Oct 22, 2009 (FCC Meeting on Network Neutrality)
BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2009
Two big items on today's agenda: Video Competition in a Digital Age and the FCC Launches a proceeding on Network Neutrality (see news below). See http://bit.ly/30xD5
NETWORK NEUTRALITY
Markey: FCC Network Neutrality Proposal Needs Legislative Teeth
11 Pro-Net Neutrality Senators Rally Around Genachowski's Proposal
FCC Will Probe Managed Services As Part of Network Neutrality Push
FCC's McDowell, Baker to Give Partial Support on Net Neutrality Notice
Telecom firms face Network Neutrality defeat
Free Press: AT&T investments are proof Network Neutrality doesn't hinder broadband
Canada: ISP traffic shaping should only be "last resort"
Civil Rights Groups Speak Up for Network Neutrality
28 Public Interest Groups Give 'Strong Support' To FCC for Network Neutrality
Public Interest Groups Express Disappointment in Congressional Letter on Net Neutrality
Verizon CEO Blasts FCC Open Internet Proposal
Google, Verizon Seek Common Ground
Beck through the looking glass: smears net neutrality as a Marxist plot to take over the Internet
BROADBAND
FCC Floats Cash-For-TV-Spectrum Scheme
FCC's broadband coordinator warns of spectrum shortage
AT&T CTO: Throw Moore's Law out, rethink networks
706 Joint Conference Says "Pick Me, Pick Me" for National Broadband Clearinghouse
Barriers to Broadband Adoption
The broadband adoption dilemma
First white space broadband deployment in Virginia
The Rise of Broadband Video and the Future of Digital Media
Governor Pawlenty recommends broadband stimulus applications
Research finds that online searching can increase brain activity in older adults
OWNERSHIP
More Details on FCC's Media Ownership Proceeding
Congress escalates battle over radio royalties
POLICYMAKERS
FCC's International and Consumer Affairs Bureaus Get New Leadership
MORE ONLINE ...
Marketers salivating over smartphone potential
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to Americans: Cybersecurity is a Group Effort
Company Pays FTC Fine to Settle Lawsuit Over Its Data Collection From Children
MediaPost Seeks To Unseal Google's Report In Bungled Email Case
Why Your Next IT Job Will Be In Healthcare
AT&T Should Relinquish Handsets If Buying Centennial
Telemedicine getting short shrift in Congress' health care reforms
Political Ad Spend to Increase 11% in 2010
Regulation blocking telcos from the grid, Bechtel CTO says
China Expands Cyberspying in US
India fed investigator probing spectrum distribution
Mixed Reaction For Senate Passage of FOIA
Google and Microsoft Crank Up Rivalry
NEA chairman's 'Art Works' tour
Recent Comments:
AT&T lobbyist asks employees, their families and friends to protest net neutrality rules
Sharing the Risks of Wireless Innovation
NETWORK NEUTRALITY
MARKEY: FCC NET NEUTRALITY PROPOSAL NEEDS LEGISLATIVE TEETH
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Rep Ed Markey (D-MA) reiterated this week that the Federal Communications Commission's Network Neutrality efforts likely won't be a sufficient deterrent to Internet service providers and remains determined to pass open Internet legislation. In a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, Reps Markey and Anna Eshoo (D-CA) expressed their support for the chairman's network neutrality proposal. But Rep Markey also said that he still expected that to be a "complement" to the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (H.R. 3458) that he and Rep Eshoo introduced to codify network neutrality rules. While praising Genachowski's proposal to add two new principles of nondiscrimination and transparency as "precisely the kind of regulatory predictability that markets require" and praising the FCC's own promised transparency and inclusiveness in the rulemaking process, Rep Markey suggested that would not be sufficient.
benton.org/node/29023 | Broadcasting&Cable
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DORGAN RALLIES SENATE NET NEUTRALITY ALLIES
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Sen Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and 10 other senators wrote Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski a letter saying that they are pleased the FCC is launching the proposed rulemaking on Network Neutrality, but also said they supported an extended comment period with time for all sides to provide their input. "We believe that this is the path toward guaranteeing that consumers will hold ultimate control over the content they send and receive over the Internet and that the Internet will remain open and free for everyone who uses it." They point out that the FCC has "rightly" treated the Internet with a light regulatory hand. But they also add that the FCC's enforcement of its four Internet openness guidelines has been challenged (Comcast challenged the BitTorrent decision).
