June 2012

Facebook comments, ads don't sway most users: poll

Four out of five Facebook Inc users have never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on the social network site, a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows, the latest sign that much more needs to be done to turn its 900 million customer base into advertising dollars. The online poll also found that 34 percent of Facebook users surveyed were spending less time on the website than six months ago, whereas only 20 percent were spending more. The findings underscore investors' worries about Facebook's money-making abilities that have pushed the stock down 29 percent since its initial public offering last month, reducing its market value by $30 billion to roughly $74 billion.

Apple Denied Ban On Samsung Tablet Computer Sales In US

Apple was denied its renewed request for a ban on US sales of Samsung Electronics’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer while the case is still before a federal court of appeals. US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, said that she doesn’t have jurisdiction to issue a preliminary injunction because the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington hasn’t issued a mandate yet. The judge said Apple can renew its request once the court in Washington issues its ruling.

Using a Market to Obtain the Efficient Allocation of Interference Rights

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released the fourth of its new FCC Staff Working Papers. The paper examines possible alternatives to the current administrative process for identifying the efficient allocation of signal interference rights. The paper shows how the efficient allocation of such rights can arise from a multi-player game embedded into an auction where participants place bids reflecting the benefit or harm they would expect to incur due to signal interference. It also considers how to identify the efficient set of interference rights, as well as the efficient licensee, for yet-to-be auctioned spectrum (e.g., Advanced Wireless Services-3). In both cases, the authors demonstrate that an efficient outcome requires market participants to select a particular Nash equilibrium from a possibly large set of equilibria, a process that also may require them to solve a “collective action” problem.

Publicly Available Sources in FCC’s Special Access Proceeding

In January 2005, the Federal Communications Commission initiated a broad inquiry into the regulatory framework applicable to price cap local exchange carriers’ (LECs) interstate special access services. The FCC subsequently sought to refresh the record in the Special Access NPRM proceeding, and invited interested parties to propose an analytical framework that the FCC could apply to assess competitive conditions for special access. Most recently, the FCC issued two voluntary data requests, which sought to obtain data from special access providers and customers about special access facilities, pricing, and competition. Consistent with the questions the FCC has asked thus far, and to ensure a high level of transparency in the rulemaking process, the attached appendix provides a list of publicly available documents that the Commission may consider as part of this proceeding.

Repealing De-Regulation: How Not to Build a Roadmap Towards an All-IP World

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission has circulated an order that would undo more than 12 years of Clinton-era, deregulatory pricing policy on legacy non-packet services. The services in question are called “special access” services – 95% of which are slow 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps) TDM (think POTS) services.

That is not a misprint. We are not talking about 100 Mbps connections – services we should actually be figuring out how to get to more people in more places. We are not even talking about fiber. We are talking about legacy, copper-based services that are so slow the services would not qualify for a single dollar of Universal Service Fund (USF) support if they were deployed to homes throughout rural America under the FCC’s recent USF order. We are concerned about the impact the proposed action is going to have for the overall transition to IP technology that the FCC had begun in that USF order. The transition to IP cannot happen fast enough. The industry needs to move to a more cost-effective, all-IP infrastructure if we are going to remain a globally competitive economic force. In regulatory time, that transition must occur with incredible speed. Once subsidies are removed from TDM/POTS infrastructure, carriers will need to nimbly move to retire that infrastructure to make way for an all-IP world. In the USF order, the FCC took a great step in that direction by declaring the obsolescence of TDM/POTS. To make those investments work, however, there must also be a path away from the costs of the legacy infrastructure.

First Lady Joins the Walt Disney Company to Announce New Standards for Food Advertising to Kids

First Lady Michelle Obama joined The Walt Disney Company Chairman and CEO Robert A. Iger to announce that Disney will become the first major media company to introduce new standards for food advertising on programming targeting kids and families.

