Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Center for Digital Democracy all had favorable reactions to the Department of Commerce online privacy report.
Senate Commerce Communications Subcommittee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) called on the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice to focus on ensuring that consumers are protected and that competition is not hampered as the agencies contemplate possible conditions to attach to the proposed merger of Comcast with NBC Universal.
In a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Christine Varney, Sen Kerry did not call for blocking the merger as some lawmakers have insisted. Instead, he said he wanted to "reinforce the need for this merger to work for consumers, and enhance innovation and competition. I believe it can, but we count on you to ensure that it does." Sen Kerry said regulators should consider offering remedies if the merger would pose a risk to such goals as ensuring consumer access to video content on the Web including programming the merged company will control. In addition, he also noted that the merged company should not "act unfairly as a bottleneck or gatekeeper for critical programming for competing distributors or leverage its distribution network against content that competes with its new property."
Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), one of the harshest critics in Congress of the Democratic-led Federal Communications Commission, will head the House Communications, Technology and the Internet Subcommittee in the Republican-controlled House in the 112th Congress.
Incoming Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton indicated he would enlist all the subcommittee chairs in an army of budget-cutters. "Every member and every subcommittee will be on the frontlines as we take on federal agencies -- EPA, HHS, DOE, FCC, you name it -- to identify wasteful programs and target areas to immediately cut spending."
The announcement could spell bad news for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who can expect blunt questioning and tough oversight from Rep Walden, a GOP firebrand who has previously accused the agency of overstepping its regulatory authority. In a statement, Walden emphasized that oversight of the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus program, run by the Agriculture and Commerce departments, would be a high priority. "With that much money going out so quickly, taxpayers need to know how it's being spent and what they're getting for it," he said. "We will conduct oversight on those expenditures and will also review the existing regulatory policies and new regulations under consideration by various agencies."
In the fall of 2009, Rep Walden expressed outrage over the FCC's hiring of Mark Lloyd, a civil rights advocate and former professor who was brought aboard to promote media diversity, because of critical views he'd expressed about conservative talk radio and other topics.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asserted cybersecurity is a civilian domain, not a military battlefield or private sector jurisdiction, as some critics of federal cyber policy have argued.
"Some categorize the challenge as one for the market, or a looming war," she said. "In my view, cyberspace is fundamentally a civilian space, and government has a role to help protect it, in partnership with the private sector and across the globe ... both the market and the battlefield analogies are the wrong ones to use." New cyber threats, such as intrusive monitoring of Internet users and the Stuxnet worm, which can cripple computer operating power grids, have prompted calls for the U.S. military to design a cyber defense plan and for industry to give consumers "do not track" options on Web browsers. But DHS, by mandate, must be involved in securing the critical infrastructure of the country, which includes the information technology networks underpinning every aspect of modern life, Sec Napolitano said.
Public Knowledge got the AT&T cupcake delivery list because someone was outraged at the sight of AT&T having total access to the staff of the Federal Communications Commission, even if was only to deliver cupcakes with AT&T logos on them, on the day after the public debate closed on the crucial network neutrality item.
AT&T, after all, is a regulated company that has billions of dollars at interest at the FCC. No one is intimating that a mere cupcake can influence the decisions of FCC officials. As former Commissioner (and interim chairman) James Quello once said, “If you can't eat their food and drink their booze and still vote against them, you shouldn't have this job.” The problem is the easy familiarity AT&T nourishes at the FCC – continually reinforcing that they are simply another part of the FCC family bringing cheer throughout the agency for the sheer, non-threatening seasonal joy of it, ulterior motives not included.
It’s more that there are a few questions, which deserve to be discussed. Why does AT&T want to spend all that money on cupcakes? What they really think they get out of it? Is it appropriate to do so? And what is the effect on other companies which also want to do business at the Commission but don't have the time, energy or resources to sweeten their advocacy as AT&T does?
President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate James Dempsey and Elisebeth Collins Cook to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board; and Kevin J. Kennedy to the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.