benton.org/node/29029 | Broadcasting&Cable
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FCC WILL PROBE MANAGED SERVICES AS PART OF NET NEUTRALITY PUSH
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Stacey Higginbotham]
Apparently the Federal Communications Commission will be asking questions about managed services in the upcoming Network Neutrality proceeding. In general, managed services are ill-defined, but most carriers will tell you they include features that customers pay extra for and as such, require guaranteed levels of service — things like IPTV or virtual private networks back to a corporate office. No one paying for telco TV wants to let VoIP calls or Hulu interfere with the Big Game when they're watching it on IPTV. But the FCC apparently wants to know how far carriers can take that. If taken too far, then carriers could protect their revenue streams and get around any net neutrality provisions by allocating more of their network for managed services rather than for the public Internet. The FCC is worried that a neutral public Internet that gets forced through a smaller pipe so that carriers can invest more on upgrades and capacity for managed services won't be able to support the innovations of tomorrow. So we expect the FCC to ask some probing questions aimed at exposing how the carriers view this managed services, as well as how, from a technical perspective, they currently wall such services off. The FCC's attention on managed services is an effort to make sure that the fat pipes the carriers are building will be available for innovations that aren't delivered through a carrier-created and controlled managed service. The threat of ensuring a quality-of-service guarantee for some offerings means, at its heart, that certain traffic is shunted aside when traffic deemed to be a priority comes through.
benton.org/node/29022 | GigaOm
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BAKER AND MCDOWELL TO BACK NET NEUTRALITY NPRM
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Apparently, the two Republican Commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission will support, at least in part, a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on Network Neutrality at a vote on Oct 22. Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker will vote to concur on a full and transparent process with plenty of opportunity for comment; however, they will dissent from the factual and legal basis the document uses to justify proposing the rules. That is different from supporting the underlying argument for codifying network neutrality rules -- both remain unconvinced -- but at least it would be a unanimous vote to move the debate to the next level. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski already has the support of the other two Democrats on the Commission.
benton.org/node/29039 | Broadcasting&Cable
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TELECOM FIRMS FACE NETWORK NEUTRALITY DEFEAT
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Cecilia Kang]
Facing a major regulatory issue that could be worth a fortune in future business, AT&T has unleashed the kind of lobbying blitz that makes it one of the grand corporate players of the great Washington game. And yet, for all the money AT&T and other old-line telecom and cable companies have spent pushing their cause, they are poised to lose a key vote to a bunch of younger technology companies that never had anything to do with Washington until recently. If the Federal Communications Commission votes Thursday in favor of crafting rules to let the government oversee access to the Internet, it could be a sign of a fundamental shift of power under the Obama administration that may make K Street rethink its ways. "This is totally new in Washington, that opposed to only the old Goliaths like AT&T, or traditional public utilities commissions or large insurance companies at the table, they are now joined by others like tech growth companies," said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, a trade group that represents the investors of Web giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.
benton.org/node/29038 | Washington Post | The Hill | NPR
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NEW FREE PRESS NET NEUTRALITY STUDY
[SOURCE: IDG News Service, AUTHOR: Grant Gross]
Free Press disputes the often-claimed criticism that new Network Neutrality rules will hurt broadband investment by pointing to investments made by AT&T when the telecom giant was subject to similar regulations. AT&T, as part of conditions it agreed to in its late-2006 merger with BellSouth, agreed to Net neutrality rules for two years, and the telecom's investments increased significantly during that time period, the Free Press study finds. AT&T's gross capital investment increased by nearly $1.9 billion from 2006 to 2008, the largest increase among U.S. telecoms. The percentage of capital investments to revenue at large telecom carriers has actually fallen since the FCC relaxed network-sharing regulations in 2005.
