January 2012

Leap, MetroPCS May Be Buyout Targets for AT&T, JPMorgan Says

Leap Wireless and MetroPCS may be takeover targets for bigger rivals AT&T or T-Mobile USA after the larger companies’ $39 billion merger plan collapsed, JPMorgan Chase & Co. said.

The pay-as-you-go carriers could be suitable “near-term” sources of spectrum for a buyer, Phil Cusick, a JPMorgan analyst in New York, said in a note to clients. AT&T cited a need for more spectrum as a reason for its attempt to buy T-Mobile. Leap’s spectrum and certain potential cash-flow benefits following a takeover could be worth more than $13 a share to a buyer, said Cusick. MetroPCS’s airwaves and some potential cash-flow benefits could be worth more than $6 a share, the analyst said. Leap’s spectrum alone is worth $1.9 billion and MetroPCS’s airwaves $2.6 billion, he said. (Dec 29)

FCC Concludes 2010 Review of Telecommunications Regulations

The bureaus and offices conducting the Federal Communications Commission’s 2010 biennial review of telecommunications regulations have completed their reviews. This Public Notice summarizes the bureaus’ and offices’ determinations and recommendations. (Dec 23)

FCC Releases Universal Service Monitoring Report

This is the fifteenth report in a series of reports prepared by federal and state staff members for the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service. This report is based on information available to us as of October 2011.

Section 1 provides an update on industry revenues and the universal service program requirements and contribution factors.
Section 2 includes the latest data on the low-income, high-cost, schools and libraries, and rural health care support mechanisms.
Section 3 includes the most recent Census data on subscribership from the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey. It also includes data on telephone penetration by income by state and a discussion of the impact of Lifeline programs on penetration.
Section 4 includes updated Consumer Price Index data and updated interstate access rate information.
Section 5 includes the latest NECA data on interstate access minutes.

After Slow Start, Republicans Blanket Iowa With Ads

After a slow start, the Republican presidential hopefuls and the political action committees that support them are saturating Iowa TV with mostly negative ads.

Spending on campaign ads has reached nearly $6 million in the run-up to the state's Jan. 2 nominating caucuses. "The race is fully engaged now," said Ken Goldstein, president of Campaign Media Analyst Group, which tracks political advertising spending. In the 2008 campaign cycle, between $37 million and $42 million was spent on political advertising in Iowa. But Goldstein believes the slew of GOP debates and "dramas" such as the harassment allegations against Herman Cain prompted campaigns this year to hold off on advertising in Iowa. The lack of a contest on the Democratic side will also result in less spending in Iowa than four years ago, Goldstein said. While campaigns are spending less, independent groups have ratcheted up their involvement. According to the Federal Election Commission, Restore our Future -- a "super PAC" created to support Mitt Romney -- has bought $2.6 million worth of ads attacking Newt Gingrich. Romney's campaign is spending about $1 million in ad buys in Iowa. But Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) is the biggest spender in Iowa, buying more than $500,000 worth a week in December.

Boycott forces GoDaddy to drop its support for SOPA

Under intense pressure from an Internet-wide boycott, domain registrar GoDaddy has given the open Internet an early Christmas present: it's dropping its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The change was announced in a statement sent to Ars Technica:

Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.
"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation—but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

GoDaddy's embarrassing climbdown took barely 24 hours. The boycott started on reddit (an Ars sister site), but it quickly spread to the broader Internet. GoDaddy's competitors began offering special deals with promo codes like "SopaSucks" to entice GoDaddy switchers. (Dec 24)

Getting to a gigabit. How Sonic.net will take on caps, residents and AT&T in San Francisco

San Francisco is slated to get a gigabit fiber to the home network in the coming five years, with the construction on the network to begin next year if Sonic.net gets the permits it needs to begin the pilot build out. But those permits are far from certain. As AT&T’s battle with the city proves, getting to a gig (or in AT&T’s case about 18 Mbps) takes more than just money — the city’s residents are active protestors of some of the infrastructure a fiber network requires. Higginbotham spent some time talking to Dane Jasper, the CEO of Sonic about how he plans to take on the incumbents, the cost of a fiber build out and the natives of a city that already have sued to stop AT&T from building out fiber to the node broadband. We also touched on caps and why Jasper can’t see himself offering businesses gigabit services in the near future. (Dec 28)

Bloggers Argue over ‘Lie of the Year’

When a Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking site announced its "Lie of the Year" for 2011, it set off a partisan firestorm in the blogosphere triggered by liberal critics of that choice.

