January 2012

BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 2012

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology meets today http://benton.org/calendar

LABOR
   It's a Man vs. Machine Recovery

ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
   We need a political litmus test for tech and SOPA isn’t it - analysis
   Iowa Campaign Ads Show Power of Negativity in Republican Race - analysis
   7 Social Networks Obama And The GOP Hopefuls Should Definitely Join - analysis [links to web]
   Study Says Looks Matter as TV Covers Congress

INTERNET
   Is Internet access a fundamental human right? - analysis
   Soul searching in Silicon Valley
   Iran clamps down on Internet use
   What the Internet Means for How We Think About the World
   Gov Haley Barbour pushes for online sales tax in farewell speech [links to web]

CONTENT
   How the US pressured Spain to adopt unpopular Web blocking law
   Dodd says online piracy debate is ‘breakthrough’
   Twitter, Facebook, Google endorse alternate online piracy bill
   'NewsRight' Launched By 29 News Outlets To Track Stories Online
   Barnes & Noble Seeks Next Chapter
   Nook From Barnes & Noble Gains More E-Book Readers [links to web]
   American movie industry's box-office blues - editorial [links to web]
   Digital finally overtakes physical in US music market [links to web]
   Blogging iPhone News [links to web]

SPECTRUM/WIRELESS
   Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth, and Gap Is Growing
   Verizon Fixed-Line Sale Would Enable Vodafone Combination, Goldman Says
   Verizon's Deal With Big Cable Spells the Demise of the Telecom Act - op-ed
   AT&T has ‘no regrets’ over failed T-Mobile bid
   Texting profits at risk as users look elsewhere
   AT&T Says High-Speed Network Expansion Is Ahead of Target [links to web]
   Sprint details first LTE launch cities, expansion plans [links to web]
   Multi-gigabit Wi-Fi is here and 5 reasons it matters - analysis [links to web]

TELEVISION/RADIO
   Economic Impact of Low-Power FM Stations on Commercial FM Radio
   Media Ownership NPRM: What Hath Quad Wrought? - analysis
   Broadcast News Rebounds in 2011 [links to web]
   WLNY Owner Spinning Off LPTVs, Too [links to web]
   Obsolete Television Law Needs Modernization - op-ed [links to web]

OWNERSHIP
   The new four horsemen of tech - analysis [links to web]
   Media Ownership NPRM: What Hath Quad Wrought? - analysis

EDUCATION
   Students of Online Schools Are Lagging

POLICYMAKERS
   Senior Staff Changes at FCC - press release

MARKETING
   Companies Struggle To Manage Social Media [links to web]
   10 No-Fail Brand Resolutions For 2012 [links to web]

ENERGY
   Department of Energy Launches Initiative with Industry to Better Protect the Nation’s Electric Grid from Cyber Threats - press release [links to web]

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LABOR

MAN VS MACHINE
[SOURCE: Bloomberg, AUTHOR: David Lynch]
The US produces almost one-quarter more goods and services today than it did in 1999, while using almost precisely the same number of workers. It’s as if $2.5 trillion worth of stuff -- the equivalent of the entire U.S. economy circa 1958 -- materialized out of thin air. Although businesses haven’t added many people, they’ve certainly bulked up on machines. Spending on equipment and software hit an all-time high in the third quarter of 2011. “Huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less,” vaporizing jobs for everyone from steelworkers to travel agents, President Barack Obama warned in December.
So are robots getting all the good jobs? This year may provide the answer as the economy gathers steam. Most economists, cheered by 540,000 hires since Labor Day, say technology inevitably destroys some jobs even as it ultimately creates new ones. But with more than 20 million Americans still jobless or underemployed, others worry that something fundamental has changed. “What’s different now is the speed and scale of what’s happening,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business. Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, co-authors of the recently published book Race Against the Machine, argue that the economy is in the early stages of a “Great Restructuring” that is hollowing out the labor market and exacerbating inequality. Nonsense, say economists including James D. Hamilton of the University of California at San Diego. There’s nothing new about machines replacing people. In 1900, 41 percent of Americans worked on farms. Today, thanks to labor-saving tractors and combines, the figure is less than 2 percent. Yet ex-farm workers found new jobs. And as manufacturing grew leaner in recent decades, factory workers—or their children—migrated to finance, health care, computers, and other growing industries.
benton.org/node/109820 | Bloomberg
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA

