December 2011

Sec Clinton Urges Countries Not to Stifle Online Voices

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other international leaders urged countries and private businesses to fight increasing efforts to restrict access to the Internet by repressive governments and even some democratic ones.

Opening a two-day conference on digital freedom at The Hague sponsored by Google and the Dutch government, Sec Clinton warned that restrictions on the Internet threatened not only basic freedoms and human rights, but also international commerce and the free flow of information that increasingly makes it possible. “When ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us,” Sec Clinton said. She added: “There isn’t an economic Internet and a social Internet and a political Internet. There’s just the Internet.” “More and more countries are trying now to regulate and control the Internet,” Uri Rosenthal, the foreign minister of the Netherlands, said after meeting separately with Sec Clinton. “And it is unacceptable that Web sites are blocked, Internet queues are filtered, content manipulated and bloggers are attacked and imprisoned.”

Bill Aims to Curb Tech Firms' Censorship Exports

Pressure mounted Dec 8 on US and Western companies that sell censorship and surveillance technology to repressive regimes, with a congressman introducing a bill that would restrict such exports. Separately, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on corporations to do "human-rights due diligence" before making sales in new markets.

"In recent months we've seen cases where companies' products and services were used as tools of oppression," Sec Clinton told a conference on Internet freedom in the Netherlands. In Washington, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) introduced the latest version of a bill—the "Global Online Freedom Act"—that would prohibit the export of certain telecommunications technology that can be used for online censorship or surveillance to countries that the State Department determined was restricting use of the Internet. "Current export control laws do not take into account the human rights impact of these exports and therefore do not create any incentive for U.S. companies to evaluate their role in assisting repressive regimes," Rep Smith said during a hearing on the proposed bill.

Judge Allows Dodgers’ Plan for TV Rights

A federal bankruptcy judge ruled that the Los Angeles Dodgers can accelerate the sale of their future television rights over the objections of Fox Sports, whose Prime Ticket channel has a contract to carry the team’s games through 2013.

Judge Kevin Gross of United States Bankruptcy Court decided in favor of the team after a two-day hearing. If upheld, his decision is likely to set off a vigorous auction for the TV rights between Time Warner Cable, AT&T, DirecTV and Fox. Fox argued that rights contained in its current contract with the Dodgers precluded the team from contacting any other suitors for the TV rights before the end of a 45-day exclusive negotiation window on Nov. 30, 2012. Fox said it would suffer enormous financial damages if Judge Gross ruled for the team.

New 'Adware' Apps Bug Facebook, Google

A new generation of controversial advertising software is wreaking havoc on the ad businesses of Web giants including Facebook, Google and Yahoo, inserting a layer of ads on websites or covering up other paying ads.

The software comes in the form of applications that allow people to customize their Facebook profiles with, say, special borders of snowflakes or colorful designs or turbo-charge Web searches. But in downloading the software, computer users open up a door to ads that the big Internet companies complain are rogue. Once people download the apps, with names like PageRage and BuzzDock, extra ads can appear on Facebook and search-engine results pages. Facebook and Google don't see any of the revenue from these ads, which often are for big-name companies including Gap, American Express and AT&T. The vast majority of user complaints that Facebook receives about advertising are because these ads.

Don't fold on Internet gambling ban

[Commentary] Powerful and wealthy political forces are pushing Congress to repeal the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. They even hope to slip a repeal measure quietly into a bill as Congress rushes to pass legislation this month. In addition, a few cash-strapped states are moving toward legalizing this highly addictive type of gambling within their borders.

Momentum to overturn the act picked up steam last year when major casinos, which once feared any competition from the Internet, jumped on board. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) also flip-flopped. Since then, a powerful lobby for legalization has grown larger, even hiring a former FBI director and a former Homeland Security chief. The monied interests behind legalization know that Internet gambling would come with many social problems – especially among teens, who could not easily be deterred from using such websites. Hearings in the House this fall revealed the extent of the potential problem and how Internet gambling would require extensive regulation. Simply stopping Internet gambling is the best course. And now the Justice Department is fully on board.

Jawbone offers 'no questions asked' refund on Up wristbands

In November, Jawbone released the Up band, a plastic bracelet that monitors a range of biorhythms, from sleeping patterns to eating habits. The Up, Jawbone executives claimed, was intended to "make people consumers of their own health, so that health becomes a topic of conversation, like the TV show from last night or that new app that you downloaded." But late last month, Up users began reporting strange quirks – bugs, syncing problems, battery problems. In some cases, the band wouldn't charge; in others, the band would die altogether.

