December 2011

American Cable Association President Matt Polka suggests the new NFL football deal and its $27 billion price tag is running in full pads and cleats over consumers on its way to the bank.

"Reports that CBS, NBC and Fox are expected to pay hyperinflationary fee increases to the NFL are a calamity for consumers and should be a clarion call to policymakers in Washington, DC," said. He argues that the tackling dummies in the game of escalating sports rights are "the nine out of 10 U.S. households that subscribe to cable and satellite services and are denied any opportunity to opt out of paying for the channels on which these NFL games will appear." Polka says that broadcasters can pay those billions to the NFL if they like, but should not be able to rely "on the government's broken retransmission consent and cable carriage rules as the means for them to recoup the cost of their corpulent NFL contracts."

[Commentary] If you come across content which you find disagreeable, distasteful, or just plain idiotic, it might be best to just... shut up.

Don't waste your time firing up your righteous indignation, raking the author over the coals in the comment section, or forwarding message to your friends under the heading of "can you BELIEVE this?!" Just move on. Go to a different post, or a different site, or maybe get off the Internet entirely and do something in real life. Not only do your responses raise your own blood pressure, but in the world of the Internet, those comments are your votes. The voting metaphor itself, of course, isn't limited to the Internet. In retail, for example, it's often said that you vote with your wallet. You buy the products you find valuable and ignore the others. Widely bought products turn a profit, widely ignored products prove unmarketable, and manufacturers learn what to keep making and what to abandon. This way, it doesn't take long for the garbage to get identified and tossed out. Of course, when you're shopping, it's fine to commiserate with a friend about your disgust over a certain product. As long as you don't buy it, your vote isn't cast. Things are different on the Internet. Here, every comment, share, and forward is a vote. Every email you open has the potential to alert the sender that it caught your eye. Every click on a blog post casts a vote for it to be displayed to other people. Every ounce of attention, positive or negative, feeds more power to the content receiving it. That's the power of shutting up: it keeps you from voting for what you despise.

A joint House and Senate 2012 appropriations bill splits apart two funds that promote transparency initiatives, the e-government fund and the Federal Citizen Services Fund, a victory for champions of digital open government.

The conference bill appropriates $12.4 million to the e-government fund, up from $8 million in 2011. That figure appears to be a compromise between a House figure of about $15 million for e-gov and about $6 million in the Senate version. Because the e-gov fund had been combined with the Federal Citizen Services Fund in both chambers it's impossible to provide precise funding levels. White House officials and transparency advocates had criticized combining the two funds, saying that would water down e-gov's mission of promoting Web-based transparency across government and possibly endanger specific e-gov projects such as Data.gov, a repository for federal data sets, USAspending.gov, which tracks spending trends, and the Federal IT Dashboard, which drills down into information technology spending.

Two watchdog groups called on the Federal Election Commission to look into possible infringements by Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry’s campaign and a pro-Perry super-PAC.

Make Us Great Again might have shared videos produced by the political action committee with the Perry campaign for free or might not have charged the correct amount, Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 said. “The Perry campaign is prohibited from accepting such in-kind contributions with a value exceeding the $2,500 contribution limit and, further, Super PACs are prohibited altogether from making contributions to candidates,” Campaign Legal Center attorney Paul Ryan said. “It appears the Perry campaign and Make Us Great Again likely violated these laws and the FEC needs to investigate.” The two groups, which plan to file a complaint urging investigation with the commission, cite Politico reports as evidence that the groups shared campaign footage. Three portions of footage used in campaign ads created by Make Us Great Again were also used by Perry’s campaign, the release states.