A POLITICAL LITMUS TEST
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Stacey Higginbotham]
[Commentary] A growing problem as the web and technology becomes more central to how we share, communicate and work is that an average person doesn’t know how abstract laws can affect their lives and the media doesn’t expose how well (or poorly) politicians understand technology. As a result, certain companies with lobbyists are getting away molding our laws and policies in their favor and in the process they are going to hinder how Internet works and thrives.
Horror stories about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) abound, but what about your cell phone? Can a police officer search the contents of your phone during a traffic stop? Can a customs agent rifle through your laptop files as you return from a trip abroad? What about the history of your Google searches or checkins on Foursquare, can those be used against you in a court of law? These are not idle issues and instead of focusing on who is a socialist or paying attention solely to where someone stands on social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, the broader media, politicians and citizenry need to start paying attention to and thinking about tech policy.
So while debates over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) will continue to rage as we head into an election year in the U.S. France, The U.K and other places, we should ask elected officials about how they view the Internet and how connectivity can change the world.
benton.org/node/109791 | GigaOm
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IOWA ADS
[SOURCE: Bloomberg, AUTHOR: Jonathan Salant]
As Iowa Republicans took in the final appeals before caucus voting, one major lesson the candidates will take away: Going negative works. An estimated $5.8 million was spent on television advertising in Iowa through Dec. 30, with $3.7 million financing negative ads, according to most recent data available from New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, a company that tracks advertising. Most of those negative ads were directed against one candidate: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who led national and Iowa opinion polls from mid-November to mid-December. Since Dec. 1, 45 percent of all ads airing in Iowa criticized Gingrich for shifting policy positions and advocacy for Freddie Mac, a government-backed mortgage-finance company caught up in the housing crisis, and other groups after resigning the House in 1999. The commercials were primarily financed by Rep Ron Paul (R-TX), Gov Rick Perry (R-TX) and an outside committee that backs Mitt Romney, who used his own campaign cash to run only commercials promoting himself.
benton.org/node/109778 | Bloomberg
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YOU LOOK MARVELOUS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Sam Roberts]
Maybe looks aren’t everything, but new research suggests that more physically attractive members of Congress get more coverage on network television. Two Israeli professors concluded that members whom a student survey judged to be better looking appeared more frequently on television — but not radio or in newspapers. The researchers argued that the networks were trying to attract larger audiences. “In an ideal democracy, the amount of news coverage representatives receive should be determined by the quality of their work and the originality of their ideas,” the professors wrote. Instead, they said, the networks were compromising “the democratic principle of equal access to the public sphere.” The study, by Prof. Israel Waismel-Manor and Prof. Yariv Tsfati of the University of Haifa, appears in the current edition of the journal Political Communication.
benton.org/node/109822 | New York Times
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INTERNET

