January 2012

Consumer Watchdog urges EU to block Google's Motorola deal

Consumer Watchdog, an independent consumer rights organization that has worked with Microsoft, has written to the European Commission asking it to block Google's deal to acquire Motorola and to launch an investigation into the Internet giant's alleged anticompetitive behavior.

The commission is expected to approve Google's takeover of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion by mid-February, after requesting and receiving additional information from Google. Consumer Watchdog believes this would be bad for consumers on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Google's Android smartphone operating system dominates the mobile market with a 38 percent share and is growing," said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's privacy project director, in a letter to European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia. "Google controls 95 percent of the mobile search market. There is evidence it is pressuring handset manufacturers to favor Google applications when using the Android operating system," Simpson added. "Allowing the Motorola Mobility deal would provide Google with unprecedented dominance in virtually all aspects of the mobile world -- manufacturing, operating systems, search and advertising. It would be a virtually unstoppable juggernaut."

LTE spectrum: How much do the big carriers have?

The top US carriers over the past year have stepped up their efforts to grab more spectrum for 4G wireless data services needed to accommodate a seemingly insatiable and exploding population of iPhone, iPad and other mobile device users.

To get a sense of just how much additional bandwidth carriers will need, consider that Ericsson's most recent Traffic and Market Data report predicted that global mobile data traffic will grow by 10 times between now and 2016. What's more, the FCC has projected the nation's wireless carriers will face a 275MHz "spectrum deficit" by 2014 if no new spectrum is opened up for use. Carriers are going to need that spectrum not only to build out nationwide LTE mobile data networks but also to support critical applications such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and eventually move to LTE-Advanced, the next generation of LTE that's projected to deliver average download speeds in the 100Mbps range. Mark Lowenstein, the managing director for consulting and advisory firm Mobile Ecosystem, says that getting significantly more spectrum would allow carriers to promote LTE not just as wireless technology for smartphones and tablets but for high-definition video services as well. Or put another way, while it would be impractical to stream Netflix movies on your Xbox using LTE right now, it might not be that impractical in the future when carriers have significantly more spectrum to play with and can thus charge less money for high data consumption.

Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights

The Supreme Court on unanimously ruled that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device on a suspect’s car and tracked its movements for 28 days. But the justices divided 5-to-4 on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying that the problem was the placement of the device on private property. That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies.

“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’ ” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor joined the majority opinion. “It is important to be clear about what occurred in this case,” Justice Scalia went on. “The government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.”

In a concurrence for four justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. faulted the majority for trying to apply 18th-century legal concepts to 21st-century technologies. What should matter, he said, is the contemporary reasonable expectation of privacy. “The use of longer term G.P.S. monitoring in investigations of most offenses,” he wrote, “impinges on expectations of privacy.” Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the concurrence.

350,000 Textbooks Downloaded From Apple’s iBooks in Three Days

Though nascent and unproven, Apple’s new textbook initiative appears to be gaining lots of momentum — and quickly, too.

Within days of its debut, Apple’s iBooks textbook store had already racked up a significant number of downloads. Same thing with the company’s textbook authoring tool. According to Global Equities Research, which monitors Apple’s iBook sales via a proprietary tracking system it doesn’t much care to discuss, more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded from the company’s iBooks Store within the first three days of availability. And there were some 90,000 downloads of iBooks Author, Apple’s free textbook-creation tool, during the same time. If those numbers are accurate, Apple’s textbook effort would seem to be off to a good start. Which is good news for everyone involved — particularly textbook publishers, who stand to make more money on books sold through iBooks than those sold at retail.

YouTube hits 4 billion daily video views

YouTube, Google's video website, is streaming 4 billion online videos every day, a 25 percent increase in the past eight months, according to the company.

The jump in video views comes as Google pushes YouTube beyond the personal computer, with versions of the site that work on smartphones and televisions, and as the company steps up efforts to offer more professional-grade content on the site. According to the company, roughly 60 hours of video is now uploaded to YouTube every minute, compared with the 48 hours of video uploaded per minute in May.

