February 2012

According to a spokesperson for Sen Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), his staffers met with those of Commerce Committee Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) Feb. 27 to discuss the senator's hold on two pending nominations, one of which is Jessica Rosenworcel, a top telecom aide to Chairman Rockefeller. The other is Ajit Pai, a communications attorney and former FCC official and Senate staffer. It is the first meeting about the hold since December, a Grassley staffer confirmed. The Grassley spokesperson called the meeting a "development" rather than "progress," and would not further characterize the meeting beyond saying it was about the Federal Communications Commission nominations, the hold and a possible resolution.

"The FCC said it wouldn't give internal documents about LightSquared to any members of Congress except the chairmen of the two committees that oversee the FCC," said Sen Grassley. "Now one of those two committee chairmen [Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), chair of the House Commerce Committee] "is asking for internal documents. It will be hard for the agency to ignore this request. The House committee that's seeking information from the FCC is fulfilling its oversight responsibilities. As a federal agency, like all government agencies, the FCC should account for its actions. The House request is good news for accountability and transparency."

Patent law is a notoriously dry subject, and it's almost never the subject of debate in presidential campaigns. One patent holder has found an ingenious method for raising the profile of the issue: he sued Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich for patent infringement.

The plaintiff runs Everymd.com, a website that claims, not very plausibly, to be "the easiest way to contact your doctor online." The complaint says that Everymd "provides home pages for over 300,000 member doctors" and "allows patients to obtain information about, send messages to, and submit comments about those doctors." There's no indication of how many of those 300,000 doctors signed up for this "service," or how many patients use it. Still, the site's owner, Frank Weyer, claims to have invented the concept of "providing individual online presences for each of a plurality of members of a group of members." And he believes that 4 million Facebook business account holders, including at least three major presidential candidates, are guilty of infringing his patent.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt is a passionate advocate for the technology industry, and he laid on the charm in an hour-long appearance at Mobile World Congress that was part Chrome commercial, part techno-utopian vision, and part high-brow version of Reddit’s Ask Me Anything. Here’s what he said.

• On the digital divide: “The gap between the top and the bottom will be larger, not smaller, because of the technology I’m describing.” A lot of people think technology will bring the world closer together, but because of the speed at which technology is developed and its cost when first released, those at the top of the food chain will get farther and farther ahead, he said.
• On a mobile future: “Why don’t you just buy a smartphone?” Schmidt’s flip remark to a questioner who wanted to know why Android isn’t on feature phones was designed to make the point that feature phones as we know them will likely go away as smartphones get cheaper. The better question is when smartphones will cost as much as feature phones, and that could happen next year, he said.
• On ITU control of the Internet: “Be very careful about moves which seem logical but have the effect of balkanizing the Internet.” Perhaps Schmidt’s strongest words were saved for a question about the International Telecommunications Union angling for a stronger role in managing and regulating the Internet. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea.

Netflix is usually cast as a cable competitor, but CEO Reed Hastings said he thinks cable will eventually become an on-demand internet platform, and Netflix just another programming provider that cable can use to sell its services.

“It’s not in the short term, but it’s in the natural direction for us in the long term,” said Hastings. “Many (cable service providers) would like to have a competitor to HBO, and they would bid us off of HBO.” Hastings continued to identify HBO’s Go on-demand service—as well as the cable industry’s larger TV Everywhere model—as Netflix’s top competition, and he continued to downplay the emergence of what he called “copycat” competition in the video streaming business from companies like Amazon.