INTERNET AS HUMAN RIGHT
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Mathew Ingram]
Should Internet access be seen as a fundamental human right, in the same category as the right to free speech or clean drinking water? The United Nations says it should, but in a New York Times op-ed, Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, argues it shouldn’t. In a nutshell, Cerf’s argument seems to be that if we define Internet access itself as a right, we are placing the focus on the wrong thing. The ‘Net, he says, is just a technological tool that enables us to exercise other fundamental rights, such as the right to free speech or access to information — and rights should not be awarded to tools, but to the ends that they enable us to reach. One of the arguments against seeing Internet access as a fundamental right is that doing this places all kinds of potential burdens on society — including the potential costs of delivering access to millions or potentially billions of people.
But whether we define Internet access as a fundamental human right or simply a civil right, aren’t we taking a risk by not calling it a right at all? I think we are — and the risk is that it makes it easier for governments to place restrictions on access or even shut it down entirely (a point the United Nations made in its recent report). As JD Rucker notes in a blog post, seeing Internet access as a right is no different from seeing access to medical treatment or clean drinking water as a right. The Internet is a fundamental method of communication and connection, and is becoming more fundamental all the time. Seeing it as a right is an important step towards making it available to as many people as possible.
benton.org/node/109826 | GigaOm
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SOUL SEARCHING IN SILICONE VALLEY
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: April Dembosky]
In the wake of social uprisings around the world this year, AnchorFree has become a poster child among human rights advocates for embracing the unintended uses of technology. Facebook was first used for tracking university friends; Twitter, to plan parties. YouTube and Bambuser, a live streaming video service based in Sweden, originally hosted home-made movies. All have become instrumental in facilitating and documenting social movements, from the Arab spring to Occupy Wall Street. In June the UN declared internet access itself a human right. Technology companies have accepted these new responsibilities to varying degrees, some begrudgingly reshaping internal policies to account for their wider role in society and a few, such as AnchorFree, interpreting them as a strategic opportunity. The range of reactions is giving rise to fresh tensions between Silicon Valley and international human rights organizations, with rights advocates directing the forces and rhetoric usually reserved for dictators against the technology services being tapped to topple them. They have been calling on chief executives to adapt to activists’ needs and establish human rights policies before crises erupt, and beseeching young start-ups to build human rights considerations into their mission statements.
benton.org/node/109827 | Financial Times
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IRAN CLAMPS DOWN ON INTERNET
[SOURCE: guardian.co.uk, AUTHOR: Saeed Kamali Dehghan]
Iran is clamping down heavily on web users before parliamentary elections in March with draconian rules on cybercafes and preparations to launch a national Internet. Tests for a countrywide network aimed at substituting services run through the world wide web have been carried out by Iran's ministry of information and communication technology, according to a newspaper report. The move has prompted fears among its online community that Iran intends to withdraw from the global Internet. The police this week imposed tighter regulations on Internet cafes. Cafe owners have been given a two-week ultimatum to adopt rules requiring them to check the identity cards of their customers before providing services. "Internet cafes are required to write down the forename, surname, name of the father, national identification number, postcode and telephone number of each customer," said an Iranian police statement, according to the news website Tabnak.
benton.org/node/109782 | guardian.co.uk
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TOO BIG TO KNOW
[SOURCE: The Atlantic, AUTHOR: Rebecca Rosen]
A Q&A with Internet theorist David Weinberger. In this time of easy access to information, experts, and news, the last thing you would expect is that we are in the midst of a crisis in knowledge. But sometimes it seems that we, in fact, are, says Weinberger. How's that? Weinberger says that on the day he sat down to write the prologue to his new book, Too Big to Know, three of the six front-page New York Times stories -- about topics as diverse as the Gulf oil spill, John Updike's archive, and soccer players who fake injury -- could have carried the subhead, "Knowledge in Crisis!" On the face of it, these stories do not seem to be about knowledge in any way, or even to be connected at all. But Weinberger says that at their core these stories are all about questions of how we store, organize, find, and apply knowledge -- questions that are changing rapidly as knowledge is increasingly stored not in paper or people's minds, but online.
benton.org/node/109798 | Atlantic, The
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CONTENT

