February 2012

James Murdoch steps down as News International head

News Corp moved to distance James Murdoch from its scandal-hit British newspapers, announcing he would step down as executive chairman of News International, its UK press business.

For the first time since Rupert Murdoch bought into the UK newspaper market in 1969 no member of his family will have any direct role in the management of News Corp’s UK press assets which include The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun. Two senior British politicians linked the resignation of the media tycoon’s son to the bad publicity surrounding police and judicial inquiries into illegal journalistic techniques. Don Foster, a member of the UK’s governing coalition and spokesman for the Liberal Democrat party on media, said the younger Murdoch’s move “has all the appearances of being bundled in a car, away from the scene of the crime.” He said News Corp had to “make clear that his move to New York will not be a barrier to getting answers and his taking responsibility for what happened on his watch.” News Corp investors have already raised the prospect of selling or hiving off News International in conversations with Chase Carey, Murdoch’s number two, but analysts doubt this will have any demonstrable effect in insulating the group from the bad publicity.

Why U.S. Prosecutors Won’t Be Filing Corruption Charges Against News Corp

[Commentary] What if the scandal involving bribery, phone-hacking and News Corp landed in an American courtroom? It would be a great story. But despite the best efforts of some media outlets to wish the story into existence, it’s not going to happen.

For two weeks, the British newspaper The Guardian (disclosure: until a month ago, we were owned by Guardian News & Media) has been beating the drum about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law that makes it illegal for U.S.-based companies and executives to obtain business by bribing foreign officials. Media pundit Michael Wolff, for instance, yesterday opened a piece by noting the obvious—that the FCPA is not designed for events like the UK hacking scandal. But Wolff nonetheless embarked on a speculative tour de force of how the FCPA could technically apply and how Team Murdoch is rejigging its legal strategy to fight off the Americans. He concludes by egging on the U.S. feds.

Give me a break. Attempting to prosecute part of the UK media establishment would be a bridge too far, even for a Justice Department that has acquired a reputation for over-zealous and politicized FCPA investigations.

Clearwire CEO Sees 4G Opportunities Where Rival LightSquared Stumbled

With rival LightSquared running into interference, Clearwire sees an even bigger opportunity for itself to offer a 4G network to others.

“Our spectrum is clean, it’s contiguous, it’s deep and it doesn’t suffer from interference issues,” CEO Erik Prusch said in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It’s been a rough go for Clearwire, however. In addition to shifting its focus from one wireless technology to another, Clearwire has also cut costs, pared its workforce and outsourced some network operations to Ericsson. And that’s not to mention the turmoil on its board and in its executive ranks.

But Clearwire has something that its rivals are running out of: The wireless spectrum needed to operate their networks.

What You Need to Know About Interactive TV

There's a "You say potato, I say potahto' scenario going on in interactive TV. The term ITV is used to refer to two types of interactivity: one dealing with usage, the other with technology.

Strictly speaking, ITV is an overlay in pay TV that enables an engaging experience. ITV is frequently confused with TV convergence, however -- the marriage of the TV set and the internet. This has become especially bewildering as the market speculates about an Apple TV set, which is expected to be named iTV. What it boils down to is this: Interactive TV is delivered via the pay-TV set-top box and converged TV functionality is delivered via the web through internet-connected TV sets, over-the-top boxes like Roku or gaming consoles, according to Rex Harris, innovation supervisor at SMGx.

ICANN plays the name game with domain names

The group that manages the Internet's domain-name system is facing a real test of confidence. The Commerce Department is weighing whether to renew the contract under which the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers performs technical functions that help make the Web run smoothly.

This contract, under which ICANN runs the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, expires at the end of March. The contract covers such tasks as doling out the pool of Internet protocol numbers connecting computers to the Web. But on a more basic level, the IANA contract is the only concrete leverage the U.S. government still has over ICANN, which it picked in 1998 to take over management of the Internet's domain-name system. "It is the one clear area that the Department of Commerce, without question, has authority in regard to ICANN," said Dan Jaffe, executive vice president of government relations for the Association of National Advertisers.

