August 2012

The Math Behind Time Warner’s Bleacher Report Deal

Turner paid some $180 million for Bleacher Report, a move that gives the cable programmer a bunch of online sports inventory to sell to advertisers.

Reminder: Turner used to have a bunch of online sports inventory to sell to advertisers. But it recently had to give much of that to its corporate coworkers. Last quarter, Turner handed back control of Golf.com and Sports Illustrated’s Web site to Time Inc., ending an unhappy arranged marriage between the two Time Warner units. By my math, the divorce cost Turner about $40 million a year in ad revenue, a deficit it’s trying to fill with Bleacher Report.

Obama campaign app includes canvassing map

The campaign to reelect President Barack Obama has taken canvassing to the next technological level by including a map that shows users the names and addresses of Democratic voters in the area. The feature is part of a free iPhone app called Obama for America. The map lists the first name, last initial and party affiliation — in this case, all Democrats — of nearby voters. Once volunteers download the app, they can look for homes to canvass nearby and then send the information they collect back to the main campaign.

Cellphone exposure limits should be reassessed, GAO recommends

Mobile phone exposure limits and testing requirements should be reassessed, according to a Government Accountability Office study.

While the report did not suggest that cellphone use causes cancer, the agency did say that Federal Communications Commission’s current energy exposure limit for mobile phones, established in 1996, “may not reflect the latest evidence on the effects” of cellphones. The study recommends that the FCC reassess two things: the current exposure limit and the way it tests exposure. In its conclusions, the report says that the FCC has not formally coordinated with the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency on the exposure limits. The report also raised questions about the FCC’s decision to only test exposure at a distance from a body while using an earpiece, simulating, for example, someone setting their phone on a nearby table rather than in their pocket while speaking.

Cable Operators to FCC: Don't Rush ISP-Based USF Contributions

The American Cable Association and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association were on the same page when it comes to reforming the contribution side of the Universal Service Fund, which is that the current system is in need of repair, but said it should not rush into a broadband remake.

Google countered that the FCC should take the plunge, but confine that expansion to Internet service providers (ISPs). The fund is paid into by telecom companies to subsidize telecom service in hard-to-reach (thus uneconomical) areas. The FCC is migrating the subsidies from traditional phone to broadband, and is looking to expand the contribution base to broadband as well. In reply comments to the FCC's USF contribution reform rulemaking, ACA asked the FCC to focus on relieving smaller operators -- the ones it represents -- of burdens under the current Universal Service Fund contribution regime, and to collect more data on the cost-benefits of broadening the contribution base to include broadband revenue.

Team USA Deserves No Gold Medals for Internet Access

[Commentary] The opening ceremony of the London Olympics showed us the Internet’s history by honoring Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and featuring a display of his live Twitter post: “This is for everyone.” Unfortunately, the games as a whole are providing a less inspiring vision of the Internet’s future, at least in the US.

People in at least 64 territories around the world are able to watch free live streaming video of every event; 3,500 hours on 10 separate real-time channels are being made available online by YouTube. Yet in the U.S., this coverage is only available to those who pay for a cable, satellite or telephone- company TV subscription that includes MSNBC and CNBC. (About 7.8 percent of this streamed Olympic content is available over the air in the U.S.) If you’re a non-subscriber, almost the only way to get access to these multiple live streams is through a proxy server that shields your location -- IP addresses can be tied to geography -- or through other, possibly illegal, means. The group Global Voices Advocacy reports that the file-sharing site Pirate Bay, where users could upload video of Olympic events for all to see, briefly renamed itself “The Olympic Bay,” with the saucy tagline “This is for everyone.”

We seem bent on providing the technological equivalent of the Olympic sport of dressage -- high-speed Internet access only for rich people. We’re prancing around a core market failure that is undermining the future of our economy. The Internet was supposed to be for everyone.

[Crawford a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School]

Wintour, Weinstein Host Connecticut Fundraiser To Help Obama

President Barack Obama, seeking to raise at least $2.4 million, turned to movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and other entertainment industry leaders for help funding his re-election campaign.

At the second of two events in Connecticut, Weinstein and his wife, Georgina Chapman, held a $35,800-a-head dinner at their Westport home. The dinner for 60 was co-hosted by American Vogue editor Anna Wintour, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and actresses Anne Hathaway and Joanne Woodward, according to Obama’s campaign. Wintour, a top bundler for Obama, was co-host for another fundraiser in New York in June. The president is trying to narrow a money gap as Republican Mitt Romney and party committees aligned with him have outraised Obama and the Democrats for three consecutive months.

20,000 AT&T workers strike; company says customers 'a priority'

About 20,000 AT&T workers in the East and West started striking even as the telecommunications giant reached tentative deals with unions in the Southeast. The company's contracts with two major branches of the Communications Workers of America expired in early April, leading to months of acrimonious negotiations. Now, 17,000 wireline employees in California and Nevada and 3,000 employees in Connecticut have decided to strike, AT&T said in a statement. Wireline businesses have slumped in recent years as use of land-based phones falls off amid the rise of mobile devices.

Trends in the International Telecommunications Industry: Summary through 2010

This report traces U.S.-international traffic and revenue trends from 1980 through 2010. The Federal Communications Commission last published this report in September 2005.

This report shows the continuation of several trends – decreasing costs to US consumers for international calls, sharp drops in revenue per circuit for private line service, an increase in the proportion of US-billed minutes that are terminated using non-traditional settlement arrangements and a decline in per-minute settlement payments and receipts for foreign and US-billed calls.

Craigslist reportedly blocks search engines to kill competitors

A third-party site that relies on Craigslist data has accused the classified giant of changing its policies in an effort to kill it off.

Craigslist has reportedly told major search engines to stop indexing its users' ads. That could leave 3taps -- which operates the site Craiggers and re-publishes the data for use by third parties such as Padmapper to use -- out in the cold. "At approximately noon on Sunday August 5, Craigslist instructed all general search engines to stop indexing CL postings," says a statement on the 3taps homepage. Because 3taps had been harvesting Craigslist data from cached copies offered by Google and Bing, the move to block search engines means Craigslist is "effectively blocking 3taps and other third party use of that data from these public domain sources," 3taps claims. "We are sorry that CL has chosen this course of action and are exploring options to restore service but may be down for an extended period of time unless we or CL change practices," the company says.

Officials: United Nations Internet Regulation is not a Conspiracy

Although some have dismissed fears that other countries will use international telecommunications negotiations later this year to hand the United Nations a greater role in governing the Internet, the United States government doesn’t seem to be taking any chances.

Internet companies, civil liberties advocates, and lawmakers have been debating the true extent of the threat from what The New York Times facetiously called the United Nations’ “Web-snatching black helicopters,” but newly released proposals from the State Department indicate U.S. officials have taken those fears to heart. The United States will be one of many countries to send delegates to the World Conference on International Telecommunications in December to negotiate updates to International Telecommunications Regulations, or ITRs, which were last negotiated in 1988. The ITRs, which are overseen by the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union, mainly addressed older telecom technologies like telephone service. Some countries have expressed interest in expanding their scope to cover Internet issues because the Internet is playing a larger role in communications in general. The issue may smack of a U.N. conspiracy theory, but now the State Department has officially outlined plans focused almost entirely on preventing a more government-centered system of Internet governance.

Benton

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