If the feds can shut down Megaupload, why do we need SOPA?

So if the US government already has the power to arrest people and seize assets in places as far away as Germany, New Zealand, and the Philippines, are the new enforcement powers sought by content companies even necessary?

We posed that question to two people on opposite sides of the SOPA debate. Cara Duckworth is a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America. And Julian Sanchez is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and an occasional contributor to Ars Technica.

If Congress wants jobs, it can’t want SOPA

Although the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act have been shelved, their staunchest congressional supporters are still criticizing the opposition, claiming the bills would save thousands of jobs. However, these claims look like little more than empty rhetoric.

The entertainment industry — profit-hungry and change-averse — is already its own worst enemy. Meanwhile, the Internet economy that bills such as SOPA and PIPA threaten to derail is a potential job creator the likes of which Hollywood could ever be. It’s difficult to take any complaints about job losses in the television industry too seriously. Sure, networks have been better about embracing the Internet than have movie studios, but many also cling to archaic notions such as primetime programming and ever-more-expensive delivery models such as cable and satellite providers. And when television networks spotted an opportunity to cut costs with reality television, they pounced on it. According to Media Life, reality television went from practically zero percent of the big five networks’s primetime programming in 1996 to 20 percent entering the fall 2011 season (although it peaked in 2006-07). The result of the reality overload wasn’t necessarily a lack of jobs, but a lower class of jobs. Interchangeable reality television participants make far less than do cast members on scripted programs, and despite its decade of saturating the airwaves, reality television writers are still fighting to unionize like their Writers Guild of America brethren. As is, many are without standard benefits such as overtime pay and health care.

Why I’m fighting SOPA: We need a solution, but a better solution

[Commentary] The current SOPA legislation, which is being debated everywhere from Capitol Hill to the Hollywood Hills, is not the answer that creative rights holders — nor advocates of the DMCA and other free internet policy proponents — are seeking. Instead, we need to find a more elegant middle ground, with policy that encourages online creativity and economic growth while also protecting the intellectual property of musicians, filmmakers, and others. It’s not as exciting to advocate for a compromise, but that’s what we need.

[Tom Gimbel is the general manager of Austin City Limits, the award-winning KLRU produced music television show.]

If Comcast can’t make it in the wireless biz, who can?

Comcast tried hard to become a mobile operator, but it failed to find a way to make the business work — at least that’s what Comcast EVP of public policy David Cohen claimed in a fascinating blog post last week describing why it and its cable buddies decided to sell their spectrum and shack up with competitor Verizon Wireless. That admission is a surprising one to say the least, and if Comcast is being forthright it also raises some troubling questions about the state of the U.S. wireless industry. If a company with a $71 billion market cap and deep roots in the telecom service provider business can’t make a go of the wireless business, what hope is there for any newcomer?

Why you’ll soon love your cellphone contract

[Commentary] Cellphone contracts suck, but pretty much everyone in the U.S. still has one.

For the vast majority of people, signing a contract is the only way to get the phone they want for a price they can afford. But contracts present problems: They’re 24 months long, but phones typically have issues after the first 12 months (when manufacturer’s warranties have expired); if a phone is lost, the contract still stands, yet the consumer has no phone; and newer phones that are far more desirable are released yearly or more frequently, yet consumers are stuck with the same old phone. But carriers need contracts about as much as consumers disdain them. It’s the only way to ensure that consumers will be there month after month, allowing carriers to recoup the investment they make in phone purchases. But what if all of this changed? What if consumers actually enjoyed signing contracts? What if carriers just gave away phones — all of them — for free?

Carriers need to rethink the current model of phone ownership. How about the carrier owns the phone, and it must be returned after the 12 months is up. Moreover, instead of signing a two-year contract, consumers would have to sign a four- to five-year one. But, and this is a big but, when a consumer gives that 12-month-old phone back to the carrier, they’ll get a brand-new one of their choice — every single year of the contract.

Benton

Search