benton.org/node/29027 | IDG News Service | Free Press
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CANADA NET NEUTRALITY DECISION
[SOURCE: ars technica, AUTHOR: Nate Anderson]
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has issued an order saying traffic shaping is a "last resort" measure to deal with Internet congestion, network investment is the "primary solution," but no "bright line" network neutrality rules will be forthcoming. When ISPs need to control traffic levels, then, they are first encouraged to use "economic measures" as the fairest solution. These can take the form of data caps or discounts for Internet use during off-peak hours, instead of involving the ISP in discriminating among packets. Economic measures would "generally not be considered unjustly discriminatory," says CRTC, "as they link rates for Internet service to end-user consumption... Furthermore, these practices match consumer usage with willingness to pay, thus putting users in control and allowing market forces to work." Instead, the CRTC has set up a "framework" for evaluating these non-economic traffic management measures. There are few advance rules, though there are four general principles looked at in evaluating specific policies: 1) Demonstrate that the [measure] is designed to address the need and achieve the purpose and effect in question, and nothing else; 2) Establish that the [measure] results in discrimination or preference as little as reasonably possible; 3) Demonstrate that any harm to a secondary ISP, end-user, or any other person is as little as reasonably possible; and 4) Explain why, in the case of a technical ITMP, network investment or economic approaches alone would not reasonably address the need and effectively achieve the same purpose as the ITMP. The CRTC does warn, however, that "application-specific [shaping measures] degrade or prefer one application, class of application, or protocol over another and may therefore warrant investigation." Harold Feld writes: "Canada has now settled its definition of "reasonable network management" and set rules for traffic throttling. Amazingly, the rules the CRTC settled on for "reasonable network management" look a lot like the standard our own FCC settled on in the Comcast/BitTorrent Order, but even stronger on the notice and transparency side."
benton.org/node/29026 | Ars Technica | CRTC Press Release | CRTC decision | Public Knowledge
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GOOGLE, VERIZON SEEK COMMON GROUND
[SOURCE: CongressDaily, AUTHOR: Andrew Noyes]
Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam wrote a post on the companies' policy blogs detailing the Internet and innovation areas they agree upon. To wit, 1) The Internet revolution has been people powered from the very beginning, and should remain so. The minute that anyone, whether from government or the private sector, starts to control how people use the Internet, it is the beginning of the end. 2) Advanced and open networks are essential to the future development of the Web. Policies that continue to provide incentives for investment and innovation are a vital part of the debate we are now beginning. 3) The FCC's existing wireline broadband principles make clear that users are in charge of all aspects of their Internet experience--from access to apps and content. So we think it makes sense for the Commission to establish that these existing principles are enforceable, and implement them on a case-by-case basis. 4) Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya.
benton.org/node/29025 | CongressDaily | C-Net|News.com | C-Net|News.com2
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BROADBAND
FCC FLOATS CASH-FOR-TV-SPECTRUM SCHEME
[SOURCE: TVNewsCheck, AUTHOR: Kim McAvoy]
Blair Levin, head of the Federal Commission Commission's efforts to write a National Broadband Plan, met with leading television broadcasters in Washington to discuss the nation's urgent need for more spectrum for wireless broadband access to the Internet and the possibility of broadcasters' relinquishing most of their spectrum to help meet that demand. According to sources familiar with the October 8 meeting with the board of the Association for Maximum Service Television (MSTV), Levin suggested broadcasters might want to consider returning their spectrum in exchange for a share in the billions of dollars that would come from the auction of the spectrum to the wireless industry. Broadcasting would retain just enough spectrum so that each station could provide a lifeline standard-definition service to the millions of TV viewers who still rely on over-the-air reception. Broadcasters could no longer offer over-the-air HD and second channels and mobile video would be off the table, but they could continue to provide a single channel of TV to every home in their markets as they do today — in full-blown HD via cable and satellite carriage and SD via the over-the-air lifeline service. There seems to be consensus among the broadcasters to hang on to the spectrum they have now and move ahead with plans on monetizing it further through multicasting and mobile video.
