February 2012

AT&T's Chief Pays for Big Deal's Failure

AT&T's failed $39 billion bid for T-Mobile USA cost the telecommunications giant $4 billion in assets and cash. It also cost Chief Executive Randall Stephenson.

AT&T ‘s board cut Stephenson's combined short- and long-term incentive payout by more than $2 million, due in part to the implosion of the deal. The company walked away from the offer in December amid regulatory resistance. Combined with a reduction in his stock option awards and the value of his pension and deferred compensation, Stephenson's total pay package fell to $22.02 million last year, from $27.34 million a year earlier. The move was the first sign of any internal fallout from the failed deal.

Are Silicon Valley tech bloggers truly objective?

Technology news bloggers' curious habit of accepting investments from the very people they're presumed to be covering objectively blew up last week over what might be termed the Path Affair.

Path, a San Francisco social networking company, got caught downloading users' address books from their iPhones without their permission. After New York Times tech blogger Nick Bilton picked up the story, he and his story became the target of vituperative attacks by tech bloggers Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, who happen to be investors in Path. Their reaction earned them a vituperative counterattack by Newsweek tech columnist Dan Lyons, who identified them as part of Silicon Valley's "cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on." They promptly returned fire at Lyons, in much the same vein. These exchanges spotlighted a cause for real doubt about the credibility of news sites covering the tech business. Many bloggers about technology drape themselves in the mantle of journalistic objectivity. But real journalists don't invest in companies they cover or seek investments in their own enterprises from companies they cover. Arrington and Siegler have done the former, and far too many tech bloggers in Silicon Valley are doing the latter.

TripAdvisor claims Google pushing services harder

Google is getting more aggressive in prioritizing its own services in search results at the expense of independent sites, according to a senior TripAdvisor executive, even since the search engine group has come under closer regulatory scrutiny following allegations of anticompetitive behavior.

“We continue to see them putting Google Places results higher in the search results – higher on the page than other natural search results,” said Adam Medros, TripAdvisor’s vice president for product, referring to Google’s local reviews and listings service which competes with TripAdvisor’s hotel and restaurant reviews site. “What we are constantly vigilant about is that Google treats relevant content fairly.” As well as Places, Google’s competition with TripAdvisor and other travel sites such as Kayak has recently intensified with its launch of a flights search tool, following its $700m acquisition of information and technology company ITA.

Mozilla to challenge big players in mobile web

Mozilla, the Mountain View nonprofit that took on Microsoft's Internet browser dominance nearly a decade ago and won, now wants to play the same transformative role with the mobile Web. Mozilla is expected to announce plans for its own app store, to be called the Mozilla Marketplace, offering mobile apps that could run equally well on an iPhone, an Android phone or a Windows Phone device. Mozilla is also working to develop a smartphone that would not be locked into the "walled gardens" of apps, operating systems and devices that are now controlled by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and a few others.

CIA to software vendors: A revolution is coming

The Central Intelligence Agency told software vendors that it plans to revolutionize the way it does business with them as part of a race to keep up with the blazing pace of technology advances. Rather than stick with traditional all-you-can-eat deals known as "enterprise licensing agreements," the CIA wants to buy software services on a "metered," pay-as-you-go basis, Ira "Gus" Hunt, the agency's top technology officer, told an industry conference. "Think Amazon," he said, referring to the electronic commerce giant where the inventory is vast but the billing is per item. "That model really works." The old way of contracting for proprietary software inhibits flexibility, postponing the CIA's chance to take advantage of emerging capabilities early on, Hunt said. He added that this made it harder to keep up with "big data" at a time that such challenges are growing while federal agencies are tightening their belts for deficit reduction.

Media Groups Unite on Protecting Sources

A broad coalition of media organizations — including The New York Times — urged a federal appeals court to protect an investigative reporter from being forced to testify about his confidential sources, rejecting the Justice Department’s claim that journalists have no such protections in criminal trials.

At issue is whether James Risen, a New York Times reporter, must testify about the sourcing for a chapter in his 2006 book, “State of War,” detailing what it portrays as a botched Central Intelligence Agency effort to sabotage Iranian nuclear research. Prosecutors want him to be a witness in the trial of Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former C.I.A. operative charged with leaking the classified information to him. Last year, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the United States District Court in Alexandria (VA), ruled that Risen was protected by a qualified “reporter’s privilege” that allowed her to balance whether it was necessary to force him to disclose his sources. She contended that Risen’s testimony was not crucial because prosecutors could use other evidence against Sterling. The prosecutorial team, led by William M. Welch II of the Justice Department’s criminal division, has appealed that ruling, arguing that no reporter’s privilege exists in criminal trials. Prosecutors argued that if a reporter witnessed a crime — in this case, the unauthorized disclosure of classified information — then he could be subpoenaed to testify about it just like anyone else.

