June 2011

House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) responded to the Federal Communications Commission’s agreement to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine and other outdated regulations by August.

FCC Chairman Genachowski initially agreed to strike the Fairness Doctrine from the Code of Federal Regulations in response to an inquiry made by Chairmen Upton and Walden on May 31.

“We are pleased that Chairman Genachowski has finally set a target for striking the Fairness Doctrine from the rulebooks once and for all,” said Chairmen Upton and Walden. “The rules are outdated, unnecessary, and needlessly endanger our sacred freedoms of speech and the press. The Commission says it plans to eliminate these obsolete rules through a streamlined, delegated-authority process, and we will continue to monitor the issue until they are fully repealed.”
In addition to the Fairness Doctrine, the FCC Chairman has agreed to review and eliminate antiquated regulations that hamper economic and job growth in line with President Obama’s Executive Order. In particular, Chairman Genachowski said that his staff already adheres to the directive that all major new rules be accompanied by an analysis of costs and benefits and is working with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) on best practices going forward.
“The committee appreciates Chairman Genachowski’s agreement that burdensome regulations—even those not subject to President Obama’s Executive Order—should be subject to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis before adoption,” said Upton and Walden. “We are also dedicated to assisting the FCC’s efforts to eliminate burdensome regulations in order to unleash private sector investment, spur growth, and create jobs for the American people. The committee urges the FCC to coordinate its plans to review and repeal job-crushing regulations with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).”

Cormac Herley, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, embarked on a study of the methods used to calculate estimated losses to cybercrime and found them severely wanting.

Most of the statistics come from surveys in which respondents are asked to report whether they've been victims of a crime and how much they lost. "Surveys are hard," Herley says. His research revealed a number of reasons why surveys about cybercrime are particularly hard. Scientists have pretty good methods for surveying, say, voter intentions. In that case, you focus on getting a good representative sample. Inaccuracies matter, but a few one way or another aren't going to make much of a difference. Cybercrime is a whole different story. For one thing, cybercrime surveys are trying to measure a number: how much money was lost. In that case, individual responses can make a huge difference. A voting survey isn't thrown off by much if someone who actually plans to vote Democrat states an intention of voting Republican. But if a survey respondent who has lost $50,000 to cybercrime claims to have lost $500,000, any calculations based on that information will be wildly out of whack.

There are other problems. Any registered voter has useful information to report. But not everyone has a useful story to tell about cybercrime, which means that a small number of responses can make a huge difference. For example, in a 2006 survey conducted by Gartner Research, 128 out of 4,000 people claimed to have been victims. Herley calculates that 59 percent of losses came from the top 1 percent of respondents who had been victimized—in this case, a single person. He believes that such concerns make it impossible to trust data coming from most cybercrime surveys.

Right now, all roads to the iPhone and iPad run through Apple. The only straightforward way for users to load apps onto their Apple devices is to download the software from Apple's curated and tightly controlled app store. Things are a little looser in the Android ecosystem, where Google lets almost anything into its Android Market and Amazon runs a rival Android Appstore, but gatekeepers still stand between app developers and their customers. That's about to change, thanks to an emerging Web standard called HTML5. The new standard supports video, offline reading, touch and gestural interaction -- all functions that, until recently, were only available for mobile devices on native apps.

You can't swing a cat these days without hitting a comedy series on Vimeo, Daily Motion, or YouTube. But if you’re looking for drama, you'll mostly still find it on the boob tube.

In 2009, 50% of adults watched comedy online compared to 31% in 2007, according to a 2010 Pew Research report. Even mainstream stars are taking their act to the smaller screen, like former Friend Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy, the winner of this year’s Webby Award for Best Comedy: Long Form or Series. “For whatever reason, someone has put out to the web world that comedy is what works online,” Tina Cesa Ward, executive producer, writer and director of the widely-acclaimed web drama Anyone But Me, tells Fast Company. The show launched its third season’s finale June 21. “But what they fail to realize is that what works is great storytelling no matter what the genre.”

Dina Kaplan, a co-founder of blip.tv, says she thinks it may take one to two years for drama to really make a splash online. She offered her perspective on four keys to making online drama click: 1) Economics, 2) Niche programming, 3) Audience building, and 4) Enough time to produce multiple seasons.