March 2010

Verizon Communications divestitures haven't worked out too well for the buyers of the phone giant's assets. Three of them — involving Idearc, Hawaiian Telecom and FairPoint Communications — have recently been either in bankruptcy or near it. That track record makes Verizon boss Ivan Seidenberg "one of the best deal makers of his time, or one of the worst," wrote Deal Journal colleague Dennis K. Berman in May 2009. Now comes potential trouble for a fourth Verizon divestiture - last year's sale of 4.8 million Verizon access lines in 14 states to Frontier Communications Inc. for $5.8 billion. A regulator in one of those states, Illinois, has recommended against approving the deal, which would transfer about 550,000 Verizon access lines across the state into Frontier's hands.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has upheld regulations that require cable TV companies to make channels they own available to satellite TV providers and other rivals on equal terms.

The ruling leaves in place the Federal Communications Commission "program access" rules which prevent cable operators from striking exclusive deals for satellite-delivered programming in which the operator has a financial interest. The court decided that the FCC was reasonable to conclude that the rules were still necessary, but that at the current pace of change in the marketplace, they probably won't be the next time the FCC reviews them. The court essentially concluded that, while the multichannel video marketplace had gotten more competitive, it was not sufficiently so to render arbitrary and capricious the FCC's decision to renew the program access rules for another five years back in 2007.The ruling marks a setback for Cablevision Systems Corp. and Comcast Corp., the cable companies that had challenged the rules in court.

In a speech at Columbus University, former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt candidly talked about his decision to promote the Internet over broadcasting as the one and only "common medium" for the United States while he was chairman of the FCC between 1994 and 1997, and how his work then will culminate next week when the current FCC under his protégé Julius Genachowski unveils the National Broadband Plan.

"The broadband plan that will be published on March 17 actually will reflect ... the end of the era of trying to maintain over-the-air broadcast as the common medium and the beginning of a very detailed, quite substantive, commitment to having broadband, the son of narrowband, be the common medium," Hundt said in the speech that he describes as a "confession or admission." Among other things, he said, the "broadband plan will have in it a specific pathway to shrinking the amount of spectrum that broadcast will be able to use. In all previous eras, the government has expanded the spectrum for broadcast so as to give it a chance to thrive as it moved from analog to digital. Now, it's going to be moving in reverse." Hundt said that his decision to favor broadband over broadcast was made in 1994, when his first days as FCC chairman coincided with the introduction of the Mosaic browser and the emergence of the Internet as a commercial medium.

According to a report that summarizes Online Reputation Research, commissioned by Microsoft, fewer than 15% of consumers surveyed in the U.S. and the U.K. believe that information found online would have an impact on their getting a job.

Those consumers surveyed significantly underestimate the level of data mining that recruiters and HR professionals conduct and the impact it can have on hiring. In the United States and U.K., recruiters and HR professionals surveyed are likely to research candidate behavior online and report markedly high rates of candidate rejections based on their findings. Comparatively, only 7% of U.S. consumers surveyed believe information about them online affected their job search, while 70%% of U.S. recruiters and HR professionals have rejected candidates based on information they found online.