June 2012

New Online Partnership Aims for Cheaper Political Ads

The issue of mammoth “super PAC” spending on political advertising has already dominated the election cycle. But potential voters may be seeing even more advertising because one company that tailors online advertisements to users — known as microtargeting — wants to lower the overall cost.

On June 18, Aristotle, a company that provides data for online political advertising, and Intermarkets, a digital advertising company that works with sites like Drudge Report and anncoulter.com, will announce an exclusive partnership. Through the deal, advertisers that work with Intermarkets will have access to the data Aristotle collects on users, including party affiliations, voting districts and charitable or political donations.

Royalties From Digital Radio Start to Add Up

After more than a decade, the royalties for Internet radio and other digital music streams are finally starting to add up. On June 18, SoundExchange, a nonprofit group that processes payments for online streams, will announce that it has paid $1 billion to artists and record companies since its founding in 2000, and that this year its quarterly payments exceeded $100 million. The payments reflect the growing popularity of digital music as well as new ways for the record industry to make money as sales continue to fall.

The UN's Internet Power Grab

[Commentary] It's easy to understand why countries like Russia, China and Iran would want to rewire the Internet, cutting off access to their citizens and undermining the idea of a World Wide Web. What's more surprising is that U.S. diplomats are letting authoritarian regimes hijack an obscure U.N. agency to undermine how the Internet works, including for Americans.

Someone leaked the 212-page planning document being used by governments to prepare for the December conference. George Mason University researcher Eli Dourado summarized: "These proposals show that many ITU member states want to use international agreements to regulate the Internet by crowding out bottom-up institutions, imposing charges for international communication, and controlling the content that consumers can access online." The broadest proposal in the draft materials is an initiative by China to give countries authority over "the information and communication infrastructure within their state" and require that online companies "operating in their territory" use the Internet "in a rational way"—in short, to legitimize full government control. The Internet Society, which represents the engineers around the world who keep the Internet functioning, says this proposal "would require member states to take on a very active and inappropriate role in patrolling" the Internet. Several proposals would give the UN power to regulate online content for the first time, under the guise of protecting against computer malware or spam. Another proposal would give the U.N. authority over allocating Internet addresses.

Google's Censorship Juggle

Google received more than 1,000 requests from governments around the world in the second half of last year to take down items such as YouTube videos and search listings, and it complied with them more than half the time.

Google is publishing the data June 18 in its Global Transparency Report, a biannual study the search giant started in 2010. The report makes public the number, location and type of content-removal requests Google receives from various governments. The company said it received 461 court orders demanding the removal of 6,989 items in the second half. Google consented to 68% of those requests. The company received 546 informal requests, such as phone calls from police officials, requesting the removal of 4,925 items. It complied with 43% of them. In total, Google received 1,007 requests and complied with roughly 54% of them. The statistics don't include countries such as China and Iran that block Google content directly without submitting removal requests to the company.

Cable TV's antitrust issue

[Commentary] Rapid technological advances have helped cable TV operators become the country's leading providers of broadband Internet connections. Yet "cable modem" service poses an existential threat to the pay-TV business that has been cable's bread and butter since its inception. Low-cost online movie and television services from the likes of Netflix and Hulu are slowly drawing customers away from cable's ever-more-expensive bundles of channels.

So when leading cable TV operators started penalizing customers who downloaded unusually large amounts of data — a practice that seemed to target the heaviest users of online video services such as Netflix — it raised a troubling question: Are the penalties a legitimate effort to reduce congestion and offer a better online experience for most cable modem customers, or just a pretext to hamper cable's online rivals? That's the backdrop for a new inquiry launched by antitrust enforcers at the Justice Department. Cable operators have the right to compete aggressively, but not to use their power in the broadband market to compete unfairly for video customers. We welcome the Justice Department's efforts to determine whether the cable companies' practices are just aggressive or unduly discriminatory.

