April 2012

“[W]e’re finally on the cusp of becoming what I like to call a cash-generating machine.”
- Jerry Kent, Suddenlink

BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for THURSDAY, APRIL 19, 2012

SPECTRUM/WIRELESS
   Verizon offers to sell some airwaves in exchange for approval to buy others
   How Verizon might kill any hope for LTE interoperability - analysis
   FCC official provides more details on possible broadcasting participants
   FCC ‘Unlikely’ to release Repacking Data [links to web]
   FCC’s McDowell: Auctions Will Likely Yield Less Spectrum Than Estimated
   Either AT&T or Verizon Has the Faster LTE Network, Depending on Which of Two New Studies You Believe
   Google Seeks Billions by Boosting Mobile Internet Speeds
   Industry tells House panel private sector will be key in fixing spectrum crunch
   Markey calls for hearing on Google Wi-Fi snooping [links to web]
   At US Patent Office, Mobile Makes Up Nearly Quarter of Those Granted [links to web]
   Stuck With a $10,000 Phone Bill [links to web]
   Verizon Aims New Data Package at Global Travelers [links to web]

OWNERSHIP
   Larry Page evasive with Oracle's lawyer, but admits Google never obtained Java license
   Broadcasters Demand Barry Diller Explain $20.5 Million Aereo Investment
   Sony wins antitrust approval for EMI deal

CONTENT
   The DOJ's Publishing Lawsuit May Doom Digital Rights Management
   Apple wants trial on e-book price-fixing: lawyer
   Content’s kingdom a worry for cable
   Facebook, Google Must Adapt as Users Embrace 'Unsocial' Networks - analysis
   Senate Commerce panel to examine how Netflix, Hulu are changing TV [links to web]
   The future of Netflix isn’t just streaming — it’s original programming [links to web]
   Online Advertising Hits $31.7 Billion In 2011 [links to web]
   NBC’s London Olympics strategy: If it moves, stream it [links to web]
   A Startup Repackages the News for a Facebook Generation [links to web]
   The future of KCET

INTERNET/BROADBAND
   Report: High Speed Broadband Provides Key Returns for Small Biz
   Sergey Brin: I Didn’t Actually Conflate Government Censorship With Apple and Facebook [links to web]
   Colorado launches $130 million broadband project [links to web]
   California State Senate panel backs bill to deregulate Internet phone service [links to web]
   Who Are the Gigabit Internet Subscribers? Study Released by FTTH Council Explores Existing Gigabit to the Home - press release [links to web]

CYBERSECURITY
   Tech firms face netroots uprising
   Cybersecurity Markup Sparks Democratic Dissent
   House GOP leaders rebuff White House push on cybersecurity [links to web]

DIVERSITY
   NAB: Localism Still Key to Success for Stations and Women in TV [links to web]

ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
   Romney says ‘vast left-wing conspiracy’ in media is attacking him
   FCC’s McDowell Offers Hope on Political Ad Files
   Ron Paul still buying ad time in Rhode Island [links to web]

COMPANY NEWS
   Google Opens Up About Its Network
   Amazon, seeking to relieve partner angst, launches partner program [links to web]
   Goldman Sachs: This Is the Beginning of a Big Year for Apple [links to web]
   Facebook's Telescope on Human Behavior
   Why Facebook Could Beat Google - analysis [links to web]
   Menlo Park council unanimously approves deal for Facebook expansion [links to web]

STORIES FROM ABROAD
   Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook
   Tim Berners-Lee urges UK government to stop the snooping bill
   Sony wins antitrust approval for EMI deal
   British Prosecutors Consider Charges in Phone Hacking Case

