June 2012

NAB's Smith: FCC Should Limit Station Moves in Repacking

In a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, National Association of Broadcasters President Gordon Smith has asked the FCC to limit the number of stations that will have to be repacked after its spectrum auctions.

Smith said that would limit viewer dislocation and ensure that stations that do move are compensated in a timely fashion. Smith also asked that the FCC give broadcasters "ample time" to evaluate FCC auction and repacking plans. Smith's letter comes the day after NAB exec Jane Mago made those arguments at an FCC repacking workshop, and a day before Hearst TV President David Barrett will make a similar pitch to Congress at a future of video hearing. If "hold harmless" was the NAB rallying cry before the auctions were approved, "transparency" is the new watchword as the FCC comes up with a game plan for reclaiming and re-auctioning spectrum.

Facebook pulls Find Friends Nearby GPS-locator feature

It was kind of creepy, but it also had potential to be useful. But in the end it didn't matter because Facebook has pulled Find Friends Nearby as unceremoniously as it debuted it.

After the feature was introduced to the world Sunday by one of the Facebook engineers who created it, Facebook pulled the feature not long after, taking it offline the very next day. Find Friends Nearby was definitely not a polished final product, but the feature certainly seemed like it could have been useful. Essentially, it was meant to help you connect with new-found friends offline by having both people access it at the same time. Opening the tool from your phone's browser or Facebook app would show other users on the page within your proximity using your phones' GPS. That could've sped up the process of how new friends locate your profile to add you, which can be a huge obstacle for people trying to find users with common names, such as mine. But the feature, which was originally called "Friendshake," could have posed privacy problems for Facebook. Immediately, the possibility of members using the feature inappropriately came to the surface, with some expressing concerns that people could use the feature to locate information on others near them.

Web Privacy Census shows tracking pervasive

University of California at Berkeley researchers will unveil a first-of-its-kind tool for measuring online tracking of consumers over time. The team has established the Web Privacy Census, a process for surveying top websites each quarter to evaluate the amount and kind of monitoring under way.

The goal is to create benchmarks to accurately evaluate the shifting methods of Internet marketers, ideally enabling a better informed debate over privacy policy. The census primarily serves as a baseline for comparison with future surveys. But even on its own, the report highlights the almost dizzying amount of online tracking that occurs. Here's what that means: If you visit a single popular site, companies you've never interacted with, whose names you don't know, are putting dozens of pieces of software onto your computer. If that strikes you as invasive and presumptuous, that's only because it is.

NCTA’s Powell: Antitrust allegations 'flatly wrong'

Michael Powell, the president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), pushed back against claims that cable companies are trying to stifle competition from online video, saying the allegations are "flatly wrong."

Powell, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), said critics of the cable industry have "radically exaggerated" the problem. He argued that cable companies want to see their customers consume more content on the Internet, noting that Internet service is a more profitable business than cable television for most companies. "Why would you want to frustrate consumers?" Powell asked at a briefing for reporters. Powell said broadband caps are a way to ensure that the heaviest data users pay their fair share. He said the issue is not dividing up a limited resource, but ensuring that the top users pay more for the expensive Internet infrastructure they are using. He compared data caps to the Occupy Wall Street movement's calls for the richest one percent of Americans to pay more in taxes. "One percent of heavy broadband users probably cause 42 percent or more of the consumption of the network," Powell said. Powell, who also worked in the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, said he believes the investigation is routine.

House Commerce Committee Staffers: Time to Revisit Must-Carry/Retransmission Regulations

Republican staffers on the House Commerce Committee's Communications Subcommittee signaled in their memo on the June 27 Future of Video hearing that that future should be a deregulatory one, including that if Congress rethinks any regulations, they should be must-carry/retransmission and program access rules.

"The Communications Act is woefully out of step with the state of competition and technology in video distribution and programming," the staff write. That means, they argue, that retransmission consent deals between MVPDs and broadcasters and program carriage deals between MVPDs and programmers "are best left arranged by the respective parties and their viewers, free from regulatory intervention." That would be good news for broadcasters not looking for the government to step in and mandate carriage or arbitration during impasses. "Both sides should be able to withhold valuable assets," the staffers say, otherwise no "true negotiation can take place." The alternative, they say, is the "risky" proposition of asking regulators to weigh the relative value of programming and carriage.

NBC Stations Keep Tabs on Employee Tweets

While people typically delineate their personal and professional digital lives, there is little distinction between the two — at least as far as social media is concerned — for the news staffs at the 10 NBC-owned stations.

