Revere Digital

Newly released lobbying figures show that broadband providers are still far outpacing Internet companies on spending in DC, as federal regulators consider how to write new rules for Internet lines.

Collectively, Internet service providers (and their trade associations) have spent $42.4 million so far in 2014 on lobbying lawmakers and regulators, according to federal disclosure forms. In the second quarter, Comcast spent $4.45 million on lobbying, while the cable industry’s trade group, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, spent another $4 million.

The discrepancy between the spending by the two industries -- which is nothing new -- continues to be a potential problem for net neutrality advocates who are hoping to convince federal regulators to adopt strong rules on Internet lines to prevent broadband providers from discriminating against some traffic.

While Aereo generated lots of attention from the media world in the run-up to its Supreme Court case, consumers may have been less interested. Paperwork filed with the US Copyright Office indicates that the startup ended 2013 with 77,596 subscribers, spread out among 10 cities.

About 27,000 of those subscribers lived in the New York City area, which was Aereo’s first market, and launched in the spring of 2012. Boston, which launched in the spring of 2013, had 12,000 subscribers. The Atlanta area, which also launched in 2013, accounted for 10,000 subscribers.

Don’t like the idea of Comcast, the nation’s largest cable and Internet provider, getting larger by purchasing Time Warner Cable? You can now officially let regulators know, after the Federal Communications Commission formally launched its review of the deal.

The agency is asking for comments about the proposed $45 billion transaction (including Comcast’s spin-off deal with Charter Communications). Initial comments are due August 25, with final comments due October 8.

The action will be mostly administrative. The FCC has already received more than 10,000 comments about the deal since it was announced in February. The FCC notice also starts an informal 180-day shot-clock for completing its review, although that doesn’t really mean much because the agency routinely blows those deadlines. Comcast reiterated its position that the acquisition is in the public’s interest, but suggested that it knows others may not agree.

AT&T grabbed a lot of attention back in January when it announced plans to offer companies the option to pay for data used by their customers. Since then? Crickets.

Speculation that Amazon might be the first big-name customer for the service for the Fire phone proved to be premature. However, AT&T has been gradually adding a few smaller names to the pilot program launched earlier in 2014. So-called sponsored data is designed to work like a toll-free number did in the landline days.

In this case, the sponsor foots the bill for the consumer to use certain services without having the resulting data use count against his or her monthly limit. Seattle-area startup Syntonic Wireless is announcing that it is now a part of the AT&T effort and plans to launch a sponsored content marketplace that will allow smartphone owners to see a range of available content that won’t count against their monthly data cap.

Sen Mark Warner (D-VA) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to look into whether Facebook’s experiment on the ability to manipulate emotions on Facebook using the data of 700,000 unwitting users may have violated the company’s privacy agreement with the federal government.

“As the collection and analysis of ‘big data’ continues to increase and as it assumes a larger role in the business plans of Internet-based companies, it is appropriate that we consider questions about what, if any, oversight might be appropriate,” Sen Warner wrote to the FTC.

[Commentary] Over the last seven years, since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, the PC has gradually been dethroned by the smartphone (and to a lesser extent, by the tablet) as the key digital device.

PC sales have fallen significantly in recent years, racking up their worst annual sales in 2014, while smartphone and tablet sales have soared.

Almost all of the energy that developers once put into making software for laptops and desktops is now devoted to making mobile apps and mobile websites.

Just recently, it has become clear that a serious effort has begun to merge the smartphone and the PC, or at least to bring some of the more familiar features of the surging smartphone to the tanking PC. We are seeing the start of what I expect to be a long-term trend to make PCs look and act more like smartphones, and to bring to the PC some of the functions of the phone.

With just a filing deadline approaching, companies are starting to weigh in on the Federal Communications Commission’s controversial fast-lane net neutrality proposal.

E-commerce marketplace Etsy said that it can’t support the current proposal, which would allow Internet providers to charge content companies to use faster, priority lanes into subscribers’ homes.

“Etsy’s continued growth depends on equal access to consumers,” the company said.