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SPECTRUM/WIRELESS

VERIZON OFFERS TO SELL SPECTRUM
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Cecilia Kang]
Verizon Wireless offered to sell some unused airwaves in exchange for federal approval of its purchase of other airwaves from cable companies. Verizon said it would sell some spectrum licenses in the 700 megahertz band that it bought at a federal auction in 2008 during which the Federal Communications Commission placed "open access" requirements on the spectrum. (The requirements were added to auction terms at the behest of Google.) The sale is meant to appease regulators who are reviewing whether Verizon will have too much dominance in the wireless industry if it were also to buy AWS airwaves from SpectrumCo, a consortium of cable giants including Comcast and Time Warner Cable. The airwaves Verizon said it would sell, in the A and B portion of the 700MHz band, are not being used for its deployment of LTE 4G services. The A and B block licenses cover dozens of major cities and “a number of smaller and rural markets.” Verizon Wireless didn’t immediately say whether the A and B block licenses it owns cover fewer areas than the AWS licenses it wants to buy from cable firms.
Public interest groups reacted negatively to Verizon's announcement for varying reasons. Public Knowledge legal director Harold Feld said in a statement that "there is less than meets the eye" to the announcement, since even if the proposed sale takes place, there will still be a "cartel" extant in which Verizon will still "rule the air for wireless broadband" and cable will remain the only option for landline service. Feld accused Verizon of using "the mere offer" of a sale to entice regulators into approving the deal. But even when spectrum changes hands, Feld said, history shows that AT&T buys Verizon's spectrum and visa-versa, giving consumers no new options. Even if AT&T were barred from bidding, Feld said any other entrant would only "marginally" increase capacity.
"[T]he gap between the biggest companies and the rest of the industry would grow and the competitive world would shrink even more. Consumers would again be the losers,” Feld said.
Free Press research director Derek Turner said the announcement shows previous statements by Verizon that it wasn't hoarding capacity to be untrue. The announcement "demonstrates that Verizon has in fact warehoused spectrum," Turner said.
benton.org/node/120230 | Washington Post | The Hill | Multichannel News | LATimes | AP | National Journal
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SAY GOODBYE TO LTE INTEROPERABILITY
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Kevin Fitchard]
[Commentary] The technology wars were supposed to be over. The global adoption of LTE as a common 4G technology was going to heal the rift between the CDMA and GSM camps and give U.S. consumers more freedom to switch between carriers, as well as the ability to choose from set of common devices that could work on any network. Well forget it: Verizon’s planned sale of its extra LTE spectrum pretty much quashes that dream. Instead of coalescing around mutually exclusive technologies, U.S. carriers are now coalescing around mutually exclusive spectrum bands; but the result is the same. A Verizon LTE phone won’t work on an AT&T LTE network, and vice versa. This was always going to be a problem, but Verizon’s proposed fire sale of 700 MHz licenses would essentially codify that rift. If Verizon dumps all of its lower 700 MHz spectrum, it won’t share a single similar license with any of the country’s other operators, effectively creating its own private band within the 700 MHz airwaves. That means device makers like Apple will have to design phones that work on Verizon’s network and no one else’s. That means dozens of carriers who own spectral real estate in the same band won’t be able to roam onto Verizon’s network. LTE was supposed to change everything, but the industry remains as Balkanized as it always was.
benton.org/node/120308 | GigaOm
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LAKE ON SPECTRUM AUCTIONS
[SOURCE: National Journal, AUTHOR: Juliana Gruenwald]
Federal Communications Commission Media Bureau Chief William Lake gave a few more details on which broadcasters may participate in incentive auctions to make more spectrum available for wireless use, saying some stations have inquired about possibly sharing channels. Lake and media analyst Mark Fratrik, vice president of BIA Kelsey, also said that some investors have been buying up broadcast stations in recent years with the intent of offering their spectrum for auction as part of the proposal authorized by Congress in February. Under the process, broadcasters that choose to participate will offer a bid for what it will take for them to give up all their spectrum and get out of the business, give up of their spectrum and share a channel with another broadcaster, or trade their UHF channel spectrum for a lower-quality VHF channel. "There are purchases of television stations in the most recent few years ...in anticipation of the auctions," Fratrik said at the National Association of Broadcasters annual show. "We've seen prices of television stations that were sold only two or three years earlier go up by several hundred percent in large markets...These tend to be independent stations that are obviously players on the reverse auctions. So I think you're having an impact already, and it's a positive one." But he added that there's still much uncertainty and concern among broadcasters about the "rules of the road" and how the repacking process will work, which will involve moving broadcast stations that plan to stay in business in order to create a chunk of spectrum that can be auctioned for wireless providers.
benton.org/node/120279 | National Journal
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MCDOWELL ON SPECTRUM AUCTIONS