Under Disney’s new standards, all food and beverage products advertised, sponsored, or promoted on Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior, Radio Disney, and Disney-owned online destinations oriented to families with younger children will be required by 2015 to meet Disney’s nutrition guidelines. The nutrition guidelines are aligned to federal standards, promote fruit and vegetable consumption and call for limiting calories and reducing saturated fat, sodium, and sugar. American children see an estimated $1.6 billion a year worth of food and beverage marketing, and many of those ads are food that are high in calories and sugar, but low in nutrition. The First Lady has been focusing on these issues since launching her Let’s Move! initiative, and in 2010 called on the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association to retool their advertising to market healthy foods and habits to children.

Google May Soon Charge For Free Services, Could Monetize TLDs

Gmail, docs, and a variety of free Google services could soon cost consumers, agencies and marketers a small fee, say some search engine experts. The chatter comes after the company last week said it would charge for product listings in Google Shopping. It also acknowledged the submission of dozens of applications of top level domain names (TLD) for .google, .docs, .youtube and others to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Industry executives are concerned that the change will come. If Google gains access to the TLDs, aimClear founder Marty Weintraub believes it will allow the company to prioritize them in certain search engine results pages (SERPs). "For instance, the TLD .YouTube may well have greater weight in YouTube, or even Google's organic SERPs," he said. Weintraub said it's important to consider how .droid may play in mobile. While many believe mobile could become Google's cash cow, the company will look for other viable revenue streams. Reliable-SEO cofounder Terry Van Horne believes the company will begin changing for other free services to maintain a prior revenue growth rate. "Give people free so they become dependent, and then turn around and charge them," he said.

Dollars, Donuts, And Domains: The Race To Control The Web's Addresses

A company called Donuts has amassed a fund of over $100 million to buy the rights to new, product-specific domain addresses--such as .pizza--and has applied for 307 of them in various characters to appeal to the international market. What does this mean, exactly, for you and me? Plenty, despite the fact that gTLDs (generic top-level domains) are something you probably don't often think about.

Donuts doesn't expect to win all 307 of its applications, but it'll likely win a lot of them...and that instantly will turn it into a company you're going to hear more of. Because then you'll be able to buy a web address along the lines of Jims.pizza from companies acquire them from Donuts. Okay, perhaps not .pizza, necessarily, as the list Donuts has applied for is obviously closely guarded. But Donuts cofounder Daniel Schindler revealed that the list is rich with "generic everyday words." Not on the list are brand names, because the legal ramifications are too complex, Schindler says.

Analyst: Online Streaming Now Hurting Some TV Networks' Ratings

The online streaming availability of TV content may have helped TV ratings in the early going, but its benefits are peaking and even reversing for some networks, Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Tony Wible suggested.

TV audience data for May suggests "a worsening trend" for the TV industry as C3 ratings pressure "has intensified for the past three quarters," the Wall Street observer wrote in a report that reviewed data from a sample of 2 million TiVo users. In his latest contribution to the debate about whether online content services cannibalize traditional media consumption, Wible said the recent TV ratings decline "is ill-timed and could impact upfront negotiations for affected networks," which are ongoing. "Investors need to look at a broader set of metrics as they evaluate the impact of new technology adoption," he said. The data "is not reflective of current trends in the broader population but rather is a tool that helps us find harbingers for future trends," he argued.

Netflix builds its own delivery network

Netflix has created its own content delivery network called Open Connect. It's a series of servers, routers and fiber that can send Netflix video from the source to Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Previously, Netflix had been relying exclusively on third parties to deliver its content from its servers to ISPs. Level 3 had been the company's primary content delivery network since November 2010, but Netflix also relied on Akamai to handle some of its traffic. Shares of Akamai plunged on the news. About 5% of Netflix content is now being served up by Open Connect, and Netflix said in a blog post that it expects Open Connect to eventually become its primary delivery tool. It will make the shift gradually, as its multi-year agreements with the third parties come to an end. Why make the change? Netflix serves up just under 1 billion hours of streaming video per month, second only to Google's YouTube. That amounts to petabytes of data -- millions of gigabytes each month -- sent over borrowed networks. At a certain point, it makes sense to stop relying on landlords and buy the building yourself.

Benton

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