For the last year or so, the NBC Owned Television Stations have required individuals who work in their newsrooms — from interns and production assistants to reporters and anchors — to follow the company rules governing social media use, regardless of whether they are using the platform to promote news or their personal lives. That means news staff is prohibited from tweeting, posting or distributing via other social networking means “anything that compromises the integrity and objectivity of you or NBCUniversal,” even using a personal account, says Kevin Keeshan, ombudsman for the station group. “We ask them to think and use common sense,” he says. “Don’t post anything we’re not prepared to broadcast.” Keeshan says the policy is necessary to protect the reputations of both personnel and the news organizations they represent a time when “there is a tendency to be more flip and looser with the jargon and vernacular of the times on social media.”

Ergen to Congress: Parents Can AutoHop Over Booze, Junk Food Ads

Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen will testify before the House Commerce Committee’s communications subcommittee this week and plans to say that Dish's AutoHop ad-skipping option allows parents to shield their kids from commercials for "junk food and alcohol."

He is defending Dish's Hopper service from the broadcast networks, who have sued the company over the AutoHop commercial-skipping feature, saying it breached contracts and violated copyrights. In his testimony, Ergen positions the service as the evolution of giving consumers what they want, when they want it, which includes allowing them to skip "what they don't want to see."

Should Google and Amazon be allowed to control domains?

Google wants the exclusive right to reserve domains such as .search and .blog for its own use, and Amazon wants to do the same with .music and .cloud. Some critics, including open-web advocate and blogging pioneer Dave Winer, think this is wrong and shouldn’t be allowed. Are they right?

Even something as seemingly innocuous as .cloud could become contentious, especially since both Google and Amazon are vying for exclusive control of the domain — and Google is expected to announce at its upcoming I/O conference that it is launching an Amazon-style cloud service, which it will presumably want to distinguish from that of its competitor. Should ICANN be giving one company or the other the exclusive right to offer companies a .cloud address? And what about .news? Controlling that could theoretically allow Amazon to convey benefits on news entities that play by its rules. Whether ICANN accepts any of the applications from Google and Amazon remains to be seen — but if it does, there will be an even bigger spotlight on what those companies plan to do with them, and whether that is in the interests of the web as a whole.

Has Facebook ruined Silicon Valley or just changed it?

As giants like Google and Apple and Amazon and Facebook battle for supremacy, venture-capital veteran Bill Davidow says, their main weapon is the ability to lock web users into their ecosystems and then exploit the data provided by consumers, along with the other elements of this unbalanced relationship.

He doesn’t mention it, but a great example of what I think Davidow means is the way that Facebook routinely seems to change the terms of its offerings primarily for its own benefit — including the way it recently made facebook.com email addresses the default for all users without telling anyone. Would older Silicon Valley companies have treated their customers this way? It’s hard to imagine how — but then, their businesses were very different, in a time before social media took over the world. Davidow argues that this kind of behavior is almost required in today’s environment, since everyone is after the same goal: accumulating as large a user base as possible, so that it can be monetized in some way. If Google can’t generate what it needs with Google+, then Facebook wins — and if Facebook can’t make inroads into mobile, then Apple wins.

The fundamental shift behind what Davidow is describing is that consumers are not really Facebook’s customers — as more than one person has pointed out, they are actually the product that is being sold.

July Fireworks: Senate May Take Up Cybersecurity, But Then What?

There is a lot of chatter on and around Capitol Hill about the possibility that the Senate will be taking up cybersecurity in July.

It is unclear at this point which bill or issues will make it to the floor or even if any effort will garner enough support to pass, though more voices are calling for some sort of compromise. While those following cybersecurity legislation await some possible post-4th fireworks in the Senate on what was once a non-partisan issue, there is a larger question looming in the background: What's next?

Even if cybersecurity legislation does get through the Senate, there is not a clear path forward for reconciling that bill (or bills) with any or all of the House cybersecurity measures passed earlier this year. Congress is only in session a short span in July, before lawmakers exit for August recess. September will be an even shorter work period before attention is turned to home districts and the upcoming elections. There is much talk of an end of the year marathon, but with the debt, sequestration, appropriations, tax cut extensions and other headline-grabbing topics front and center, will there be room for negotiated cybersecurity legislation? Could it be attached to another moving vehicle in hopes of passage? What would "it" be anyway?

Benton

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