[SOURCE: National Journal, AUTHOR: Juliana Gruenwald]
Federal Communications Commission member Robert McDowell says he doesn't think that incentive auctions will yield much spectrum for wireless broadband providers. "I'm less optimistic than the [FCC's] National Broadband Plan, which talked about 120 megahertz. It ended up they forgot about Canada and Mexico. Oops," Commissioner McDowell said during a panel discussion with fellow FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn at the National Association of Broadcasters annual show. "So they pared that to 80 megahertz. But I ask 80 megahertz where?" He added that it will be difficult to reach even 80 megahertz given that each television broadcaster only has 6 megahertz to give up. "Broadcaster by broadcaster, that's got to be a lot of broadcasters leaving the market," Commissioner McDowell said. The problem is compounded by the Canada-Mexico issue Commissioner McDowell jokingly referred to that relates to language included in the spectrum legislation, which authorized the incentive auctions. Broadcasters and some lawmakers voiced concern that some U.S. viewers, particularly in bigger areas along the Mexican and Canadian borders like Detroit, could lose access to over the-air television following the "repacking process" to free up a swath of spectrum to auction. In response, Congress included language in the spectrum legislation that requires the United States to negotiate with Canada and Mexico before they can reclaim spectrum affecting those areas. Given the difficulty of such a process, the language could take a significant chunk of spectrum off the table, some broadcasters say.
benton.org/node/120280 | National Journal
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WHO HAS FASTEST NETWORK?
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Ina Fried]
With the battle over LTE now heating up, both Verizon and AT&T are eager to tout the benefits of their networks. And, depending on which of two studies you believe, both can lay claim to having the fastest network. AT&T is pushing a PCWorld study that found its network to be the faster of the two. “In our tests, AT&T’s new LTE network pumped out the fastest speeds of any 4G provider,” PCWorld senior editor Mark Sullivan said in a statement. Verizon, meanwhile, calls attention to a RootMetrics study that finds that it has the better-performing of the LTE networks.
benton.org/node/120291 | Wall Street Journal | Washington Post
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GOOGLE WANTS TO BOOST WIRELESS SPEEDS
[SOURCE: Bloomberg, AUTHOR: Olga Kharif]
Like many users of mobile devices, Arvind Jain is annoyed by how long it takes Web pages to load over cellular connections. The Google engineering director is continually monitoring Internet-access rates -- from hotels, offices and airport lounges around the world -- looking for ways to speed things up. Jain’s mission: get websites to load over mobile- phone networks twice as quickly as they do now. Today’s times are typically 9.2 seconds in the US. The goal is part of a companywide initiative for Google, the world’s biggest search-engine provider, which aims to use faster mobile Internet access to unlock billions of dollars in additional e-commerce and online advertising. When people are waiting for pages to load, they aren’t shopping or viewing ads. That’s hampering everyone from giant Internet companies to local businesses trying to reach customers. “There’s a clear correlation between speed and the success of your online business,” Jain said. What makes a mobile Web connection slow? In some cases, it’s the carriers’ network -- say, if users can’t get 3G or 4G service on their phones. Often, though, it’s because the Web page wasn’t designed to load quickly on a wireless device. The site may have high-resolution pictures or data-intensive effects. Beyond that, Internet protocols and software aren’t always optimized for mobile connections, which can lose some of the data they transmit.
benton.org/node/120311 | Bloomberg
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SPECTRUM CRUNCH HEARING
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Andrew Feinberg]
Experts and industry advocates told members of a House Science, Space and Technology subpanel that new technology allowing scarce radio spectrum to be shared won't be enough to meet demand. CTIA Vice President Christopher Guttman-McCabe said such technologies are neither feasible nor desirable at this time, when available spectrum must support increasingly complex mobile devices — which Americans depend on more and more. While the recently announced National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NIST) plan to release some government-held spectrum is a good start, he said, more spectrum must be cleared and released to the consumer market if a spectrum crisis is to be prevented. "Without exclusive licenses [for the private sector]," he said, "it is doubtful that the massive investment … in [wireless services]" would have happened. Cisco spectrum policy director Mary Brown agreed, saying "there is no end in sight" to the exponential growth in consumer wireless device usage.
Ranking member Donna Edwards (D-MD) asked what government and the private sector could do while reallocating spectrum to "step up research and development" of spectrum-sharing technology that would meet future needs. Richard Bennett, an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation senior research fellow, suggested redesigning applications to use commercial networking technologies. "One of the things that it's important to realize is there's no downside" to acting on the assumption that the spectrum crunch is real. Subramanian added that we've "started too late" and that as a result, there isn't much spectrum to repurpose. Offloading traffic to landlines or Wi-Fi can only do so much, he said.
benton.org/node/120307 | Hill, The
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OWNERSHIP

