November 13, 2012 (Politics of Abundance)
BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2012
Future of Music Summit and Looking Back to Look Forward: The Next Ten Years of Spectrum Policy http://benton.org/calendar/2012-11-13/
OWNERSHIP
The FCC is again ignoring nation’s diversity - editorial
Leadership Conference Urges FCC Not to Rush to Media Ownership Order
How four companies took over the Internet
Google Said to Face Ultimatum From FTC in Antitrust Talks
Google presses fair use case in book scanning appeal
Tim Cook: too practical for Steve Jobs’ “thermonuclear” war? [links to web]
INTERNET/BROADBAND
For a politics of abundance, growth first - op-ed
Cord-Cutting: Cable's Offer You Can't Refuse
Gotta get a gig: KC startups are buying homes to get Google FiberGovernment Should Encourage 4G Network Build-Outs - editorial [links to web]
Text Messaging Declines in U.S. for First Time, Report Says
Tim Cook: too practical for Steve Jobs’ “thermonuclear” war? [links to web]
CONTENT
Changing Channels: YouTube Will Pull the Plug on at Least 60 Percent of Its Programming Deals
TELEVISION
TV's Good Wife Takes On the FCC [links to web]
ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
Academic ‘Dream Team’ Helped Obama’s Effort
Secret of the Obama Victory? Rerun Watchers, for One Thing
How Obama’s tech team helped deliver the 2012 election
Orca was no fail whale, says Romney's digital director
How Cellphones Complicate Polling
Election Over, Political Campaigns Reveal Their Bags of Tricks [links to web]
PRIVACY
Not that hard for authorities to get to your e-mail
Gmail's Location Data Led to the Discovery of the Petraeus Affair [links to web]
With Digital Trail, an End to the Hushed Affair [links to web]
More Companies Are Tracking Online Data [links to web]
Facebook’s False Faces Undermine Its Credibility [links to web]
TELECOM
Telecom firms, prisons team to gouge callers, group charges
HEALTH
FCC advisory committee: mHealth Task Force must meet needs of underserved groups [links to web]
CYBERSECURITY
Military Cyber Range Moves from Laboratory to Deployment
UN's civil aviation body recommends cybersecurity task force [links to web]
Former Feds Take Vital Cyber Skills to Foreign Companies [links to web]
POLICYMAKERS
Group launches campaign to pressure Obama not to pick Berman for State
COMPANY NEWS
Verizon Wireless Announces $8.5 Billion In Distributions To Verizon And Vodafone By Year-End 2012
AT&T’s Biggest Problems Aren’t Emboldened Rivals, Chief Says [links to web]
NBCUniversal cuts about 500 employees [links to web]
STORIES FROM ABROAD
BBC head says broadcaster must reform or die [links to web]
Do we really need state-funded news entities like the BBC anymore? - analysis
UK Tories back radical BBC revamp calls [links to web
British MP Concerned About Impact of Wireless on Free TV [links to web]
China slams "distorted" view of copyright piracy problem [links to web]
OWNERSHIP
FCC IGNORING DIVERSITY
[SOURCE: Seattle Times, AUTHOR: Editorial staff]
[Commentary] A bad idea persists. The Federal Communications Commission is once again expected to seek a weakening of media-ownership rules in the nation’s 20 largest markets. Allowing the consolidation of newspapers and television stations or radio stations ignores the diversity of America — a grievous mistake, as politicians have learned. Putting local journalism into a few hands and limiting the access to local media are bad for democracy. Our political system thrives on independent news gathering, viewpoints and opportunities for women and minorities. The FCC is apparently ignoring the courts and the lessons of the recent presidential campaign. America’s diversity must be acknowledged and respected.