HOW US PRESSURED SPAIN
[SOURCE: ars technica, AUTHOR: Nate Anderson]
In a February 2008 cable, the US Embassy in Madrid stated, “We propose to tell the new government that Spain will appear on the Watch List if it does not do three things by October 2008. First, issue a [Government of Spain] announcement stating that Internet piracy is illegal, and that the copyright levy system does not compensate creators for copyrighted material acquired through peer-to-peer file sharing. Second, amend the 2006 “circular” that is widely interpreted in Spain as saying that peer-to-peer file sharing is legal. Third, announce that the GoS [Government of Spain] will adopt measures along the lines of the French and/or UK proposals aimed at curbing Internet piracy by the summer of 2009.”
The Watch List referenced is the US Trade Representative's "Special 301" list, updated annually. Spain was duly put on the list in 2008 after failing to take such measures. ("The United States is concerned by the Spanish government’s inadequate efforts to address the growing problem of Internet piracy, described by U.S. copyright industries as one of the worst in Europe," said the 2008 report.) Spanish copyright holders applauded the move; indeed, the cables show that they repeatedly asked US officials to make it.
benton.org/node/109814 | Ars Technica
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DODD ON SOPA DEBATE
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Gautham Nagesh]
Motion Picture Association of America CEO Chris Dodd said the heated debate over online piracy legislation in Congress is proof the tech industry recognizes the gravity of the nation’s online piracy problem. “No one is arguing about whether we ought to deal with these rogue criminal foreign sites that steal American jobs and products,” Dodd said. “We all understand something needs to be done. We’re now arguing about how best to do this. And that’s a major breakthrough.” The battle over the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and its companion PROTECT IP in the Senate has seen the tech industry square off with the content community, which strongly supports both bills. Tech companies argue the bills would result in censorship and restrict innovation. Dodd told Bloomberg TV’s Emily Chang he believes the future of Internet commerce will be guided by mutual growth by both sectors.
benton.org/node/109780 | Hill, The
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INTERNET COMPANIES ENDORSE OPEN ACT
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Gautham Nagesh]
Eight of the largest Web companies have endorsed an online piracy bill offered by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) as an alternative to the unpopular Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, Protect IP. The OPEN Act would direct online patent infringement claims against foreign websites to the International Trade Commission (ITC), which would be authorized to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties with the rogue foreign sites. That approach drew praise from the Web firms, many of which oppose the provisions in SOPA that would require search engines and other sites to delete links to sites deemed to be "dedicated" to copyright infringement. The online community argues such a requirement would result in censorship online. "[The OPEN Act's] approach targets foreign rogue sites without inflicting collateral damage on legitimate, law-abiding U.S. Internet companies by bringing well-established international trade remedies to bear on this problem," said AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga.
benton.org/node/109812 | Hill, The
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NEWSRIGHT
[SOURCE: The Huffington Post, AUTHOR: ]
The Associated Press and 28 news organizations -- including The New York Times Co. and The Washington Post Co. -- are launching a company that will measure the unpaid online use of their original reporting and seek to convert unauthorized websites, blogs and other newsgathering services into paying customers. The company, called NewsRight, brings together efforts started by the AP and its partners in October 2010 to track the use of stories on websites, blogs and other Internet forums through what it calls the News Registry. NewsRight encodes original stories with hidden data that includes the writer's name and when it was published. The encoded stories send back reports to the registry that describe where a story is being used and who is reading it. The technology can even locate stories that have been cut and pasted in whole or in part. [Why is everyone looking at me?]
benton.org/node/109805 | Huffington Post, The
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BARNES AND NOBLE WOES
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Jeffrey Trachtenberg, Martin Peers]
Barnes & Noble is the latest old-school company to discover how costly it can be to try to reinvent itself for a digital future. The nation's largest bookstore chain warned it would lose twice as much money this fiscal year as it previously expected, and said it is weighing splitting off its growing Nook digital-book business from its aging bookstores. Over the past 15 years, rapid technological change has transformed the company from a dominant retailing force that left smaller booksellers quaking in fear to a struggling giant grasping for a plan to ensure its long-term relevance to the publishing industry. Barnes & Noble realized early on that e-books could appeal to consumers, but allowed Amazon to get an early leg up. Now it is locked in a battle with Amazon and another deep-pocketed rival, Apple, to sell both electronic books and the high-tech devices consumers use to read them. The worry is whether B&N can rely on profits from the traditional books business while it pumps money into Nook, which doesn't appear to be profitable yet.
benton.org/node/109833 | Wall Street Journal | WSJ | NYTimes | FT
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SPECTRUM/WIRELESS