EVASIVE PAGE
[SOURCE: San Jose Mercury News, AUTHOR: Brandon Bailey]
Google CEO Larry Page completed his testimony in federal court after an hour of laborious grilling by an attorney for tech rival Oracle, in the high stakes lawsuit claiming that Google misused Oracle's Java technology to build the popular Android mobile software. Under repeated questioning, Page eventually acknowledged that Google never obtained a license for using Java, but he added that Google ultimately felt it didn't need one, because, he said, Google only used elements of the Java programming language that are freely available in the public domain. "When we weren't able to reach terms on a partnership, we went down our own path," he testified. That is a key theme of Google's defense in the case, while Oracle is seeking nearly $1 billion in damages for what it says are violations of Java copyrights and patents that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems, which created Java. Throughout his testimony, however, Page repeatedly balked at giving direct answers to a number of questions posed by Oracle attorney David Boies. US District Judge William Alsup interrupted several times to order Page to answer simply "Yes or no."
benton.org/node/120296 | San Jose Mercury News | Dow Jones | LATimes | AP
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BROADCASTERS VS DILLER, AEREO
[SOURCE: Wired, AUTHOR: David Kravets]
Television networks seeking to dismantle a startup that delivers over-the-air broadcasts via the internet want to know what the hell Barry Diller, the chairman of the IAC/InterActiveCorp media empire, was thinking when his company invested $20.5 million in to a legally questionable startup called Aereo. So much so, they dropped a subpoena on Diller to that effect. The demands are part of a lawsuit brought by ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS and others that want a federal judge to shutter Aereo, which opened for business last month and delivers unlicensed internet streams of the broadcasters’ shows for a monthly fee. The legal maneuver is reminiscent of the Napster trial, in which the recording industry targeted the formerly renegade music-sharing service’s deep-pocketed investors — eventually securing about $200 million in damages from the likes of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Attorneys for Diller and other investors are crying foul, saying the broadcasters’ subpoenas are “patently overbroad” because they seek “confidential investment decisions and analyses that are extremely sensitive and should not be produced to any of the parties in the litigation.”
benton.org/node/120267 | Wired
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CONTENT