Colorado Eyeing ‘No Access’ Broadband Map

Colorado residents and businesses frustrated by a lack of broadband connectivity in the state's rural areas may have some hope on the horizon. A bill is circulating in the Colorado General Assembly that would require the state’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and Office of Information Technology (OIT) to identify and map communities that don’t have sufficient build-out of broadband networks. The mapping would have to be done by Jan. 1, 2013. Colorado Senate Bill 12-129, sponsored by Sen. Gail Schwartz (D-Snowmass Village) also would require development of a strategy to increase broadband access to those areas. The work done to uncover communities with limited or no access to high-speed Internet will be done using existing PUC and OIT broadband data and mapping information.

Major update to government-wide cyber manual takes on WikiLeaks

Worried that an employee may be about to take your agency's digital crown jewels to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks? The draft edition of a biennial catalog of federal information security standards advises agencies on how to spot conduct that may signal an employee plans to spill sensitive information to the public. The last time the National Institute of Standards and Technology updated Special Publication (SP) 800-53 in August 2009, no one had heard of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly divulged a mass of classified materials to WikiLeaks.

Cord Cutting Can Wait: Subscription TV Added 343,000 Subs in Q4

With the rise of Netflix, Amazon and other alternatives to subscription TV, there’s been plenty of talk about the death of cable. But based on fourth-quarter data, subscription TV may have more life left in it than people think.

The nation’s top cable, satellite and telco TV service providers grew their customer base sharply in the last quarter of 2011, reversing several years of steep decline. The nation’s top cable, satellite and telco TV service providers collectively added nearly 343,000 new video subscribers in the fourth quarter of last year. It’s a nice little turnaround considering the second quarter of 2011 saw record video customer losses of 195,700 for the top eight publicly traded TV service companies. The growth was driven by telecom-based services AT&T U-Verse and Verizon FiOS, which added 208,000 and 194,000 video customers during the fourth quarter, respectively. Satellite companies DirecTV (up 125,000) and Dish Network (added 22,000) also contributed to this growth.

Google Wins. He's Giving Up On Privacy

That's it. They win. He's giving up on privacy. Trying to maintain privacy in contemporary America is just too time consuming, too complicated, too exhausting.

He can't tell the good guys from the bad guys anymore. He doesn't know whom to trust. There are so many relentless assaults coming at all angles — from closed-circuit cameras to GPS trackers to online cookies to spammers, hackers, malware makers, spyware spinners, identity thieves and countless other assailants — he cannot fight them all anymore. They never sleep. They are always evolving, always pushing, always changing privacy settings and terms of service agreements. Privacy fatigue, they call it. Google is not the first company to wear him out; it's just the latest. On March 1, the omnipotent digital empire is rolling out new privacy rules. New default settings will allow Google to cross-reference a logged-in user's activity among its vast and varied Internet presences, which include the elegant Google search engine, the cool YouTube video repository and the impressive inner workings of Android phones.

Chattanooga Invites Innovators to Play

Citizens in Chattanooga, Tennessee, have access to one-gigabit-per-second Internet—that's 100 times the U.S. national average, and fast enough to download a two-hour movie in about five seconds. The only question is: what to do with it?

The city is hoping a contest with $300,000 in prize money will help answer that question. Entrants are invited to come up with clever ways of making use of the city's blisteringly fast Internet, which was installed in late 2010 with a $111 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, as part of federal stimulus efforts that also built out the city utility's long-planned smart grid. Some early entries include health-care applications, such as transferring larger files like CT scans in real-time so that specialists can serve a larger area. Ideas contributed by students include a platform for high-definition video debates, and international collaborations with students in Sri Lanka, London, Jamaica, and elsewhere.

Benton

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