MOBILE BANDWIDTH USE
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Kevin O’Brien]
The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth. Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November. The gap between extreme users and the rest of the population is widening, according to Arieso. In 2009, the top 3 percent of heavy users generated 40 percent of network traffic. Now, Arieso said, these users pump out 70 percent of the traffic. Michael Flanagan, the chief technology officer at Arieso, said the study did not produce a more precise profile of extreme users. But the group, he said, was probably diverse, with a mix of business users gaining access to the Internet over a 3G network while traveling, and individuals with generous or unlimited mobile data packages watching videos, the main cause of the excess traffic.
Apple’s voice recognition software Siri has prompted owners of the iPhone 4S to use almost twice as much data compared with the handset’s predecessor, placing greater pressure on operators, network firm Arieso said. The iPhone 4S’ regular connections with Apple’s servers to synchronize applications including music lists may also contribute to the data load.
benton.org/node/109838 | New York Times | Bloomberg | Financial Times
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VERIZON AND VODAFONE
[SOURCE: Bloomberg, AUTHOR: Jonathan Browning, Cornelius Rahn]
A disposal of Verizon Communications’ fixed-line operations would clear the way for the company to merge its wireless and enterprise units with partner Vodafone Group Plc, analysts at Goldman Sachs Group said. An agreement on a frequency purchase and marketing cooperation that Verizon’s mobile-phone unit reached in December with U.S. cable operators led by Comcast would make separating its divisions easier, the analysts, including Tim Boddy in London, wrote in a research report. Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said in November that the two carriers were moving from a financial partnership to a strategic relationship. The companies will focus on joint purchasing and service agreements for their business customers in the short term, the Goldman Sachs analysts said. “Given that it no longer faces the threat of integrated cable competitors, Verizon could potentially spin off its remaining Consumer Wireline assets,” along with “large” pension and benefit liabilities, the Goldman analysts said.
benton.org/node/109836 | Bloomberg
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VERIZON’S SPECTRUM DEAL
[SOURCE: The Huffington Post, AUTHOR: Joel Kelsey]
[Commentary] Opening up communications markets was the purpose of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The Act was designed to help phone companies get into the pay-TV business, and cable companies get into the phone business. Yet after a series of regulatory blunders, this promise of increased competition and lower prices has become a distant memory. And the situation is only getting worse. Just last month Verizon announced it had signed a $3.6 billion deal with its erstwhile competitors Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. In many ways, this announcement placed a capstone on the grave of the 1996 Telecom Act's biggest promise to America: genuine competition in communications service offerings. The telco-cable deal comes in two parts. The first lets Verizon buy wireless spectrum -- the public airwaves over which iPads, cellphones and radios receive data -- that these three cable companies teamed up to purchase from the Federal Communications Commission in 2006. The second part of the deal maps out terms by which the companies agree to stay out of each other's way. While the terms of these agreements remain undisclosed, it's been widely reported that the deal is an accord for the companies to sell one another's services to common customers in their (sometimes overlapping) service territories. This means Comcast subscribers hoping to see lower prices as a result of Verizon FiOS competition shouldn't hold their breath. It means smartphone owners who wanted more companies to enter the mobile data marketplace got coal for Christmas. It means the future where consumers are empowered to choose the pay-TV channels they want, and not the 500-plus channel bundles they are coerced into buying, could be strangled in its crib. Ultimately, it means the quality of U.S. communications networks will continue to trail that of other developed nations as less competition leads to less incentive to invest in infrastructure. What's more, this deal directly contradicts the promise Congress made to the country when it passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
benton.org/node/109773 | Huffington Post, The
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AT&T HAS NO REGRETS
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Paul Taylor]
AT&T, the US telecommunications group that walked away from its $39 billion bid for T-Mobile USA last month, had “no regrets” about pursuing the deal, said John Stankey, chief executive of AT&T’s business solutions unit. Stankey is the first senior AT&T executive to speak about the failed bid since it was abandoned in the face of strong opposition from regulators. AT&T had promised that if the T-Mobile USA deal was approved it would extend the planned rollout of its LTE network to cover 95 per cent of the US population over the next few years. Stankey did not state whether AT&T had withdrawn that commitment but he did say the company was pushing ahead with plans to improve customer service despite the failure of the T-Mobile deal. He warned, however, that the deal’s failure “is going to be unfortunate for the industry and consumers in the longer term” and expressed frustration that the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission had opposed the deal. “We gave it our best shot but it became apparent to us that there were two agencies that would not be supportive of the deal in any form.”
benton.org/node/109834 | Financial Times
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TEXTING REVENUE AT RISK
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Sinead Carew]
Text-messaging has long been a big-time profit generator for U.S. mobile operators, but they now risk losing these profits as consumers find cheaper ways to communicate. SMS -- short message service -- is no longer all the rage, but it still generates an estimated 12 percent of service revenue for U.S. operators. Now, with many consumers turning to low-cost alternatives like iMessenger, BlackBerry Messenger and Facebook's mobile messaging service, operators like Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint Nextel risk losing a steady, superbly profitable source of income. Customers using the new crop of messaging services must still pay for mobile Internet access, but the cost per message is much smaller than a monthly SMS service plan or per text charges, particularly as U.S. carriers charge both the recipient and sender. U.S. operators still carry a lot of text messages on their networks, but they are seeing warning signs ahead.
benton.org/node/109811 | Reuters
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TELEVISION/RADIO