benton.org/node/29017 | TVNewsCheck
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FCC'S BROADBAND COORDINATOR WARNS OF SPECTRUM SHORTAGE
[SOURCE: TelephonyOnline, AUTHOR: Sarah Reedy]
The U.S. faces an urgent problem in a looming spectrum shortage, Blair Levin, executive director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative for the Federal Communications Commission, told SuperCOMM attendees. Unlike past administrations, which had cleared spectrum available for auction or distribution, President Obama took office facing the task of clearing spectrum already in use in order to satisfy new wireless demand. Mobile broadband is going to be the biggest driver of growth and changes in processes at a Congressional level, Levin said. But if the US doesn't get more spectrum, it will become the Doug Flutie of mobile broadband, Levin joked. Flutie, a great football player never made it big in the US based on his 5'10'' height. "For spectrum, there may be technology that changes some things, but the demand is just so great," Levin said. It has to overcome its "height" limitations. AT&T's problems with the iPhone taxing capacity will soon become every carrier's problem as demand for smartphones really takes off, he said. "I hope policy makers understand the seriousness of it," Levin said, adding that it can't be fixed over night, since it takes six to 13 years to clear spectrum. Any long-term plan needs to start now, Levin said. Levin's broadband task force is crafting policy recommendations due to Congress in mid-February, including provisions for spectrum reform.
benton.org/node/29036 | TelephonyOnline
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AT&T CTO: THROW MOORE'S LAW OUT
[SOURCE: TelephonyOnline, AUTHOR: Ed Gubbins]
Telecom carriers must fundamentally rethink how networks are designed to keep up with runaway bandwidth demand, AT&T's chief technology officer said Wednesday during a panel discussion on the first morning of the SuperCOMM trade show. Though AT&T's work in upgrading its backbone network in 2008 were "unprecedented," future increases in demand will eventually outpace carriers' ability to keep up, said John Donavan, AT&T's CTO. "The capacity we carried in 2008 will be a rounding error five years out," he said. "Our 2-[gigabit-per-second] backbone lasted seven years. Our 10-gig lasted five. Our 40-gig will last three. You get to 100 gig, what's that - 18 months? At 400 gig, I think routers melt. The finance [department] likes liquid assets, but I don't think that's what they have in mind."
benton.org/node/29035 | TelephonyOnline
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NATIONAL BROADBAND CLEARINGHOUSE
[SOURCE: State Members of the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advance Telecommunications Services, AUTHOR: ]
The state members of the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advance Telecommunications Services filed comments on the creation of a broadband clearinghouse for easy access to broadband best practices. They strongly support a broadband clearinghouse and suggest the Federal Communications Commission. They note that the Joint Conference was convened in part to perform this clearinghouse function: "The activities of the Joint Conference will include monitoring the ongoing deployment of advanced services throughout the nation to determine where and what advanced services are being deployed and to identify a set of "Best Practices" that promote rapid deployment," reads the order creating the body. Recognizing both that: (1) the full Joint Conference would not be operational until some time after Chairman Genachowski and newly appointed Commission colleagues were nominated and confirmed, and (2) that the effort could provide useful information for the FCC in its efforts to create a National Broadband Plan (NBP), the State Members of the 706 Joint Conference, acting on the recommendation of the State Chair, initiated an project to create an interactive "best practices" webpage.
benton.org/node/29016 | State Members of the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advance Telecommunications Services | See the Joint Conference best practises site
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BARRIERS TO BROADBAND ADOPTION
[SOURCE: New York Law School, AUTHOR: Charles Davidson, Michael Santorelli]
New York Law School's Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute focuses on older Americans and people with disabilities and four sectors -- health, energy, education, and government -- that stand to benefit greatly from more robust utilization of broadband but, for the reasons discussed herein, face a number of barriers to further adoption of broadband and broadband-enabled technologies. For senior citizens, a general lack of adequate education and training are key contributors to a relatively low broadband adoption rate; For people with disabilities, widespread negative perceptions regarding the accessibility of broadband impedes further adoption and
use of this technology; In the telemedicine sector, a number of outdated legal and policy frameworks hinder more robust adoption and use of broadband-enabled
telemedicine services by patients and healthcare providers; In the energy arena, the highly regulated and conservative nature of many energy utilities challenges the dynamic nature of broadband and the ecosystem of innovation that it fosters; In the education space, lack of targeted funding and inadequate training impede further adoption and usage of broadband and broadband-enabled educational tools in schools across the country; and For government entities, institutional inertia and a lack of cross-government collaboration regarding best practices has slowed the effective integration of broadband into many government processes.