DOJ AND DRM
[SOURCE: Bloomberg, AUTHOR: Brad Stone, Felix Gillette]
In the days following the announcement of the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against publishers accused of colluding with Apple to raise e-book prices, much of the U.S. publishing industry decamped to the U.K. for the annual London Book Fair. Not surprisingly, the suit was a major topic of conversation at cocktail parties and booths across the Earls Court Exhibition Centre—in particular speculation about whether the DOJ suit might finally push big publishers to consider easing their requirements for digital rights management (DRM), the controls that keep e-book readers from being able to pass a copy of a title on to a friend. Publishing-industry futurists -- individuals typically far removed from the real-world calculations being crunched in publishers’ accounting departments -- have long argued that the DRM requirements prevent small e-book retailers from entering the market and competing with the giant e-book distributors (read Amazon) and, in general, inhibiting e-book innovation. In London this year, says Lorraine Shanley of publishing consultancy Market Partners International, more mainstream publishing executives are talking seriously about ending DRM restrictions. “It would allow individual publishers much more flexibility with their own content and in making it available directly to consumers,” says Shanley. “And it would allow consumers to access content without getting locked into one device -- e.g. the Kindle.” Some analysts say that’s wishful thinking.
benton.org/node/120276 | Bloomberg
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APPLE WANTS DAY IN COURT
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Grant McCool]
Apple wants to go to trial to defend itself against U.S. government allegations that it conspired with publishers to raise prices of electronic books, a lawyer for the company said in court. Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, and Pearson Plc's Penguin Group took a similar stance in the first hearing in Manhattan federal court since the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice last week accused Apple and five publishers of colluding to break up Amazon's low-cost dominance of the digital book market. The judge scheduled the next hearing for June 22. The court also heard that 15 U.S. states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico were in settlement talks with the three publishers. If all 50 states were ultimately to settle, it would have an impact on a separate class action brought by consumers, a HarperCollins lawyer, Shepard Goldfein, told the judge.
benton.org/node/120306 | Reuters | paidContent.org
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CONTENT AND CABLE
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson]
Content is king, but America’s distributors still look pretty regal. Geography and lobbying have conspired to allow effective local cable monopolies across much of the country, guaranteeing profit margins and cash flow that other countries’ pay-television companies envy. The US cable and satellite sector is up 20 per cent so far this year, after an S&P-beating 10 per cent gain last year. Comcast, the country’s largest cable provider, is also its largest media group, outstripping Walt Disney, News Corp and Time Warner in market value. “I’ve not detected this kind of optimism from cable distributors for years,” says Jerry Kent, a co-founder of Charter Communications (the fourth-largest US cable company) who now runs Suddenlink (the number seven, with revenues of $1.9 billion and 1.4 million customers). As a $350 million network upgrade reaches its end, “we’re finally on the cusp of becoming what I like to call a cash-generating machine,” he says. “Our cash flow is going to be tremendous.” But Kent has one concern that media investors should pay attention to. “The single issue I worry most about,” he says, is the rising cost of content. The growth story at companies from Discovery to News Corp has been underpinned by their seemingly unthreatened ability to charge ever greater prices for their programming.
benton.org/node/120312 | Financial Times
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UNSOCIAL NETWORKS
[SOURCE: Bloomberg, AUTHOR: Ben Kunz]
When Facebook bought the photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion, theories flew as to what it might mean. Was Mark Zuckerberg defensive, worried that his 850 million Facebook users might stop uploading 250 million photos a day? Or was he making a proactive move into mobile, where Instagram’s friendly interface makes Facebook look clunky on iPhones? The real story is both -- and one of splintering social networks that are breaking up the vast, open “social graphs” that give Facebook and others such power. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram is a signal that smaller, closed networks are growing popular by giving audiences more control over what they share. The networking giants, such as Facebook and Google, will have to allow consumers new ways to build tighter social circles. And marketers will face new challenges in “going viral” among the masses.
benton.org/node/120310 | Bloomberg
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FUTURE OF KCET
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: James Rainey]
KCET-TV pushes into its second year of independence from PBS with a new headquarters, a new slogan and new pledges about the thoughtful and provocative shows it will produce about Southern California. "Where the story really gets good," the fresh tag line declares. Management hopes it also applies to KCET's attempts to go it alone as one of the nation's handful of independent public television stations. Chief Executive Al Jerome said in a recent interview that KCET was making "really good progress" in its three-year plan to create a winning destination without public TV name brands such as "Sesame Street," "NewsHour" and the hit "Downton Abbey." Where Jerome and his top staff see steady progress, though, critics inside and outside the station see a sluggish old media franchise that is spending lavishly on its new studio in Burbank (fully occupied as of this week), burdened with a top-heavy management and slow to launch new shows to replace the familiar old ones. KCET's biggest in-house production, the award-winning "SoCal Connected" news magazine, went on hiatus this spring earlier than in some past years, due to a paucity of funding.
benton.org/node/120303 | Los Angeles Times
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INTERNET/BROADBAND

