February 2012

Take a close look at your phone bill and you'll find a list of taxes, fees and surcharges going by obscure and slightly mysterious names. Some of these items are government-mandated. Others are devised simply to enrich your provider.

Combined they can add 20% or more to your bill. Here are some of the fees you might see:

1. Federal Universal Service Fee (also known as Universal Connectivity Fee). All telecommunications providers are required to pay into the federal Universal Service Fund, a program that subsidizes telephone services for rural and hard-to-reach areas. Providers are not required to pass this cost onto consumers, but they can if they choose.
2. Interstate subscriber line charge (also known as FCC Charge for Network Access). The Federal Communications Commission allows local phone companies to charge this fee to pay to maintain and operate their wires and networks. The current maximum is $6.50 per month for a single residential line, but companies can choose to charge less or nothing at all.
3. Federal excise tax. In 1898, Congress placed this 3% tax on phone bills "temporarily" to help pay for the Spanish-American War. It was repealed or expired three times over the last century, but each time it was reinstated by Congress. After court challenges, it was eliminated in 2006 on long distance and cellphone service, yet remains on local land-line bills.
4. State-mandated fees. California bills include charges for the Universal Lifeline program, to help provide telephone access to low-income households, and for the California Relay Service, which pays for telecommunication service and equipment for the deaf. You will also see a charge for the California Teleconnect program, which helps provide phone service to schools, libraries, community organizations and government-run hospitals and health clinics.
5. Regulatory Cost Recovery and carrier cost recovery fee. Despite their official-sounding descriptions, these are not taxes or required by the government. The money goes to your phone company. "These are additional charges which are essentially a way to hide rate increases," said Christopher White, chairman of the telecommunication committee with the National Assn. of State Utility Consumer Advocates.

A coalition of media advocacy groups warned that a cybersecurity bill could allow for more government secrecy.

"[The bill would] create unnecessary, overbroad and unwise limitations to access of information, including broad exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and jeopardize the rights of whistleblowers," the groups wrote. "Critical infrastructure information" is already exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows members of the public to request documents from the government. The media groups argued that by expanding the definition of "critical infrastructure information," the cybersecurity bill would exempt more records from public disclosure.

Consumers are looking to on-demand video programming more and more, but the pay-TV operators who generally control those offerings may be facing some disruptive challenges in the near future.

According to The NPD Group, video-on-demand revenues from pay-TV services hit $1.3 billion last year, with 15% of consumers age 13 or older having used the services at least once in the 12-month period between August 2010 and August 2011. All told, there were about 40 million users of video on demand during that 12-month period, according to NPD (formerly National Purchase Diary.) However, a competitive set of Internet video-on-demand options is growing at a healthy clip as well. Revenues from Internet video-on-demand hit $204 million last year, and the channel (which includes offerings from iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and others) hit seven million users by August 2011. According to NPD, one out of every six (16%) paid video-on-demand movie rental transactions were attributed to Internet sources in 2011.

Somewhere buried within the wealth of personal information on Facebook and Twitter is a basic, scientific need to communicate, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) wants to work with that.

At an event concerning the role social media plays in government crisis management co-hosted by Global Health Initiative, Inc. and the National Defense University, a representative from FEMA discussed the behavioral science in social media and how that can be leveraged in disaster response. "People's decisions in crisis are inherently social," said David Kaufman, director of policy and analysis at FEMA. "The average person checks in with 4-5 other people before deciding what to do under mandatory evacuation order. And if you don't believe me, look around the next time you're in a building and the fire alarm goes off."