FCC STUDY AND REPORT TO CONGRESS REGARDING ECONOMIC IMPACT OF LPFM STATIONS ON FULL-SERVICE COMMERCIAL FM STATIONS
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: Public Notice]
The Federal Communications Commission’s Media Bureau has sent Congress an economic study assessing the impact that low-power FM (LPFM) radio stations will have on full-service commercial FM stations. The Bureau finds, on the whole, LPFM stations do not currently have, and in the future are unlikely to have, a demonstrable economic impact on full-service commercial FM radio stations.
benton.org/node/109765 | Federal Communications Commission
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MEDIA OWNERSHIP NPRM
[SOURCE: CommLawBlog, AUTHOR: Dan Kirkpatrick]
Three days before Christmas, the Federal Communications Commission delivered a little present for broadcasters: a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) proposing changes to its media ownership rules. The NPRM followed up on a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) issued 18 months ago. While some might be thrilled with this gift, for most it’s probably more like a lump of coal. The FCC proposes to:
retain, for the most part, the existing media ownership rules, including the local radio ownership rules, the dual network rule, and the local television ownership rule (with minor modification);
toss the existing blanket ban on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership (NBCO), replacing it with a modified version that would allow some cross-ownership in the largest markets; and
repeal the radio/television cross-ownership rule entirely.
In ominous news for some broadcasters, the FCC requests comment on whether it should treat shared services and news sharing agreements as attributable interests, although it stops short of proposing rules to that effect. This is an extraordinarily wide-ranging proceeding. While the Commission’s particular proposals appear to involve little if any substantial change from the status quo, let’s not forget the extraordinary litany of questions on which the Commission has sought comments. Having at least posed those questions in the NPRM, the Commission could follow up with comprehensive and dramatic rule changes veering far afield of the seemingly benign “proposals” described in the NPRM. Attention should be paid.
benton.org/node/109767 | CommLawBlog
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EDUCATION

