March 2009

President Obama Nominates Jon Leibowitz to be Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission

President Barack Obama nominated Jon Leibowitz to be Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. Leibowitz is currently the only Democratic Commissioner on the FTC. He was sworn in as FTC Commissioner on September 3, 2004. In joining the Commission, Leibowitz resumed a long career of public service. He was the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters. He served as chief counsel and staff director for the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology from 1995 to 1996 and the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice from 1991 to 1994. In addition, he served as chief counsel to Senator Herb Kohl from 1989 to 2000. Leibowitz worked for Senator Paul Simon from 1986 to 1987. In the private sector, Leibowitz served most recently as vice president for congressional affairs for the Motion Picture Association of America - from 2000 to 2004 - and worked as an attorney in private practice in Washington from 1984 to 1986. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Wisconsin with a B.A. in American History (1980), Leibowitz graduated from the New York University School of Law in 1984. He is a member of the District of Columbia Bar, and has co-authored amicus briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court on issues ranging from gun control to the census.

Genachowski Plays FCC Waiting Game

Why hasn't President Barack Obama nominated Julius Genachowski to be the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission? The consensus from a number of lobbyists who asked not to be identified is that the administration is looking for a replacement for the Republican FCC seat vacated by Deborah Taylor Tate in January, to be paired with a Democratic nominee who would succeed Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein if he exits. That means we could be waiting quite a while for a new regime at the FCC. Getting a minority voice and face on the commission is likely playing into the widespread speculation that the White House wants to move on more than one seat at a time. If the administration isn't planning to renominate Adelstein, it will likely look for a diverse candidate like, say, Mignon Clyburn. "You can't have three white Democrat males on the commission," says the veteran Washington insider. Clyburn is generally thought to be the Obama administration's pick for the Democratic seat if it opens up. She was one of the names floated as a possibility for chairman, and is now the first name that comes up as a replacement for Adelstein. Possible GOP nominees include FCC deputy general counsel Ajit Pai who was once a staffer for Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), David Gross, the top international communications adviser to the State Department in the administration of George W. Bush, and Hilda Legg, former administrator of the USDA's Rural Utilities Service under President George W. Bush.

Web Archivist campaigning to head GPO

President Obama has repeatedly called for more transparency in government, and Web archivist Carl Malamud thinks he can help the president actually achieve that. With the support of some prominent Internet activists, Malamud has launched a campaign at YesWeScan.org to convince the president to charge him with the task of running the Government Printing Office, the department responsible for providing public access to a variety of federal work products. Malamud has plenty of experience facilitating public access to government documents, much to the chagrin of public officials. He has butted heads with government entities in his quest to get all levels of government to open their data banks to free, online public access. In the 1990s, he convinced the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Patent and Trademark Office to make their data available online, and he continues to post hard-to-access public documents on his Web site Public.resource.org.

Now, on "Yes We Scan," Malamud puts forth a seven-point plan to improve the GPO:

1) Lead the effort to make all primary legal materials produced by the U.S. readily available.

2) Work more closely with libraries and reform the Federal Depository Library Program to give them more support.

3) Establish a United States Publishing Academy to provide workforce development and vocational training for students on how to print and publish effectively.

4) Form a blue ribbon commission to reexamine the design of passports and other secure documents.

5) Create more materials for the public domain, both as fully produced books as well as freely available master files for others to use and remix.

6) Radically change how the government presents information on the Internet by means such as installing a cloud for .gov to use or upgrading the government's video capabilities.

7) Be fully transparent in its own financial affairs and a forceful and effective advocate for the public domain.

Broadcast TV Faces Struggle to Stay Viable

For decades, the big three, now big four, broadcast television networks all had the same game plan: spend many millions to develop and produce scripted shows aimed at a mass audience and national advertisers, with a shelf life of years or decades as reruns in syndication. But that model, based on attracting enough ad dollars to cover the costs of shows like "Lost" and "ER," no longer appears viable. Network dramas now cost about $3 million an hour. The future for the networks, it seems, is more low-cost reality shows, more news and talk, and a greater effort to find new revenue streams, whether they be from receiving subscriber fees as cable channels do, or becoming cable networks themselves, an idea that has gained currency. The last bastion of the big network audience is the Super Bowl and other live events like the Grammy Awards and the Academy Awards. The rub is that those have traditionally been viewed as promotional outlets for a network's other shows, and rarely make money themselves. Ratings over all for broadcast networks continue to decline, making it harder for them to justify their high prices for advertising. Cable channels are spending more on original shows, which bring in new viewers and dampen their appetites for buying repeats of broadcast shows. For the networks, the crisis is twofold: cultural and financial. For viewers, the result is more low-cost reality shows, prime-time talk and news programs and sports from the institutions that once made "Hill Street Blues," "All in the Family" and "Cheers."