Dempsey is Vice President for Public Policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a non-profit public policy organization focused on privacy, national security, government surveillance, and other issues affecting the future of the Internet. Mr. Dempsey joined CDT in 1997, holding senior roles in the organization, including Executive Director (2003-2005) and head of CDT’s West Coast office in San Francisco, CA. Prior to joining CDT, he served as Deputy Director of the non-profit Center for National Security Studies and Special Counsel to the National Security Archive. From 1985 to 1995, Mr. Dempsey was Assistant Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. From 1980 to 1984, he was an associate at Arnold & Porter, LLP. Mr. Dempsey clerked for Judge Robert Braucher of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. He has been a member of several bodies addressing privacy and national security issues, including the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee advisory board, the Industry Advisory Board for the National Counter-Terrorism Center, and the Transportation Security Administration’s Secure Flight Working Group, among others. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Elisebeth Collins Cook is a partner with the law firm of Freeborn & Peters LLP, where she focuses on complex civil litigation, Constitutional Rights, and administrative law. In 2008, Ms. Cook was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate as Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy at the United States Department of Justice, where her portfolio included national security, civil rights, and regulatory policy. She previously served as Senior Counsel, Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General, and Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the same office. In 2009, Ms. Cook served as Republican Chief Counsel, Supreme Court Nominations for the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Prior to joining the Justice Department, Ms. Cook was a litigation associate with Cooper & Kirk, PLLC. Earlier in her career, she clerked for Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas and for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. She received her B.A. with honors from the University of Chicago and her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School.
Kennedy is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Avaya Inc., a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services. Prior to joining the company in January 2009, Dr. Kennedy was President and CEO of JDS Uniphase Corporation (JDSU) and also served as a member of the JDSU board of directors. From 2001 to 2003, Dr. Kennedy served as COO of Openwave Systems, Inc. and spent close to eight years at Cisco Systems, Inc., most recently as senior vice president of the Service Provider Line of Business and Software Technologies Division. Earlier in his career, he spent 17 years with AT&T Bell Laboratories. Dr. Kennedy was a member of the board of directors of Polycom, Inc. and currently serves on the board of directors of KLA-Tencor Corporation and is a member of the board of regents of Loyola Marymount University. Dr. Kennedy holds a Ph.D. and M.S. degree in engineering from Rutgers University and a B.S. in engineering from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
When Immigrations & Customs Enforcement agents seized 82 web domain names over the Thanksgiving weekend, it was an unprecedented event—not just because of the scope of the seizures, but also because the web sites grabbed included a search engine and some well-known music blogs. That’s outside the scope of the intellectual property issues ICE has traditionally dealt with, which involve counterfeit goods. Here's the affidavit that the government used to get its seizure warrant, and it lays out the reasoning behind the government’s move.
[Commentary] Many communities are at an important crossroad. Maybe yours is one of them. After a year of steady news about broadband stimulus awards and Google’s contest for a 1 gigabit network, there’s widespread awareness about the benefits of true broadband delivering hundreds of megabits per second. With this awareness has come a strong yearning from constituents, local businesses, government agencies and various institutions for a piece of this broadband action. The question that stymies casual observers and visionaries alike, though, is how do we get there from here? Specifically how can we afford it?
Google has done a good job at reciting the predictable antitrust lawyer talking points (efficiency, good for consumers) to support the proposition that it should be allowed to buy any company not in their core business area. The problem for Google is that it is so good it now has what, for all intents and purposes, amounts to a monopoly in the key Internet portal market for web search. That means the law requires that it be treated differently. Not true in the case of many of the other acquirers it cites. Is this unfair? Does this punish a successful company? Yes and yes. But the basic premise of the anti-trust law is that this degree of unfairness is a reasonable price to pay to maintain robust competition in other markets.
In the short run, consumers may be denied the benefits of the new products or the lower prices that might result from such a non-horizontal merger. But that does not end the conversation in the case of a monopoly buyer, because there is a larger issue involved -- one that goes well beyond the competitive dynamic of the small market niche of the acquired company, which is the limit of most Hart-Scott-Rodino analyses. The point of the column was to suggest the proper analysis is now the larger market for Internet search and services, for which Google is a dominant portal. Google is not yet interested in joining a serious discussion of what the rest of us should do about its legally obtained monopoly. The company wants to grow and produce great new products and services and make more money -- all perfectly legitimate and healthy instincts. From an economy and industry-wide perspective, however, it would be better to let some other companies grow and some other companies come up with these great new products. Google's aggressive acquisition strategy, combined with its dominance, makes this unlikely. The tipping point has now been reached.
Wired-cable penetration of American TV households hit a 21-year low as more consumers opted to receive video programming via satellite (here called an alternate delivery system or ADS) than ever before, according to a TVB analysis of Nielsen Media Research data for November 2010. According to Nielsen NTI data, national ADS penetration reached 30.5% of television households last month, an all-time high that is up from 29.3% in November 2009, and now represents 33.7% of subscription television customers (those paying for video delivery), another all-time high. Meanwhile, wired-cable penetration represented 60.7% of households in November 2010, down from 61.7% in November 2009. The only time it had been lower was in November 1989 when wired-cable penetration was at 59.7%.
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