benton.org/node/29015 | New York Law School
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THE BROADBAND ADOPTION DILEMMA
[SOURCE: C-Net|News.com, AUTHOR: Marguerite Reardon]
At Supercom, a trade show taking place in Chicago, panelists highlighted low broadband adoption rates as a major issue that must be addressed in the pending National Broadband Plan which will outline how the U.S. can reach the goal of universal broadband use. Roughly 96 percent of American households have access to broadband service from at least one service provider, the FCC said in a status report issued last month. But of those people, about 33 percent do not subscribe to broadband. Why? John Horrigan, consumer research director for the FCC, who was on the panel Wednesday, said the FCC is currently conducting surveys to answer that question. "We are trying to figure out why people who have access to broadband choose not to subscribe," Horrigan said. "There's a big group of users still on dial-up, and there are people who have never subscribed to an Internet service." The FCC's status report suggests that adoption rates vary by age, income, education, and race. There is some speculation that price might be a factor, which means either the cost of services is too high or the cost of computers and equipment is too high. Jim Cicconi, a senior executive vice president at AT&T, said that there are a mix of reasons why people who have access to broadband choose not to subscribe. And he argued that price may not play as big of a role as some people suspect. He said that after AT&T merged with BellSouth, the company introduced a $10-a-month broadband service to entice people to subscribe to broadband [Editor's note: actually, that was a condition of the merger]. While many customers signed up for this offer, there was still a significant number of people who didn't. In fact, some consumers continued to subscribe to dial-up service, even though that service was much slower and twice as expensive as broadband.
benton.org/node/29024 | C-Net|News.com | TelephonyOnline
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FIRST WHITE SPACE NETWORK
[SOURCE: ars technica, AUTHOR: Nate Anderson]
The nation's first wireless broadband network operating in unused TV channel "white spaces" is now live in an unlikely spot -- Patrick County, Virginia (population 20,000). Rep Rick Boucher (D-VA) chairs the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, and his office helped to arrange the trial rollout. The TDF Foundation built a small computer lab in Claudville back in September and turned to Spectrum Bridge, one of the companies it invests in, to set up a white spaces link to the center of town, where the signal would then be fed to traditional WiFi routers at the local school and the cafe. White spaces broadband has not been finalized by the FCC, however, so special permission was needed to do the trial project. Dell and Microsoft contributed equipment and software.
benton.org/node/29014 | Ars Technica | GigaOm | Broadcasting&Cable
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BAKER ON THE RISE OF BROADBAND VIDEO
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker]
Federal Communications Commission member Meredith Baker spoke at the Silicon Flatirons Center October 12, noting that more than 161 million U.S. users watched 25 billion online videos in August 2009, 10.2 billion more than those viewed in January. Overall, the average viewer watched 582 minutes (9.7 hours) of video. The push of video content onto the Internet is welcomed by the FCC, she said, since it can "only increase the richness of the material available and therefore enhance the attractiveness of broadband use to consumers." But noted that the trend presents regulatory challenges: 1) digital video is subject to cheap and easy reproduction and distribution, so it is a challenge to create an environment that respects the rights of the members of the creative community; 2) video is one of the most bandwidth-consuming applications, so the National broadband Plan must include spectrum policy that provides sufficient speeds and quality of service for video services, 3) the proliferation of online video means parents will need information and tools to restrict access by their children to material that they deem inappropriate.
benton.org/node/29013 | Federal Communications Commission
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MINNESOTA BROADBAND APPLICATION RECOMMENDATIONS
[SOURCE: StimulatingBroadband.com, AUTHOR: ]
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) has decided that the communication issued by a state agency to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) relative to the administration's funding priorities for federal broadband stimulus projects in Minnesota is not considered a "public document." According to a staff attorney in the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the sequestering of the state's recommendation document to the NTIA, and of the review process that generated the submittal to the federal agency, was directed by the Minnesota Department of Administration. The Department, headed by Commissioner Sheila Reger, a Pawlenty appointee, acts as a central services arm of government. Washington DC-based broadband and telecom attorney Jeneba Jalloh Ghatt of the Ghatt Law Group said, "At the outset, the state of Minnesota has to realize that others have elected to release their rankings. Given that it was never a secret and was quite "public" that NTIA sought the rankings from all of the states in the first place, it is unclear why the ultimate rankings would be considered "non public". It is also unclear whether Minnesota can keep the letter hidden for long."
benton.org/node/29012 | StimulatingBroadband.com
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INTERNET MAKES YOU SMARTER!