TV ratings for kids' shows don't reflect aggressive content

A new study by psychologists from Iowa State University and Linfield College has found that TV ratings don't accurately reflect the aggressive content found in shows popular among children -- even cartoons. They found higher levels of physical aggression in designated children's programs (rated TV-Y and TV-Y7) than among programs for general audiences (rated TV-G, TV-PG, etc). The study, which is published online in the March/April issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, was the first to report a link between viewing TV verbal aggression and a child's resulting verbal aggression. The results also showed exposure to televised physical aggression was associated with a variety of negative behaviors in the fifth-grade girls.

APTS Praises Eshoo Bill

The Association of American Public Television Stations applauded Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA) for reintroducing a bill that would require DISH Network to carry noncommercial stations' multicast channels. APTS already has a multicast carriage deal with DirecTV. DISH did not want to make the same deal. The bill, the Satellite Consumers' Access to Public Television Digital Programming Act, comes as Congress begins considering the reauthorizing the compulsory licenses that cover satellite's carriage of local and distant-signal TV stations (the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act, SHVERA). Rep Eshoo has conceded that the bill is something of a big stick meant to force DISH to follow DirecTV's lead.

Obama's broadband stimulus: Will wireless fit the bill?

When President Obama said during his address to Congress this week that "laying broadband" was going to one of the main priorities of his recently-passed stimulus package, the first question that comes to mind is, "What sort of broadband?" Although the government has allotted US$7.2 billion for broadband deployment in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the bill does not specify what sort of technology the money will be spent on. Rather, it will enable tech companies, telecom companies and ISPs to compete for broadband grants that will be administered by both the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the United States Department of Agriculture. And with so many different types of existing and emerging broadband technologies out there right now, it seems that both federal agencies will have a wide array of options to choose from when deciding how to dole out the cash. Wireless broadband technologies such as should play a major role in any national broadband infrastructure because of their ability to cover large areas with a single base station, thus providing a more cost-effective alternative to deploying fiber-to-the-home in sparsely-populated areas. Harold Feld says that one wireless technology that could really take off in the wake of the broadband stimulus package is 802.11y, a new Wi-Fi standard approved by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) last September that runs over the 3.65 GHz band.

Northern States Need Broadband Dollars In Weeks Not Months

[Commentary] It gets cold up here! DC people generally agree that it will that 4-6 months, at best, to start rolling out the broadband grants created by the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. For people who can play hockey in their backyard during the winter, that's not a good timetable. We need to recognize that for the northern third of the country you can't lay a lot of broadband in the winter and it's winter from at least October until April. If we're going to get any stimulus effect out of these dollars this year we need to find a way to make capital available right away so that shovel-ready projects can start deploying immediately. But it's going to be nigh impossible for government to vet grant and loan applications any faster than the timeline laid out at the beginning of this post without inviting a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse into the system. So the only way we can responsibly speedily subsidize deployment is through the creation of a fast-track partial loan guarantee program.

FCC Announces DTV Delay Implementation Dates

On February 20, 2009, the Federal Communications Commission adopted and released a Second Report and Order and Notice of Proposed Rule Making to implement the most time sensitive of the remaining actions necessitated by the delay in the digital television transition deadline. On Friday, the FCC announced that the rules adopted in the DTV Delay Act Omnibus Order are now effective (with some exceptions later in order to give manufacturers, eligible telecommunications carriers and multichannel video programming distributors the necessary time to fully comply with the amended rules). The FCC announced that comments in the companion Notice of Proposed Rulemaking are due March 4 (Wednesday). The FCC also announced that the rules adopted in the Commission's Report and Order authorizing the use of distributed transmission system technologies in the digital television service are now in effect.

FCC Seeks Sirius-XM Merger Condition Input

In approving the transfer of control of licenses and authorizations held by Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio, the Federal Communications Commission accepted the applicants' voluntary commitment to enter into long-term leases or other agreements to provide a Qualified Entity or Entities with rights to four percent of the full-time audio channels on the Sirius platform and four percent of the full-time channels on the XM platform. The applicants committed to entering into these third-party leases within four months of the consummation of the merger. In order to establish procedures for implementing the Third-Party Access Commitment, the FCC now seeks comment on a range of implementation issues, including the definition of a Qualified Entity or Entities, the process for establishing eligibility, the technical and financial qualifications of lessees, the criteria for selecting among competing applicants where demand exceeds supply, the technical aspects of allocating capacity to lessees, the duration of the "long-term" lease, as well as other terms and conditions of service. The FCC also invites interested parties to comment on whether there should be a single lessee or multiple lessees and, if more than one, how much capacity should be allocated to any single lessee. In addition, we note that the Applicants indicated that the merged entity, Sirius XM, "is willing not to be involved in the selection" of the lessees. The FCC seeks comment on whether Sirius XM should select or be involved in the selection of the lessees and how the involvement of Sirius XM in the selection process would enhance overall the spectrum leasing arrangements. If Sirius XM should not select or be involved in the selection of the lessees, the FCC invites comment on who should make the selection, such as an independent trustee.

Benton

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