BROADBAND AND BUSINESS
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Groups looking to free up more spectrum for broadband released a report saying a small business start-up could save over $16,000 by using high-speed broadband. Saying broadband was an entrepreneurship booster the Internet Innovation Alliance (AT&T and fiber supplier Corning are members) and the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council broke out the savings. The report estimated the cost of high-speed at $490. The report put the total savings ($16,550.52) at about 33.37% of the total start-up cost. They include on printing services, Web and logo design, office space vs. working out of the home, travel costs and newspaper subscriptions. The report said broadband would reduce start-up costs, thus lowering barriers to entry and freeing up more money for revenue-generation and preserving capital for future investment.
benton.org/node/120283 | Broadcasting&Cable
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CYBERSECURITY

NETROOTS TURN ON TECH COMPANIES
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Jennifer Martinez, Elizabeth Wasserman]
In the wake of SOPA, everyone hailed the new power of the tech lobby to rile up the online masses and stop Congress in its tracks. But now, the netroots are turning on tech companies. Facebook, IBM and other firms — along with lawmakers — have been targeted this week in attacks on Twitter and Facebook, via email and online petitions and threatened by hackers for backing a cybersecurity bill that opponents claim would facilitate spying on Web users. Tweets are one thing, but Anonymous used support of the controversial bill last week as an excuse to disable the websites of trade groups TechAmerica and USTelecom. “Cyberbullying,” one tech company insider dubbed it. “Knowing you could be hacked or have your Facebook swamped with complaints makes it harder to express any opinion in the policy process, whether you’re conservative or liberal,” the company insider said. “It’s hard to even tell if the protesting emails and petitions are legitimate or manufactured.” The virtual masses already have a litany of crossed-out names on their hit list: SOPA, the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Now, companies that have weighed in on the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act are being attacked on social media by savvy cyberactivists who have figured out that they can have more sway over Washington with smartphones and catchy hashtag phrases than with high-priced lobbyists. Worse yet, the hacker collective Anonymous last week lent some freelance muscle, unleashing denial-of-service attacks on the websites of Boeing, TechAmerica and USTelecom in response to their CISPA support. More attacks have been threatened.
benton.org/node/120309 | Politico
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CYBERSECURITY HEARING
[SOURCE: National Journal, AUTHOR: Josh Smith]
House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-NY) had a small mutiny on his hands during a markup of cybersecurity legislation. Despite a noticeable absence of most of the Republicans on the committee, Chairman King repeatedly ruled that Democratic amendments failed on voice vote. That sparked derision from the minority, who were unimpressed with King's protests that he was following long-standing precedent. "It can appear to be done in an arbitrary way, but we try to run the committee in a congenial way," Chairman King said. Democrats responded by calling for votes by division, only to have Republicans ask for recorded votes, which the committee delayed until more members of the committee were present. Later in the hearing King relented and allowed some Democratic amendments to pass on voice votes.
benton.org/node/120305 | National Journal
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA

