January 2012

Current social networks may have been present in the earliest modern humans

In this week’s Nature, a group of researchers suggest that we share many social characteristics with humans that lived in the late Pleistocene, and that these ancient humans may have paved the way for us to cooperate with each other. Modern human social networks share several features, whether they operate within a group of schoolchildren in San Francisco or a community of millworkers in Bulgaria. The number of social ties a person has, the probability that two of a person’s friends are also friends, and the inclination for similar people to be connected are all very regular across groups of people living very different lives in far-flung places. So, the researchers asked, are these traits universal to all groups of humans, or are they merely byproducts of our modern world? They also wanted to understand the social network traits that allowed cooperation to develop in ancient communities.

The continued decline of DSL

For a brief moment in the past decade, Verizon and AT&T gave cable broadband a good run for its money. Not anymore. As two of the largest phone companies have shifted focus to their more lucrative wireless business, cable broadband has been running away with the wired broadband market. The proof — admittedly in bits and pieces — comes from the recently reported earnings of AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner Cable. Both major phone companies reported astonishing revenue growth, most of it from the sale of smartphones and lucrative (and increasingly expensive) data plans for the customers.

During the fourth quarter of 2011 (which ended on Dec. 31, 2011), Verizon lost 103,000 DSL lines. In comparison, it lost 118,000 DSL lines during the third quarter of 2011 (which ended on Sept. 30, 2011) and 127,000 in the quarter ending June 39, 2011.

The numbers at AT&T are worse. During the fourth quarter of 2011, Ma Bell lost 636,000 DSL lines, up from 501,000 during the third quarter of 2011 and 451,000 during the three months ending on June 30, 2011.

Now compare this with Time Warner Cable, which added a whopping 130,000 broadband connections.

So why is DSL continuing to nose-dive? First of all, the phone companies themselves are not interested in pushing the envelope on DSL and instead are focusing on their higher-end offerings.

Forget the EU: How to really empower users on privacy

In the fight to determine who dictates online privacy standards, web users are like a child caught in between a bitter custody battle, or a chew toy at risk of being torn asunder by two competing dogs. But the best ones to decide who does what with personal data are the very users who are currently trapped between Google, Facebook and other websites on one side and lawmakers on the other. The answer lies somewhere between the choice that web companies provide and the axe-like control mechanisms that government regulations seek to provide, in the form of creative solutions that help — or force — websites to compete on privacy.

Here are some rough ideas for how such solutions might look:

A paywall of sorts, similar to what the New York Times has in place, but users pay for privacy instead of access. Platform providers could perhaps offer an a la carte contract that lets users pick what features they want for free (i.e., what data they’re willing to hand over to advertisers) and what features they want to pay for (i.e., what data they want to keep private).
Third-party-run collectives that operate like insurance companies (or labor unions), only instead of dictating what they’ll pay to hospitals, they dictate what privacy requirements they’ll accept for their members. We have 400 million users signed up (the threat might be) and you’ll either give them these terms or we’ll find someone who will. Conventional wisdom suggests this should be a nonprofit operation, although users might be willing to pay a small premium for guaranteed results.
Monetary credits that reward users for sharing. In Facebook’s ongoing right-to-publicity lawsuit, for example, a major issue is how much more Facebook can charge for Sponsored Stories (i.e., ads that appear in a user’s news stream when a friend interacts with participating companies) than for regular ads. If users don’t want to pay for privacy, and if sites don’t want to stop using user data, perhaps the answer is to give users a piece of revenue pie that’s created by their data.

Citizens Inundated

[Commentary] The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision has already picked a winner in the 2012 elections: TV broadcasters.

Companies like CBS Corp, News Corp. and Sinclair Broadcast Group are already dividing the spoils of an election year that will see unprecedented spending on political ads. More than $12 million was spent on ads during the Iowa Republican caucus. More than $14 million was spent on the South Carolina primary. And Floridians are already seeing the effect of millions more in ad buys as the state readies for Jan 31’s vote. But that's just the first glimpse of an election year that will leave viewers awash in misinformation. All told TV broadcast companies stand to pocket more than $3 billion in political ad revenues by November. What they're not doing is letting viewers and voters in on the full story behind all this money and all these ads.

How Fox News Is Destroying The Republican Party

[Commentary] Wannabe kingmaker Roger Ailes is facing an open revolt. More and more despondent conservatives are expressing alarm over the unfolding Republican primary season and what they see as the party's dwindling chances of defeating President Obama in November.

Spooked at the general elections prospects facing frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich (especially Gingrich), members of the so-called Republican Establishment seem to want to reboot the election season and try their nominating luck again. Sorry, it's too late. If the current state of concern transforms into a larger, enveloping blame game, Fox News chairman Ailes ought be a looming target. True, conservatives in recent years have shown virtually no interest in critiquing, let alone trying to reign in, Ailes' empire. Still, it's becoming increasingly clear that Fox's programming and the radical, fear-based agenda it's setting for Republicans is now doing lasting damage to the Grand Old Party.

