December 2011

Sen Ron Wyden vows fight over PROTECT IP Act

As the Senate aims to consider a bill next month that would clamp down on music, movies and counterfeit products peddled illegally online, the proposal’s foremost opponent promised Dec 17 to fight it to the bitter end. Taking to the floor, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said he will “follow through on a commitment I made more than a year ago to filibuster this bill when the Senate returns in January.”

Sen Wyden emphasized in his brief speech that the bill — known as the PROTECT IP Act — has already raised alarms among Internet engineers, tech entrepreneurs and free speech advocates. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) made it official that the Senate will hold a key procedural vote on the bill not long after Congress returns from its holiday break. The Jan. 24 vote on a motion to proceed was praised by the bill’s author, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who said Congress can “ill afford to save the debate on how to counter online infringement for another day.” But Sen Wyden said the bill “could deal an enormous body blow to a vital job engine for our economy.” He also raised more indirect alarms about the bill’s cousin — the Stop Online Piracy Act — under consideration in the House. If the chamber is in session this week, the Judiciary Committee intends to resume its marathon markup of the bill.

GOP chairman expects President Obama to sign anti-online piracy bill

House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) said he expects President Barack Obama will sign the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a controversial measure to crackdown on online copyright infringement, if it clears Congress.

"I expect that the Administration will support the bill because it helps create jobs for American workers and makes it harder for online thieves to steal America’s products and profits,” said Chairman Smith, who sponsored the bill in the House. President Obama has not yet taken a position on the bill. An Administration spokeswoman said the President's chief adviser on intellectual property issues, Victoria Espinel, has discussed the legislation with tech companies, unions, copyright holders, consumer advocacy groups, progressive groups and Internet freedom advocates.

Will the SOPA bill kill the Internet?

Listen to Google, Facebook, PayPal and other Web companies, and you’ll hear that an online Armageddon is near: Bills now pending in Congress to thwart online piracy would violate free speech, destroy the technological underpinnings of the Web and hinder the user-generated innovation like the next YouTube or Twitter. Listen to Walt Disney, the NFL, Eli Lilly and a slew of entertainment and manufacturing companies, and you’ll hear that the Internet is a lawless Wild West: Congress is only trying to be the sheriff and save American jobs, make sure writers and artists are paid and protect the public from fake Viagra and Coach bags peddled online.

So who is right? The truth, as is often the case in heated battles on Capitol Hill between deep-pocketed constituencies that eye each other suspiciously, comes down somewhere in the middle.

Appropriations Bill Delays FTC Food Marketing Guidelines

Looks like the Federal Trade Commission won't have to be in any hurry to come up with final recommendations on guidelines for marketing food to kids. The final version of the appropriations bill that passed the House Dec 16 and headed to the Senate and will need to be approved to avoid a shut-down, includes a provision that requires a cost-benefit analysis before the FTC can make any final recommendations.

Food marketers had complained about the guidelines, with the backing of some Republicans who called for that cost-benefit analysis. FTC Chair Jon Leibowitz has repeatedly pointed out that they were only guidelines and not rules. "Congress has clearly changed its mind about what it would like the Interagency Working Group to do with regard to the report on food marketed to children," said FTC spokeswoman Cecelia Prewett. "The Interagency Working Group [charged with coming up with the recommendations] will be assessing its language and working toward Congressional intent."

Wireless markets: What a difference a year doesn’t make

Holy spectrum shortage, people. Between the collapse of AT&T’s proposed $39 billion merger with T-Mobile and the death throes of a proposed wholesale 4G network created by a satellite company and now-broke hedge fund, the wireless industry has generated a lot of stories but no real change in the past year. We still have the same top four providers, and Clearwire is still struggling. The hoped-for entrance of LightSquared as a wholesale LTE-provider hasn’t materialized, and while Dish says it plans to enter the market, that news is balanced out by Cox’s deciding to leave it.

The Internet Gets Physical

[Commentary] Internet is growing up and lifting its gaze to the wider world. To be sure, the economy of Internet self-gratification is thriving. Web start-ups for the consumer market still sprout at a torrid pace. And young corporate stars seeking to cash in for billions by selling shares to the public are consumer services — the online game company Zynga last week, and the social network giant Facebook, whose stock offering is scheduled for next year.

As this is happening, though, the protean Internet technologies of computing and communications are rapidly spreading beyond the lucrative consumer bailiwick. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies. The concept has been around for years, sometimes called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Yet it takes time for the economics and engineering to catch up with the predictions. And that moment is upon us.

Amazon Says Long Term And Means It

In 1997, the year Amazon.com went public, its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, issued a manifesto: “It’s all about the long term,” he said. He warned shareholders “we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies” and urged them to make sure that a long-term approach “is consistent with your investment policy.” But shareholders seem never to have gotten the message.

In October, when Amazon reported strong third-quarter revenue growth and earnings that were pretty much what the company had predicted, but indicated it would be spending more to support continued growth, investors hammered its stock. Amazon shares dropped nearly $30, or 13 percent, to $198 a share in just one day, Oct. 25. This week they were trading even lower, at $181. The notion that public companies should maximize shareholder value by managing for the long term is pretty much gospel among good-governance proponents and management experts.

Report: Sprint disabling Carrier IQ on its devices

Sprint, which confirmed to Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) earlier this week that it has installed the network diagnostic tool Carrier IQ on 26 million of its handsets, is disabling the software.

In a statement to MobileBurn, a Sprint spokesperson said that the carrier will no longer collect information from Carrier IQ on its handsets. “We have weighed customer concerns and we have disabled use of the tool so that diagnostic information and data is no longer being collected,” Sprint told the Web site, adding that it will look at other options for collecting necessary handset diagnostics.

MIT Expands Its Free Online Courses

While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce on Dec 19 a new program allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge — and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught.

M.I.T. led the way to an era of online learning 10 years ago by posting course materials from almost all its classes. Its free OpenCourseWare now includes nearly 2,100 courses and has been used by more than 100 million people. But the new “M.I.T.x” interactive online learning platform will go further, giving students access to online laboratories, self-assessments and student-to-student discussions.

Digital Data on Patients Raises Risk of Breaches

As part of the 2009 stimulus bill, the federal government provides incentive payments to doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic health records. Some 57 percent of office-based physicians now use electronic health records, a 12 percent jump from last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. An unintended consequence is that as patient records have been digitized, health data breaches have surged.

The number of reported breaches is up 32 percent this year from last year, according to the Ponemon Institute, a security research group. Those breaches cost the industry an estimated $6.5 billion last year. In almost half the cases, a lost or stolen phone or personal computer was responsible. Health organizations are required by federal law to report data breaches that affect more than 500 people to the Department of Health and Human Services. The department’s Office of Civil Rights publishes the equivalent of a data breach “Wall of Shame” on its Web site — which today includes 380 breaches affecting more than 18 million people.

Benton

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