ROMNEY VS ‘VAST LEFT-WING CONSPIRACY’
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Jonathan Easley]
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said a “vast left-wing conspiracy” in the media was working with the Obama campaign to coordinate attacks against him. “There will be an effort by the quote vast left-wing conspiracy to work together to put out their message and to attack me,” Romney said in an interview with Breitbart.com. “They're going to do everything they can to divert from the issue people care about, which is a growing economy that creates more jobs and rising incomes. That's what people care about.” The media has been a favorite target of the GOP presidential candidates so far in the primary season, particularly with Newt Gingrich, who on several occasions earlier in the cycle blasted debate moderators for questions he deemed inappropriate. After one such incident, Romney criticized Gingrich for attacking the media.
benton.org/node/120284 | Hill, The
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MCDOWELL ON POLITICAL ADS FILES
[SOURCE: TVNewsCheck, AUTHOR: Harry Jessell]
Federal Communications Commission member Robert McDowell stopped just short of formally endorsing the broadcaster-backed alternative to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s plan to require TV stations to post their entire political advertising files online. Speaking at a NAB Show panel with fellow FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, he said he would prefer that stations “aggregate” the spending of individual candidates and PACs and report that on a weekly or daily basis rather than requiring them to put the rates of all political buys on the Web — a proposal that broadcasters have been vigorously opposing and that is set for an April 27 FCC vote. “Isn’t it more valuable to know that x campaign or x super PAC is spending $25,000 on that station?” McDowell’s proposal sounds a lot like the alternative proposed by the Television Operators Caucus, a coalition of leading broadcasters. It too would require stations to post regular summaries of spending by candidates and PACs. After the panel, Commissioner McDowell said he wouldn’t go so far as to say he was endorsing the specific TOC plan. “But if it’s in the same spirit, it’s in the same spirit.”
benton.org/node/120281 | TVNewsCheck
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COMPANY NEWS

GOOGLE’S NETWORK
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Quentin Hardy]
Unusually, Google is putting its mouth where its money is. Company representatives appeared at a computer networking conference in Santa Clara (CA) to discuss some of Google’s data center network workings. It has disclosed that its data centers have moved over to an advanced system dominated by software, instead of traditional hardware of custom switches and routers. The industry calls it a software defined network or SDN. Google has been famously close-mouthed about how it runs its internal systems because it considers every engineering innovation as potentially strategic. Google is going public with this work, according to a senior engineer, to accelerate change throughout the Internet. “Lots of people talk about the importance of software virtualization in the data center servers. We thought it is just as big a deal in the wide-area network,” said Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure at Google, and one of its first 10 employees. “It’s not competitive for us, and it will help the Internet grow faster. That’s good for us.” The participation does not exactly signify a sea change in Google’s approach. While Google has contributed some bug fixes to associated open source projects, Hölzle said Google would not be donating its networking software to any open source project. “It is very specialized,” he said.
benton.org/node/120292 | New York Times | Wired
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FACEBOOK’S TELESCOPE
[SOURCE: Technology Review, AUTHOR: Tom Simonite]
A Q&A with Facebook Data Team Leader Cameron Marlow. One way to describe Facebook is as the most extensive data set on human social behavior that ever was. Every month more than 845 million people record and share traces of their daily lives, relationships, and online activity through their friend connections, messages, photos, check-ins, and clicks. The richness of that information goes some way to explain why the company is expected to become worth more than $80 billion when it floats on the stock market later this year. One research group inside Facebook, known as the Data Team, is tasked with the challenge of mathematically sifting through that data to look for patterns that explain the how and why of human social interactions. The people who do that, mostly PhDs with research experience in computer and social sciences, look for insights that will help Facebook tune its products, but have also begun to publish their findings in the scientific community. Marlow likens what they do to building a telescope, saying that the techniques they develop will transform scientific understanding of human behavior in the same way that astronomy transformed our understanding of the cosmos. Technology Review's computing editor, Tom Simonite, met with Marlow at Facebook's offices to hear about what the company's data science can uncover.
benton.org/node/120270 | Technology Review
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STORIES FROM ABROAD

