May 2008

Businesses alone are not doing enough to avert an impending shortage of Internet Protocol addresses, and governments must work with them to secure the future of the Internet economy, according to a report published Thursday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The number of IP addresses, needed for Web sites, servers, and PCs to communicate with one another over the Internet, is limited, and almost 85 percent of addresses are now in use. At the current rate of growth, the pool of available addresses will be exhausted by 2011. Fortunately, a solution to this problem has already been developed: a new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, which provides a far greater number of addresses. Adopting IPv6 means making extensive changes to networking hardware and software.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/05/15/Govts-must-intervene-to-end-IP...

The Administration strongly opposes Senate passage of S. J. Res. 28, a resolution disapproving the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with respect to broadcast media ownership. The FCC rule, which is the product of years of study and extensive public comment and consultation, modestly and judiciously modernizes decades-old media ownership regulations that highly restrict cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations. As a result of technological advances that have led to a dramatic and permanent transformation of the media marketplace in which citizens now have access to a multitude of additional sources of information, these outdated restrictions are not necessary. The new rule more accurately reflects this changing media landscape by taking into account the abundance of news and information outlets that exist today, and furthers the public interest by providing greater financial flexibility to newspaper and broadcast outlets struggling to survive in today's intensely competitive media environment. In addition to reducing the prior rule's excessive regulation of well-functioning markets, the new FCC rule includes substantial constraints to guard against excessive concentration. The Administration supported this FCC action and strongly opposes any attempt to overturn this rule by legislative means. To disapprove this rule and require the Federal government to reassert regulatory constraints on business decisions in a competitive media marketplace would exacerbate financial challenges facing newspapers and broadcast stations and thus not be in the public interest. Accordingly, if S.J. Res. 28 were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/legislative/sap/110-2/sapsjr28-s.pdf

Debate over the "embedded journalist" program run by the Pentagon since the weeks before the Iraq invasion in 2003 has long raged, with some claiming that it gave reporters valuable close access to action while others saying that the journalists were severely compromised within it. Now sociologist Andrew M. Lindner, writing in the spring issue of the American Sociological Association's "Context" magazine describes what is billed as the only sociological study to date of the substantive content of media coverage during the first six weeks of the Iraq war. Lindner found that journalists embedded with American troops emphasized military successes more often than they covered consequences for Iraqi citizens. "The embedded program proved to be a Pentagon victory because it kept reporters focused on the horrors facing the troops, not the horrors of the civilian war experience," wrote Lindner, who is completing his doctoral dissertation at Penn State University. "The end result: a communications victory for an administration that hoped to build support for the war by depicting it as a successful mission with limited cost." Lindner's conclusions are the result of a content analysis of 742 news articles written by 156 English-language print reporters in Iraq during the first six weeks of the war.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_con...

The American Association of People with Disabilities, Consumer Federation of America, National Hispanic Media Coalition, New America Foundation, Telecommunications Research and Action Center, and World Institute on Disability urged the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether the lack of an automatic upgrade capability in digital televisions (DTVs) is hurting consumers, particularly those with disabilities. In a letter to the FCC, the groups stated that the lack of such a capability could leave consumers with obsolete DTVs shortly after they are purchased due to software problems with the DTVs themselves, changes to V-Chip and emergency alerting regulations, and enhancements to accessibility technologies like captioning and video description. They noted recently announced software problems with V-Chips in televisions and reception tuners in digital converter boxes the government is subsidizing. Furthermore, the organizations believe that this issue could potentially be solved with a simple, inexpensive automatic software upgrade that allows manufacturers to correct software errors quickly and easily with little to no burden on the consumer. Automatic update capability could also assist people with disabilities by enabling rapid dissemination of new innovations and enhancements to existing technologies for captioning, video description, and alerting. Instead of waiting for a new base of DTVs with enhanced accessibility options to disseminate across the market, an automatic update capability could allow for such technology to be distributed much faster.
http://www.trac.org/newsroom/releases/archives/2007/national-organizatio...
* Read the letter
http://www.trac.org/on-trac-for-2009/articles/letter-to-the-fcc.html