January 2012

Bills to Stop Web Piracy Invite a Protracted Battle

When the Obama administration announced on Jan 14 its opposition to major elements of two Congressional bills intended to curtail copyright violations on the Internet, the technology industry, which has been loudly fighting the proposed legislation, could declare victory. But few people in Silicon Valley or Hollywood consider the battle over.

The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Hollywood studios and is a principal proponent of the antipiracy legislation, suggested that it would continue to push the administration to approve a modified version of the bills, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act. “Look forward to @whitehouse playing a constructive role in moving forward on #sopa & #pipa,” the association posted on its Twitter feed. Some leaders of the movie industry were not as diplomatic. The chief executive of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, in a flurry of Twitter messages in the hours after the White House announcement, accused President Obama of capitulating to the technology industry. “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery,” he posted on his Twitter feed. The opposition has been fueled by some of the most innovative pieces of the Internet — Twitter, Facebook, Reddit.com and even the I Can Haz Cheezburger? sites. “Looks like the Internet is winning a battle against some really bad potential law,” wrote Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, the online classified advertising site, in a blog post.

Tim O’Reilly: Why I’m fighting SOPA

As the debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) rages on from Silicon Valley to Washington (DC), a number of the technology industry’s most influential leaders have come out against the proposed legislation, which would give the government and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet for any alleged copyright infringement.

I interviewed Tim O’Reilly about why he believes SOPA is wrong and what the tech industry can do to stop it. His concerns fell into five main categories:

Piracy is not a real problem
SOPA protects the wrong people
SOPA ignores history
Tech and lobbying don’t mix
The US needs tech innovation

Remain Diligent: SOPA And PIPA Must Be Squashed, Not Changed

[Commentary] As members of both the Senate and the House start falling back to a more defensible position by considering the removal of the DNS provision from SOPA and PIPA, many voices of opposition to the bills are claiming victory. This is a big mistake.

"These bills need to be killed altogether," said Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Our view all along has been they are not fixable." This is one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation ever introduced in Washington. It will not only strip us of many of the freedoms (and websites) that we currently hold dear, but will also set a precedent that the US Government controls the internet. We've seen what has happened in the Middle East and Asia when governments meddle with the internet. It cannot happen here. It must not. Act.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Upton Reacts to FCC Chairman’s Comments on Spectrum Legislation

Bluster aside, it sounds like we have a federal agency more concerned about preserving its own power than offering serious improvements as we prepare to finalize this legislation. We worked with the FCC's auction experts to give the agency the legitimate flexibility it needs to design the mechanics of the auction. It's time to stop the FCC from engaging in political mischief that will hurt competition and steal money from the taxpayer's coffers. Don't take our word for it – look at the 2008 auction. The FCC imposed conditions on the C and D blocks that ultimately prevented the D-block from selling and pushed smaller carriers out of the auction. Taxpayers lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 billion, and spectrum remains sidelined. And speaking of protecting taxpayers, it's time for the FCC and others to be honest about how taxpayers would be affected by their plans to give away valuable spectrum to favored constituencies. Our goal is to strike the right balance by keeping plenty of opportunity for unlicensed use without forcing taxpayers to forfeit any return on a resource that everyone agrees is worth billions.

AT&T Statement on Incentive Spectrum Auction Legislation

We applaud the [Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s] continuing support for incentive spectrum auction legislation, which is vital to consumers and to our Nation’s economy. We are troubled, though, that the chairman and some of his staff are now saying that the FCC, and not the United States Congress, should have full power to impose conditions, and to decide which companies are allowed to participate in spectrum auctions and which should not.

In our experience, anytime a regulatory agency seeks unfettered discretion, that is the best reason Congress should not give it to them…. For the FCC to assert, in the name of ‘fostering competition’, that it should have final say on which companies can bid on spectrum is for them to engage in picking winners and losers. That is not the job of the FCC. When consumers are able to make decisions in a free and competitive market -- and wireless is clearly that -- the FCC should not be allowed to impose its own will if it doesn’t like the choices those consumers make. The FCC should be a neutral arbiter, ensuring fairness and impartially enforcing a system of rules and laws. It should not be empowered by Congress to advantage some companies and disadvantage others, or to impose its preferences on a free market. We commend the Congress for advancing spectrum legislation in a way that helps the economy, maximizes revenue for the Treasury, and ensures that consumers -- not regulators -- decide who wins and loses in the competitive wireless market. It would be a disservice to the Nation if the FCC is so adamant about preserving and enhancing its own power that it would risk killing this crucial legislation.