In an official filing with the agency, Etsy said Chairman Tom Wheeler’s assurances that his plan won’t create a fast-lane/slow-lane Internet because the agency would veto any unreasonable commercial proposal weren’t enough.

“The proposed ‘commercially reasonable’ standard and ‘minimum access levels’ give us no comfort,” the company said. “If the proposed rules were in place when Etsy was founded, we would never have achieved the success we have today. Etsy and other startups will suffer if the FCC allows some companies to negotiate priority or exclusive access to consumers.”

A Q&A with Gild CEO Sheeroy Desai and chief scientist Vivienne Ming. Tech companies have a diversity problem, especially when it comes to hiring software engineers.

Software may be eating the world, but for the most part that software is created by white males, despite the fact that there are many qualified engineers in the marketplace who are neither.

A series of self-reinforcing cycles reinforces the status quo. Companies tend to hire alumnae from certain universities and workers from particular companies; they also rely heavily on referrals from existing employees. The result is a workforce with a lot of faces that look similar.

It’s the kind of problem you might expect could be solved by, well, software. Human biases in hiring, innocent and otherwise, can be corrected by an approach that ranks candidates based on the quality of their body of publicly visible work -- or so the thinking goes. That’s what Gild does. It’s one of a few up-and-coming companies that has sought to give its customers -- some 300 companies at last count -- a leg up in finding qualified software developers.

Gild CEO Sheeroy Desai and chief scientist Vivienne Ming talked about how the company is starting to help its customers grapple with the difficulties of building a more diverse work force.

Federal regulators have received more than 625,000 comments about a controversial proposal to allow broadband providers to offer fast-lane service on the Internet. None, so far, has been from Google.

The search giant and other large tech companies, including Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and eBay, may support net neutrality rules, but they don’t appear to be spending much time or money in Washington fighting for them.

That’s a sharp contrast from 2010, when those companies, particularly Google, fought a high-profile lobbying war with telecommunications and cable companies over net neutrality, which is the idea that Internet traffic should be treated equally and not blocked or slowed.

The FCC isn’t expected to make a final decision on rules until the end of 2014, so there’s still plenty of time for big tech companies to engage. But their seeming reluctance to get too heavily involved may be a boon for broadband providers like Verizon and Comcast, which invest heavily in lobbyists and interest groups to help get their way in DC.

The tech companies signed onto a letter protesting FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s fast-lane net neutrality proposal, but appear to have done relatively little since then. Heavily-regulated Internet providers, by contrast, have been busy commissioning economic studies, reviving “grassroots” advocacy groups, hosting numerous panels around DC and generally building a defense against efforts by net neutrality advocates to push the FCC to impose more regulations on Internet lines.

“My worry about net neutrality is: What are you trying to fix? What are you trying to solve?” AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in early June at a luncheon held next door to the Federal Communications Commission. “I think we ought to be very cautious about tinkering with this thing.”

Google spent $15.8 million in 2013 lobbying lawmakers, making it the twelfth biggest spender in DC, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It was the only Internet company to crack the top 20 in spending, spending slightly less than AT&T and slightly more than Boeing.

[Commentary] New, convenient and often cheaper market entrants are encouraging consumers to abandon traditional service providers. Digital disruption isn’t just a consumer story. It is also reshaping how businesses buy goods and services from other businesses.

An Accenture survey of 500 business leaders from 10 economies found that 80 percent planned to pursue growth opportunities outside of their own industry -- in collaboration with other industries, the public sector, or the nonprofit sector. As a result, the approach to regulation that has been built around traditional models of industry -- from telecoms and taxis to banks and hotels -- needs to be adapted to address these emerging “digitally contestable markets.”

As regulators attempt to keep pace with these digitally contestable markets, they will be seeking to not constrain the benefits of innovation or protect existing practice providers from disruption. What may appear today to be a phenomenon led by technology upstarts will become embedded across old and new companies in multiple sectors as they learn to embrace new digital business models at an increasingly rapid rate.

[Robinson and Cooper work for Accenture Institute for High Performance]