According to PolitiFact.com, a non-partisan watchdog organization owned by the Tampa Bay Times, the assertion by many Democrats that "Republicans voted to end Medicare" earned the dubious honor as Lie of the Year. Democrats had claimed the plan that passed the GOP-controlled House would have ended the popular health program for seniors. PolitiFact determined that while the Republican plan would alter Medicare, it would not "end" or "kill" the popular program. Some liberals, notably New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, disagreed, asserting that the GOP plan for private vouchers changed Medicare so much that it would, in fact, end the program. For the week of December 19-23, the debate over the Lie of the Year was the No. 3 subject on blogs, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Most of the links went to a post called "PolitiFact R.I.P." by Krugman who said the so-called lie was actually true, and charged that PolitiFact was terrified of being considered partisan if they were to "acknowledge the clear fact that there's a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than the other." [Dec 26]

New head of NIST's IT lab says cloud, mobile to drive vision

The lab that oversees cybersecurity research and standards at the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a new leader. Chuck Romine took over at the Information Technology Laboratory at NIST about a month ago, after Cita Furlani announced she was retiring. Romine said the "ubiquity of computing devices" is driving his future vision of ITL. "That's going to have such a transformative effect on the IT space that I'm convinced that we really have to tackle that in a very meaningful way at ITL," Romine said in an interview on In Depth with Francis Rose. Cloud interoperability will also be an important area the lab will focus on, he said.

Commercial Spectrum: Plans and Actions to Meet Future Needs, Including Continued Use of Auctions

Since 1994, the Federal Communications Commission has used competitive bidding, or auctions, to assign licenses to commercial entities for their use of spectrum; however, its authority to use auctions expires on September 30, 2012.

Among other things, the Government Accountability Office examined 1) the extent to which FCC has made spectrum available for new commercial uses and the time taken to do so, 2) experts’ and stakeholders’ views on FCC’s plans and recent actions to meet future spectrum needs, and 3) experts’ and stakeholders’ views on the continued use of auctions to assign spectrum. GAO previously reported that auctions were effective in assigning licenses to entities that valued them the most; were quicker, less costly, and more transparent than mechanisms FCC previously used to assign licenses; and were an effective mechanism for the public to realize a portion of the value of a national resource used for commercial purposes. Experts and stakeholders responding to GAO’s survey strongly supported extending FCC’s auction authority—53 of 65 respondents supported extending FCC’s authority. However, experts and stakeholders held varied opinions on potential changes to auctions. For example, respondents generally supported actions that would provide a clear road map detailing future auctions, which could reduce uncertainty. In contrast, a proposal to require winners of auctions to pay royalties based on their revenues rather than the full amount of their winning bids up front garnered the least support. [GAO-12-118, November 23]

The Internet's Perilous New Year's Resolution

Internet legislation that is scheduled for a vote in the U.S. Senate this month would aim to stop the unlicensed downloading of billions of dollars' worth of movies and music—as well as the trade in counterfeit drugs and other goods—by blocking access to certain websites, many of them registered abroad. But its basic strategies could lead to trouble on several fronts.

For one thing, the crackdown may unintentionally weaken Internet security. That is because the legislation could let courts order Internet service providers, search engines, domain-name servers and others to block Web addresses or send people to addresses other than the ones they typed or clicked. That trick, called redirection, is just the kind thing security engineers want to stamp out, because it's also a key tool for committing Internet fraud. For another, song and movie traders will always be able to use widely available circumvention tools—such as Tor, a technology funded and developed by the U.S. government itself—to get around blocks and reach the desired sites. If passed, the legislation may achieve little more than an ineffectual antipiracy law recently enacted in France, which has been bogged down by its complexity and costs. Under the Protect IP Act, government prosecutors or copyright holders could seek a court order finding that a website was "dedicated to infringing activities." With such a finding, a court could order those sites blocked so as to prevent people who click the relevant links or type their domain names into a browser from actually reaching them. (Instead, the user might be redirected to a warning page.) The Senate bill is scheduled for a January 24 vote. [Dec 27]

Benton

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