Ethics of secret cyberattack on Iran needs full debate

[Commentary] The United States has been has been waging a secret war on Iran since the beginning of President Barack Obama's presidency. At least, it is war by the definition of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who told ABC News only three weeks ago that a major cyberattack on U.S. electrical or other infrastructure would be considered an act of war on a par with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

How would this be different from the technological attacks Obama has launched to debilitate and destroy Iran's nuclear facilities? And if they do constitute war, at what point do Congress and the American people get to weigh in? Congress should conduct a full hearing on the ethics of cyberattacks and drone attacks against nations and suspected terrorists. Feinstein should lead the charge to establish rules of engagement for this rapidly emerging field of technological warfare. Wars against sovereign nations must not be conducted in secret. They need to be debated and authorized by Congress in full public view. But war by technological attacks on a nation's infrastructure is new, and it raises different issues from, say, a secret order to send troops to invade a country. It's hard to imagine a modern president trying that. But if technological attacks truly are acts of war, as Panetta argues -- and who wouldn't agree that the U.S. should swiftly retaliate against a foreign power that crippled our power plants? -- then shouldn't more than one person be making the call?

Verizon: A surge in data -- and costs

[Commentary] Verizon Wireless, the country's leading provider of mobile phone service, announced plans this week for a double-digit increase in the entry-level price for using a smartphone. The company defended the move, saying it should help subscribers with multiple wireless devices — for example, a family with several smartphones and a tablet computer. But the heart of the plan is higher charges for using Verizon's network to transmit data, which is what customers have increasingly been doing since the advent of Apple's iPhone.

The announcement was a worrisome reminder that a handful of companies stand as potential gatekeepers to one of the most vibrant sectors of the US economy. The question for regulators is whether the entire industry follows Verizon's lead, creating a pricing structure that slams the brakes on growth and innovation in wireless technology by making consumers think twice about their data usage. Verizon can and should experiment with new offers as it tries to adapt to evolving demand, but so should its competitors. (One, AT&T, is coming up with its own shared-data plans.) For now, at least, consumers who don't like Verizon's new plans can choose from among several alternatives. Meanwhile, the onus is on Washington to make the airwaves available for a vigorously competitive wireless broadband market so that consumers, not carriers, control the pace of the mobile revolution.

Verizon Raises Prices On Faster FiOs Quantum Web Service

Verizon Communications is raising prices as it doubles Internet speeds with FiOS Quantum, a new offer debuting the company’s fastest Web service to date.

Verizon, the second-largest U.S. phone company, is emphasizing faster speeds as part of its new FiOS broadband Internet, television and phone service bundles as it seeks an edge against cable providers. The higher-speed offerings also come with higher prices aimed at users with multiple Internet devices and more bandwidth-hogging applications. Verizon, based in New York, says that beginning on June 18 customers can pick from five speeds starting at 15 megabits per second, which remains the same price at $99 a month for triple play, and topping out at 300 megabits per second for an Internet-only service for $204.99 with a two-year contract, according to a statement.

Online Tracking Ramps Up

Online tracking on 50 of the most-visited websites has risen sharply since 2010, driven in part by the rise of online-advertising auctions, according to a new study by data-management company Krux Digital.

The average visit to a Web page triggered 56 instances of data collection, up from just 10 instances when Krux conducted its initial study, in November 2010. The latest study was conducted last December. The rapid rise in the number of companies collecting data about individuals' Web-surfing behavior is testament to the power of the $31 billion online-advertising business, which increasingly relies on data about users' Web surfing behavior to target advertisements.

Verifying Ages Online Is a Daunting Task, Even for Experts

Just how hard can it be to verify the age of a person online? After all, privacy experts have been complaining for years about how much advertisers know about people who use the Internet. The answer, it turns out, is very hard. Despite attempts by privacy advocates, academics, law enforcement officials, technologists and advertisers to determine a person’s age on the Internet, the reality is that, online, it is extremely difficult to tell whether someone is an 11-year-old girl or a 45-year-old man.

Benton

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