[SOURCE: ComputerWorld, AUTHOR: Sharon Gaudin]
A team of scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles report that new Internet users between the ages of 55 and 78 improved their scores on decision-making and complex reasoning tests after just seven days online. The researchers said they found that surfing the Web seemed to stimulate neural activity and possibly enhance cognitive functioning in those mature Internet beginners. Just a week online increased brain activity twofold in the oldest Internet users studied, according to the scientists. The researchers reported that using the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that usually atrophy with age and lack of use. However, when people begin using the Internet, it positively affects cognitive functions and alters the way the brain encodes new information.
benton.org/node/28999 | ComputerWorld
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OWNERSHIP
FCC MEDIA OWNERSHIP PROCEEDING
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: ]
To assist in structuring the Federal Communications Commission's 2010 quadrennial media ownership review process, the FCC's Media Bureau will hold workshops on November 2, 3, and 4 to discuss the scope and methodology of the proceeding and the analytical framework the Commission should use for conducting its review. The FCC will explore these issues during three half-day sessions with: 1) a panel of policy scholars, 2) a panel of public interest groups, and 3) a panel of broadcasters and media trade associations. The moderator of each workshop will invite the panelists to present their views on questions relating to the scope and analytical framework of the media ownership review process. The review includes: 1) the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule, 2) the radio/television cross-ownership rule, 3) the local television ownership rule, 4) the local radio ownership rule, and 5) the dual network rule
benton.org/node/29011 | Federal Communications Commission
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CONGRESS ESCALATES BATTLE OVER RADIO ROYALTIES
[SOURCE: USAToday, AUTHOR: David Lieberman]
Members of Congress, already bruised by the struggles over the health care overhaul, had better get ready for another bitter fight, this time over the future of the music business. Record companies and radio stations are battling over a legislative proposal, called the Performance Rights Act, that would require broadcasters to pay royalties to air recorded music. A showdown appears inevitable, possibly by year's end, after the Senate Judiciary Committee cleared the bill last week. The House Judiciary Committee approved a similar bill in May. That's the furthest advocates of the proposal have gotten after decades of attempts to change the law. If the bill passes, it could force stations to pay about $500 million a year — some estimates go as high as $1 billion. The actual amount would be determined by the federal Copyright Royalty Board. Prospects for a compromise look bleak.
benton.org/node/29009 | USAToday
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POLICYMAKERS
NEW FCC LEADERSHIP
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: ]
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski appointed Mindel De La Torre to be Chief of the International Bureau and Yul Kwon to be Deputy Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. 1) Since 1998, De La Torre has been the president of the consulting firm Telecommunications Management Group, Inc. (TMG). Prior to joining TMG, De La Torre was the deputy chief of the Telecommunications Division at the International Bureau, which she joined in December 1994. De La Torre also worked at the Department of Commerce -- for over four years at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and for three years in the General Counsel's office. She has been a member of various U.S. delegations to International Telecommunication Union conferences, such as World Radiocommunication Conferences, World Telecommunication Development Conferences, and Plenipotentiary Conferences. 2) Kwon's diverse career spans across law, technology, business, and media. His government experience includes lecturing at the FBI Academy, drafting science and technology legislation as an aide to Senator Joseph Lieberman, and clerking for Judge Barrington D. Parker on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. In the business and technology sector, Kwon has held positions at McKinsey & Company, Google, and the Trium Group. He also practiced law as an attorney at Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis and at Venture Law Group. In 2006, Kwon became the first Asian American to win the CBS reality show, Survivor. His subsequent media activities include working as a special correspondent for CNN and as a co-host for the Discovery Channel.
benton.org/node/29008 | Federal Communications Commission
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