DEMAND YOUR DATA
[SOURCE: The Guardian, AUTHOR: Ian Katz]
Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, has urged internet users to demand their personal data from online giants such as Google and Facebook to usher in a new era of highly personalized computer services "with tremendous potential to help humanity." Berners-Lee, the British born MIT professor who invented the web three decades ago, says that while there has been an explosion of public data made available in recent years, individuals have not yet understood the value to them of the personal data held about them by different web companies. In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee said: "My computer has a great understanding of my state of fitness, of the things I'm eating, of the places I'm at. My phone understands from being in my pocket how much exercise I've been getting and how many stairs I've been walking up and so on." Exploiting such data could provide hugely useful services to individuals, he said, but only if their computers had access to personal data held about them by web companies. "One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don't … There are no programs that I can run on my computer which allow me to use all the data in each of the social networking systems that I use plus all the data in my calendar plus in my running map site, plus the data in my little fitness gadget and so on to really provide an excellent support to me."
benton.org/node/120289 | Guardian, The
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STOP SNOOPING BILL
[SOURCE: The Guardian, AUTHOR: Ian Katz]
The UK’s government's controversial plans to allow intelligence agencies to monitor the internet use and digital communications of every person in the UK suffered a fresh blow when the inventor of the world wide web warned that the measures were dangerous and should be dropped. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who serves as an adviser to the government on how to make public data more accessible, says the extension of the state's surveillance powers would be a "destruction of human rights" and would make a huge amount of highly intimate information vulnerable to theft or release by corrupt officials. In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee said: "The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing. "You get to know every detail, you get to know, in a way, more intimate details about their life than any person that they talk to because often people will confide in the internet as they find their way through medical websites … or as an adolescent finds their way through a website about homosexuality, wondering what they are and whether they should talk to people about it."
benton.org/node/120288 | Guardian, The
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SONY GETS EMI OK
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Alex Barker]
A Sony-led consortium will win approval from Brussels for its $2.2 billion purchase of EMI’s music publishing business, giving unexpectedly early antitrust approval to one half of a deal to split the independent British music group. To allay the European Commission’s competition concerns, Sony will sell EMI Music Publishing catalogues generating about €25m in revenues annually from songwriters such as Ozzy Osbourne, Culture Club and Tears for Fears, according to people involved in the negotiations. While Sony was forced to sweeten the original offer it made to the Commission, winning early clearance is an important breakthrough for the consortium that will allow it to avoid a lengthy in-depth investigation.
By contrast, Vivendi’s Universal Music is facing a full Brussels probe – exploring competition concerns in both the CD and digital music markets – into its $1.9 billion bid for EMI’s record labels. The Commission has until early September to rule on the proposed deal.
benton.org/node/120300 | Financial Times
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BRITS MULL CHARGES
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: John Burns]
The wide-ranging police inquiry into phone hacking and other wrongdoing at Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers moved a step closer to possible criminal prosecutions when Scotland Yard sent four files on 11 unidentified people, including 4 journalists and a police officer, to the Crown Prosecution Service. There also appeared to be an intensification of interest in the case of Rebekah Brooks, the former chief of Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper operations, and her husband, Charlie Brooks, an Eton-educated racehorse trainer. Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, told reporters that the two had been made the subject of a separate police inquiry, Operation Sacha, on suspicion of trying to pervert the course of justice. They were arrested last month. Under Britain’s judicial system, criminal charges are drawn up by the Crown Prosecution Service on the basis of evidence gathered by the police. A spokeswoman for the service said that the names of those now being considered for prosecution would not be released, and that the service could not say when it would decide whether to prosecute those involved.
benton.org/node/120299 | New York Times | WSJ
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