Amazon: Early Data Shows Kindle Owners’ Lending Library Increases Sales

Amazon’s early data from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which allows Amazon prime members who are also Kindle owners to borrow one free e-book per month, “suggests the possibility of an increase in customer purchasing,” Kindle content VP Russ Grandinetti said at Digital Book World.

Grandinetti said “we’re trying to be skeptical about this” but Amazon’s early data “suggests you can get people engaged in a book that they weren’t interested in otherwise.” Amazon compared two customer groups of Amazon Prime members who have owned an e-reading device for more than six months and have made at least one recent book purchase in the last 30 days. The members of one group used the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and the members of the other group did not. Grandinetti said that after the average customer’s first borrow from the KOLL, he or she went on to purchase 30 percent more books.

LightSquared: Interference tests were rigged

The GPS industry rigged the testing of LightSquared’s wireless network in an attempt to stymie the broadband startup, an executive claimed.

The testing conducted this fall “was shrouded in secrecy” and “there was no transparency,” Jeff Carlisle, head of regulatory affairs for LightSquared, said in a conference call with reporters. The “testing just doesn’t reflect reality and was probably never intended to.” GPS manufacturers cherry-picked devices for testing — many of them niche or obsolete — to meet an overly conservative definition of interference, Carlisle said. The complaint adds to Friday’s charge that a key federal advisory board has had a “systematic disregard for fairness and transparency.” “We believe the testing was rigged to assure that most receivers would fail,” Carlisle said. Jim Kirkland, a spokesman for the Coalition to Save our GPS and vice president of Trimble, responded that LightSquared is simply whining after things didn’t go its way.

LightSquared files ethics complaint

Exasperated by a government process that has left them scrambling to avoid bankruptcy, LightSquared filed a complaint with NASA’s inspector general’s office alleging that a key member of a panel that advises the government on GPS violated ethics laws.

Bradford Parkinson, second in command of a federal advisory board that has played an integral role informing the government’s views of the LightSquared-GPS controversy, “appears to have violated a federal conflict of interest statute” as a special government employee, the filing states. Parkinson serves as vice chairman of the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Advisory Board, which advises the Defense Department, the Transportation Department and a host of other federal agencies on GPS policy. Parkinson has a multimillion dollar stake in Trimble, a GPS manufacturing company at the heart of a campaign to derail the broadband company from entering the market. The PNT Advisory Board operates under the auspices of NASA. In the 27-page complaint, LightSquared argues that Parkinson, as a Trimble board member who has publicly called the broadband company a “bunch of greedy guys that are like the worst of the people in real estate," has a clear conflict of interest pursuant to the law. Absent a waiver from NASA, which Parkinson did not receive, he should not have been advising the government on this matter, LightSquared attorney Curtis Lu argues. Essentially, the company makes the case that Parkinson created an unfair playing field, which undermines LightSquared’s chances of success.

Social Media Win a Big One in Washington

In a powerful show of strength for social media and technology leaders, the online community derailed, at least temporarily, major legislation that had garnered significant support among Washington politicians and lobbyists. Last week, Congress was scheduled to vote on two bills aimed at combating illegal downloading and streaming of movies and TV shows on the internet-the House's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA). However, bloggers, Twitter users and social media giants like Google united against the bills because of fears the legislation would give media companies too much power and constitute internet censorship.

The online pressure was so strong that despite efforts from 115 companies and organizations that had lobbyists working on the bills, both houses of Congress announced on January 20 they would postpone the legislation. For the week of January 16-20, the protests over the piracy legislation was the No. 1 subject on both blogs and Twitter, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. And on both types of social media, there was overwhelming agreement that the bills would be detrimental to freedom on the web. In a related finding, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that nearly one-quarter (23%) of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 followed the SOPA battle more closely than any other topic last week, making it a bigger story among that youthful demographic than the presidential race. That level of interest was in full display online. A massive online protest was staged on January 18, with Wikipedia taking its site down for the day and thousands of other sites following suit. At the same time, millions of individuals signed online petitions and voiced their opposition to the bills. The relationship between the protests and the reaction by Congress was seen as a clear and crucial victory for online activism.

There's No Fixing SOPA And PIPA; Time To Start Over

[Commentary] The sudden Congressional decisions to ditch the very bad intellectual property bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) have raised all sorts of new questions about how discussion around the bills should proceed and, as importantly, how was it the opposition managed to have such a devastating impact on such a powerful lobby as the movie studios and their friends. Those are important and related questions which have been answered in recent days with a lot of speculation. Let’s start with the question of how to proceed from here on in, because the answer to that question will largely explain how we got to this point. Trying to “fix” SOPA and PIPA and all of the bad provisions in those bills is the wrong approach. Conceptually, it’s like trying to build a building starting on the second floor. The most logical way to proceed would be to start building a structure from the foundation and working up from there.

Benton

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