Ecuador’s Assault on Free Speech

[Commentary] Ecuador’s highest court has delivered a staggering, shameful blow to the country’s democracy, siding with President Rafael Correa’s campaign to silence and bankrupt El Universo, Ecuador’s largest newspaper.

Last week, the court upheld a $42 million criminal libel judgment against Emilio Palacio, El Universo’s editorial page editor, and three of the paper’s directors. The ruling also ratified three-year prison sentences for all of the men. Correa, who is expected to seek re-election next year, vowed more suits would follow. His relentless campaign against free speech also includes harassing his critics and forcing independent broadcasters off the air and has rightly drawn criticism from the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression at the Organization of American States. Correa has also been pushing the O.A.S. to make “reforms” that would silence the special rapporteur. The United States and other democracies need to loudly protest Correa’s assault on a free press and his cynical hijacking of Ecuador’s judicial system.

Arab media make most of citizen journalism

A rise in citizen-generated video during the Arab revolutions created space for mainstream media in these countries to report the uprisings and amplify the protesters’ message, according to an authoritative survey of press freedom.

Citizen journalism gave established and official media outlets “political cover” to address topics long kept under wraps, says the report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent watchdog based in New York. “The convergence of traditional and new media is among the major trends emerging [in the Middle East and north Africa] after the fall of Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali’s Tunisian regime in the opening days of 2011,” the report says. “Had the citizen content not been amplified by traditional media, particularly television, Tunisia’s revolution might have been snuffed out.”

White House Releases Report on the Economic Value of Increasing Spectrum

Vice President Biden met with first responders to thank them for their service and to discuss the new nationwide public safety broadband network included in the Payroll Tax Extension legislation. In addition, he announced the release of a new report from the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), The Economic Benefits of New Spectrum for Wireless Broadband, describing the substantial economic value of aggressively pursuing President Obama’s goal of nearly doubling the amount of spectrum available for wireless broadband over ten years and deploying a nationwide interoperable wireless network for public safety.

The report summarizes the compelling evidence that additional spectrum for wireless broadband is needed to accommodate the surging demand for wireless data traffic, projected to increase by a factor of twenty between 2010 and 2015. The report also describes the potential for wireless broadband to play a transformative role in public safety and as a platform for innovation in many areas of the economy, and documents the substantial impact on jobs, growth, and investment that the growth of wireless broadband will have.

Specifically, the report reaches the following conclusions:

The use of voluntary incentive auctions will ensure that spectrum is reassigned from the lowest value uses to the highest, and that the economic benefits are widely shared among stakeholders, including broadcasters, wireless carriers, consumers, and taxpayers. The recently passed spectrum bill gives the FCC authority to conduct these auctions.
Unlicensed spectrum is a valuable complement to licensed spectrum, and allocating new spectrum for a mix of licensed and unlicensed uses will offer the most fertile environment for future innovation. The spectrum bill gives the FCC authority to allocate more spectrum for unlicensed uses, creating new opportunities for the development of innovative wireless technologies.
Federal funding for research and development in emerging wireless technologies will have substantial public benefits, particularly to support the development of innovative technologies for use in public safety. The bill sets aside $100-300 Million for public safety network R&D, funds that will be vital to helping the public safety community build a new robust, flexible and innovative network for first responders all around the country.

The Internet won the mobile broadband war

Mobile operators might as well give in and work with web companies when it comes to delivering services via mobile broadband. That’s the conclusion of the latest report out from Allot Communications, a company that aims to sell software and gear to companies like Verizon and AT&T.

Allot’s latest mobile traffic report indicates that the big web players such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Skype are still racking up gains, while newcomers offering similar services to operators are also on the rise. Aside from predicting the future for mobile operators, Allot’s data shows how much of our present we spend surfing YouTube on mobile networks. Globally, almost one out of every four packets (24 percent) traversing the mobile network was from YouTube, and it also accounts for 62 percent of all streaming traffic. It appears from the report that the next big worry on the horizon will be HD video streaming traffic. YouTube’s HD-streaming traffic has increased by 300 percent from the first half to the second half of the year. Better and bigger screens are to blame for this boost, according to Allot, but I think faster LTE networks that are rolling out around the country play a role. Faster networks mean we can stream higher-definition content, although we may end up paying for it in overage charges later.

Benton

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