the able involvement of Tony Wilhelm in both. 2) There is going to be maximum awards for those applications which attempt to solve multiple policy objectives, on the "biggest bang for the stimulus buck" theory. 3) the states are going to be influential in the evaluation system, to the extent that their prioritization efforts are transparent and fair. It would be useful for the folks who have been tracking the NTIA and Rural Utilities Service stimulus efforts as "network-promoting" funding programs to put real energy into populating the network applications with practical application and adoption strategies. Exactly what is the real-world payoff that is going to come from the network deployment?
http://benton.org/node/26493
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BROADBAND GROUP AIMS AT DEVELOPING NATIONS
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Andrew Parker]
Sanjiv Ahuja, former head of France Telecom's Orange mobile phone businesses, has established a new company to supply broadband Internet access in developing countries. Augere is planning to launch its first consumer-focused broadband operations in Asia in October and then expand to Africa early next year. The company has secured $125m of initial funding from France Telecom, France's leading telecoms company, and New Silk Route and Vedanta Capital, which are New York-based private equity and venture capital firms, respectively. India-born Mr Ahuja is concentrating on developing countries with large populations that have little or no access to the Internet. Augere's first consumer-focused businesses are due to launch in Bangladesh and Pakistan by October. It is also looking at countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Nigeria. Augere's business model rests on charging consumers $10 per month to connect their computers to the Internet, which is a similar amount to what many households in emerging markets spend on mobile phone services. Augere is using the wireless technology Wimax to provide broadband connections to homes and offices, because the fixed-line telecoms networks in developing countries can be poor quality or non-existent.
http://benton.org/node/26489
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COMING SOON: MOBILE, IMMERSIVE, INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Eli Noam]
[Cmmentary] While video entertainment has moved from the airwaves (thinking broadcasting) to landlines (think cable TV) -- the long-term path of entertainment media back to the airwaves. Not in the old-fashioned way but instead over the mobile phones themselves. One important reason is that television will change its nature as high-speed wireline and wireless networks make it possible to supply users with many more bits, per second and per dollar. These bits will do much more than add channels and programme choices. They will also "deepen" the video image by enabling an ultra-high picture quality, with computer-based virtual reality, video-games style interactivity, two-way connectivity, three-dimensionality, multiple audio channels, and other features. This creates the ingredients for a new style of an immersive, interactive entertainment experience in which the user is surrounded by the action. For such media participation, a TV is not a box one looks at, but it is something one straps on, something one wears, like eyeglasses. And this participatory media activity requires an untethering from hardware, and mobility within the entertainment experience.
http://benton.org/node/26488
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GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
US WITHHELD DATA ON RISKS OF DISTRACTED DRIVING
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Matt Richtel]
In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel. They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America's roadways. But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers' agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering Congress. On Tuesday, the full body of research is being made public for the first time by the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the documents.
http://benton.org/node/26492
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STILL WRONG ON WIRETAPPING
[SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, AUTHOR: Editorial staff]
[Commentary] One of former President George W. Bush's most disastrous legacies - his warrantless wiretaps - has picked up a curious ally in President Obama. What the new White House wants is pretty much what the old team had: secrecy cloaking an end run around civil liberties. For months the surveillance debate has gone on before Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who is clearly weary with the Washington bob-and-weave. He's even mentioned a withering government report released this month by five watchdog agencies that said the effectiveness of the illegal wiretaps was unclear. The decision in his lap isn't an easy one. He can side with Obama lawyers and dismiss the case in the name of national security, a path that courts often take when confronted with a flag-waving invocation of homeland defense. Or he can open up a dark chapter in the nation's history to the plain light of legal examination. Such a decision would definitely roil the waters while the truth surfaces. But since the president won't do it, it's time the courts stepped in.
http://benton.org/node/26487
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QUICKLY
BARNES & NOBLE PLANS AN EXTENSIVE E-BOOKSTORE TO RIVAL AMAZON
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Motoko Rich]
Four months after acquiring an e-book retailer, Barnes & Noble, the world's largest chain of bookstores, is starting its own mega e-bookstore on its Web site, BN.com. In an announcement on Monday, Barnes & Noble said that it would offer more than 700,000 books that could be read on a wide range of devices, including Apple's iPhone, the BlackBerry and various laptop or desktop computers. When Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise in March, that online retailer had about 60,000 books in its catalog. Barnes & Noble is promoting its e-bookstore as the world's largest, an implicit stab at Amazon DOT com, which offers about 330,000 for its Kindle device. Currently, Google's public domain books cannot be read on a Kindle.
http://benton.org/node/26491
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BRITISH HIGH COURTS SIDES WITH GOOGLE IN LIBEL CASE
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Aaron Patrick]
The British High Court ruled Google isn't responsible for defamatory material trawled by its search engine -- a decision likely to give the U.S. Web giant substantial protection from the UK's tough libel laws. Justice David Eady ruled that Google's Internet search engine isn't considered a publisher under defamation law, and therefore isn't responsible for the content of the short descriptions of Web sites that appear in Google searches. The case was initiated by Metropolitan International Schools Ltd., an online training company based in the UK. The company had sued Google over comments posted on Web forums accusing the training company of running a scam, an allegation Metropolitan International Schools denied, according to the judgment. The Web forums didn't belong to Google, but Metropolitan International Schools sued Google for publicizing the claims through its search results. In its defense, Google argued it shouldn't be held responsible for the content of the 39 billion Web pages available on the Internet.
http://benton.org/node/26490
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BOSTON GLOBE UNION APPROVES WAGE CUTS
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Russell Adams]
The Boston Globe's largest union on Monday approved a package of wage and benefits cuts, ending a battle that began with New York Times Co.'s threat to shut down the newspaper and removing a significant obstacle to Times Co.'s efforts to sell it. The labor contract, ratified by a vote of 366 to 179, will save $10 million a year at the Globe, New England's largest daily. Under its terms, the nearly 700 members of the Boston Newspaper Guild will accept a 5.94% pay cut along with a number of other concessions, including unpaid furloughs, a pension freeze and the elimination of job guarantees for many members.
http://benton.org/node/26486
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