ONLINE STUDENTS LAG
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Jenny Anderson]
The number of students in virtual schools run by educational management organizations rose sharply last year, according to a new report, and far fewer of them are proving proficient on standardized tests compared with their peers in other privately managed charter schools and in traditional public schools. About 116,000 students were educated in 93 virtual schools — those where instruction is entirely or mainly provided over the Internet — run by private management companies in the 2010-11 school year, up 43 percent from the previous year, according to the report being published by the National Education Policy Center, a research center at the University of Colorado. About 27 percent of these schools achieved “adequate yearly progress,” the key federal standard set forth under the No Child Left Behind act to measure academic progress. By comparison, nearly 52 percent of all privately managed brick-and-mortar schools reached that goal, a figure comparable to all public schools nationally. “There’s a pretty large gap between virtual and brick-and-mortar,” said Gary Miron, a professor of evaluation, measurement and research at Western Michigan University and a co-author of the study.
benton.org/node/109824 | New York Times
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POLICYMAKERS

FCC STAFF CHANGES
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: Press release]
Federal Communications Commission Julius Genachowski announced today the appointment of Zachary Katz as Chief of Staff, as well as other senior staff changes. Katz will succeed Eddie Lazarus when he departs at the end of January.
Over the past three years, Katz has led a number of high-priority initiatives at the Commission, including the creation of the Connect America Fund, which brought sweeping reforms to the Universal Service Fund and Intercarrier Compensation programs. Katz has worked with technology companies at a strategy consulting and investment firm in Silicon Valley; developed an expertise on intellectual property, technology and media issues at a leading Los Angeles law firm; and worked in the White House.
In addition, Chairman Genachowski announced new roles and responsibilities for senior staff and named a new legal advisor:
Sherrese Smith, currently Senior Counsel and Legal Advisor, will become Chief Counsel and Senior Legal Advisor. In this role, Ms. Smith will manage the Commission’s overall policy agenda, and will be responsible for policy coordination among the Bureaus and Offices. The new role builds on her broad experience leading major policy initiatives for the Commission, including her role driving the process that resulted in historic new policies under which wireless companies will provide voice, text and data usage alerts for over 97 percent of U.S mobile phone consumers.
Josh Gottheimer will expand his responsibilities as Senior Counselor to the Chairman to focus on directing a new team at the Commission on public-private initiatives. This new role builds on Gottheimer’s leadership in the creation of several recent public-private partnerships, including Connect to Compete, a first-of-its-kind broadband adoption initiative with national digital literacy and low-cost broadband offerings; the FCC’s cybersecurity small business initiative, between government experts and private IT and security companies; a partnership with mobile carriers on the Personal Localized Alerting Network (PLAN), a new public safety emergency alerting system; and Jobs4America, an initiative that will bring more than 100,000 new and repatriated call center jobs to the U.S. over the next two years. Upcoming initiatives will harness the power of broadband to advance key national priorities such as jobs, health care, energy, public safety, and education.
Amy Levine, currently Special Counsel and Legal Advisor, will become Senior Counsel and Legal Advisor. Ms. Levine will continue to have particular responsibility for the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, and Office of Engineering and Technology. Her work includes supervising the agency’s spectrum auction policy and providing technical advice to Congress; managing wireless transaction reviews, including the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile and AT&T/Qualcomm transactions; and promoting the creation of a nationwide, interoperable public safety broadband network and deployment of E911 and NG911 technologies.
Michael Steffen will join the Chairman’s office as Legal Advisor to the Chairman with particular responsibility for wireline, international, and Internet issues, including universal service, open Internet, and satellite matters. Mr. Steffen currently serves as Special Counsel in the Office of General Counsel, where he has helped coordinate the Commission’s Universal Service Fund and Intercarrier Compensation reforms and other priority projects.
benton.org/node/109788 | Federal Communications Commission
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