What’s behind AT&T’s stab at the FCC on spectrum auctions

AT&T wants the Federal Communications Commission to steer clear of setting policies for the spectrum auction process and leave it up to Congress. The position comes as somewhat of a surprise, since one would think the last thing a major telecommunications company would want is to leave its critical airwave future in the hands of Congress. But here’s what’s behind AT&T’s latest public policy power play.

There are spectrum auction bills in both the House and the Senate, but it’s the one in the House that may be the reason AT&T’s getting so uppity. House Republicans are trying to stop the FCC from being able to make the rules for the eventual auction of the digital TV airwaves that President Obama and the FCC want to take from broadcasters and repurpose for mobile broadband. If AT&T can get Congress to fight the FCC on this particular spectrum auction with this bill, it will have won by making sure new airwaves don’t come burdened by FCC provisions that AT&T doesn’t like. And since Congress seems dead set on making these airwaves no good for mobile broadband, AT&T hasn’t lost much.

Multiplied by PACs, Ads Overwhelm the Airwaves in South Carolina

Anyone who happened to be near a working television in South Carolina over the weekend was exposed to one of the most concentrated and expensive barrages of political advertising that this state has ever experienced.

With the traditional efforts of candidates now multiplied by the presence of the well-financed “super PACs” supporting them, political operatives outbid and outmaneuvered one another in a last-minute race to buy up what time remained on the airwaves between now and the state’s Republican presidential primary on Saturday. None would risk having their messages drowned out by those of their rivals. The arms race at television stations across South Carolina is the most vivid manifestation yet of the influx of outside money into American politics this election cycle. Because of a Supreme Court decision that paved the way for the creation of the super PACs — groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money advocating for a candidate as long as they do not coordinate with the campaign — the messaging wars are reaching new levels of intensity. Five Republican presidential candidates are advertising on television here. In addition, seven super PACs have run commercials alongside them.

Hollywood Techniques at Play in Politics

[Commentary] Politics has looked to Hollywood before for inspiration — take, for example, the Capra-like film tribute to Ronald Reagan for the 1984 Republican convention or “The Man From Hope,” the triumph-of-the-human-spirit fable created for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign by the television producer Harry Thomason.

Hollywood came early to the 2012 presidential race in the unlikely form of “When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” the 28-minute documentary-style attack film that opens with the word “capitalism” and comes to an end with chants of “Wall Street greed.” “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” borrows from a different script — the documentary exposé. The film uses real people talking directly to the camera, varying film stocks and camera angles and cutaways of lonely factories surrounded by weedy parking lots to not only question Mr. Romney’s ability to create jobs but indict him as someone who has been pretty good at destroying them. Think of Willie Horton recast as a venture capitalist and you get a pretty good idea of the flavor of “When Mitt Romney Came to Town.”

Sunlight Supports a Centralized FCC Database of Information about Political Ads

The Sunlight Foundation submitted comments encouraging the Federal Communications Commission to quickly create a centralized, publicly accessible database of information about political ads buys.

The current system, in which valuable information about political ads is located in the file cabinets of broadcasters across the country, prevents the information from being shared, analyzed or understood. To truly make the most use of the data, information from broadcasters’ political files should be available to the public on a centralized, searchable, sortable database on the FCC’s website.

It is currently too easy to mislead the public about the source of money behind a political ad. A searchable FCC database of ad buys would enable the public to learn who is behind any given political advertisement and allow for big-picture analysis about the money being spent to influence our elections. We applaud the FCC for opening this rulemaking and hope it adopts meaningful rules to create a more transparent system of political advertising.

A Wireless Road Around Data Traffic Jams

The vast data centers that process information for the Facebooks and Amazons of the Web work at a brisk clip. But even so, they can’t always keep up.

During sudden bursts of activity, bottlenecks occur as traffic moves among dense clusters of servers. Typically, the servers are stacked one on top of another in rack after rack — and are connected by switches, routers and cables. To better handle the congestion, researchers are testing a shortcut that doesn’t involve costly rewiring. They are experimenting with wireless links, mounted atop the server racks, to supply extra bandwidth for moving data along at crunch times. Researchers in the field, as well as data center administrators, initially were skeptical about the idea of applying wireless technologies inside data centers, which have stringent requirements for reliability and security, says Victor Bahl, director of the mobile computing research center at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash. His group began trying the links to supplement wired systems three years ago.

Benton

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