This week, under heavy fire from critics, Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman took to the company site to apologize for the malfunctions, and to offer a "no questions asked" refund for consumers affected by the problems. "We’ve temporarily paused production of UP bands and will begin taking new orders once these issues have been sorted out. In the meantime, we’ll continue to release app updates for existing users," Rahman wrote. "We regret any disappointment we’ve created for our community of users and appreciate the trust you’ve put in us.... Please know that we’re doing – and will continue to do – everything we can to make things right."

Mobile payments: Bigger than cash in 2015?

We just can’t give enough love to mobile payments as we watch the world move from cash to credit to cardless. Intuit is feeling the evolution too and created an infographic to explain just how much mobile payments are growing and where they’ll be in 2015.

The two biggest payment players last year were obviously credit and debit cards, with a small, but rising mobile payments only making up 5 percent of purchases executed. But important to note is that as credit, debit and other forms of payment increase, cash exchange decreases. People have long trusted plastic to deliver their currency, so why not trade in the plastic for airwaves? Well, according to Intuit, people will do just that. Cash is expected to drop to just over $1 trillion changing hands in 2015, and alternate payments jumping up considerably to $2.7 trillion, hugely surpassing cash as a trusted method of payment. Also important to keep in mind is the proliferation of smartphones themselves. Smartphones have permeated over 40 percent of mobile users, but more interesting is the fact that this is mirrored in business owners. 37 percent of entrepreneurs also work through the smartphone, creating a level playing field for people wanting to buy and sell over the phone.

Samsung Wins Approval for Australia Tablet Sales as Apple Loses

Samsung Electronics will start selling its rival to Apple’s iPad 2 in Australian stores before Christmas after the country’s highest court denied Apple’s bid to maintain a ban on Samsung Galaxy tablets.

Chief Justice Robert French, on behalf of the three-judge High Court panel, said that Apple failed to persuade them that it could win on appeal and denied the company a hearing. He reinstated an appeals court judgment lifting the ban on the Galaxy 10.1 tablets in Australia. The ruling ends Apple’s four-month effort to keep the iPad’s biggest rival out of Australia on claims it infringes patents related to touch-screen technology. Apple and Samsung, the world’s biggest makers of smartphones and tablet computers, have sued each other on four continents since Apple accused Samsung in April of “slavishly copying” its products.

Bringing High-Speed Internet to All

[Commentary] Susan Crawford’s Dec. 4 Sunday Review essay, “The New Digital Divide,” contributes to the perception that America’s broadband marketplace is second tier. That is simply not so. About 95 percent of the United States population has access to broadband, with the vast majority having multiple competitors to choose from. The 2011 World Economic Forum global survey ranks the United States first in Internet competition. Through 2010 the number of American subscribers to fiber-based services was more than double that of Europe. Broadband prices per megabyte have decreased 89 percent — to about 5 cents per megabyte — in the past three years, while at the same time broadband speeds have increased more than 20-fold. The United States also leads the world in wireless broadband, with Americans accounting for 21 percent of all 3G subscribers. In this highly competitive, innovative market, prices for such services are declining. America has a very good broadband story; someone just has to be willing to tell it.

[Seidenberg is the Chairman of Verizon]

Americans Choose Wireless for Broadband

[Commentary] The main problem with Susan P. Crawford’s analysis is that her vision is almost entirely grounded in a rapidly disappearing reality: Internet access via wireline technologies.

The International Data Corporation projects that the number of wireless-only small and medium-sized businesses in the United States will grow by about 13 percent annually over the next five years. Wireless technologies, including smartphones and tablets, continue to replace landlines for millions of Americans, with this trend especially strong among the young. This points up two problems with Ms. Crawford’s call for a large federal program to spur wireline deployment. First, her solution is a technology that Americans are increasingly abandoning as unsuited to their (mobile) needs. It’s yesterday’s solution to today’s problem. More important, a wireline “Marshall Plan” would do absolutely nothing to address our most pressing broadband need — freeing more spectrum to handle wireless data growth. [Singer is a managing director of Navigant Economics, a consulting firm]

Benton

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