benton.org/node/139030 | Seattle Times
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LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE ON MEDIA OWNERSHIP
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The Federal Communications Commission is getting some pushback from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights after reports that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is trying to vote on a media ownership order before the end of the year. The FCC is reviewing its media ownership rules per a congressionally mandated quadrennial review and a remand from the Third Circuit Court of appeals. In a Nov 9 letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the group "urged" the commission to reconsider the decision to "permit additional consolidation of the broadcast media without the court-ordered data analyzing [of] the impact of media consolidation on communities of color and women. As we have previously stated to the Commission, any change in media ownership rules should take place only after the Commission collects, releases, and subjects to public comment complete data and analysis of broadcast ownership data," said the group. "It is a grave disservice to the constituencies represented by The Leadership Conference to attempt to push through a change in media ownership rules at the last minute without an opportunity for our members to sift through the data and engage in substantive debate about its import.
benton.org/node/139028 | Broadcasting&Cable
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APPLE, GOOGLE, AMAZON, FACEBOOK
[SOURCE: CNNMoney, AUTHOR: Stacy Cowley]
There are four tech companies controlling the industry's direction: Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook. Will they still be ruling the tech field in a decade? "At least three have established very deep moats," meaning that it's almost impossible for newer rivals to overtake them, Internet analyst Mark Mahaney (formerly of Citigroup) said during a panel discussion at the Techonomy conference in Tucson (AZ). "Probably Apple, too." Google and Facebook have the richest data sets on their users, but Amazon's data graph is probably the most valuable, Mahaney believes, because it tracks where customers are actually spending their money. Apple -- the company with the highest market capitalization in the world -- has the hardest position to defend, several of the panelists said. It can't maintain its stratospheric growth without constantly pulling new rabbits out of its hat, and rivals like Samsung are chipping away at its market.
benton.org/node/139026 | CNNMoney
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GOOGLE-FTC NEGOTIATION
[SOURCE: Bloomberg, AUTHOR: Sara Forden]
Apparently, Google is being pressed by Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jonathan Leibowitz to offer to resolve the agency’s antitrust investigation in the next few days or face a lawsuit, two people familiar with the matter said. Google has been in discussions with the agency for about two weeks and hasn’t put any remedy proposals on the table, said the people, who declined to be identified because the negotiations are private. The FTC has told Google it won’t accept a resolution short of a consent decree and is prepared to take action in the next week or two, one of the people said.
benton.org/node/139150 | Bloomberg
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GOOGLE APPEAL
[SOURCE: paidContent.org, AUTHOR: Jeff John Roberts]
Google renewed its claim that scanning 20 million books counts as a “fair use” under copyright law, and asked a federal appeals court to throw out a May ruling that let the Authors Guild go forward with a long-running class action case. In a brief filed Nov 9 in New York, Google argued that a class action trial would deny it an opportunity to argue on a book-by-book basis that its scanning was a so-called “transformative” use that falls outside of copyright. This “fair use” argument received a boost in October when a judge dismissed a similar case that the Authors Guild brought against a group of university libraries over a digital collection known as the Hathi Trust. The new filing by Google is just the latest twist in a case that began in 2005 when publishers and the Authors Guild sued the search giant over its ambitious plan to scan the world’s libraries. The parties eventually reached a settlement that would have created a market for millions of forgotten, out-of-print books but US Judge Denny Chin blew up the deal in 2011 after critics warned it would create a monopoly. The publishers recently dropped their lawsuit against Google but the Authors Guild is pressing on with demands for $750 per book. While the search giant has scanned more than 20 million books, only a relative handful would qualify for compensation under the lawsuit due to legal technicalities.
benton.org/node/139036 | paidContent.org
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INTERNET/BROADBAND
POLITICS OF ABUNDANCE
[SOURCE: San Jose Mercury News, AUTHOR: Reed Hundt, Blair Levin]
[Commentary] Now is the time for Silicon Valley leaders to demand that while negotiating budget compromises, Congress also immediately pass laws that allow the private sector quickly to deliver breakthroughs in information technology and clean energy to the market. Potential technological abundance can give the United States both a high and rising standard of living and a rapid reduction in dependence on carbon-intense energy uses. Moreover, as the Clinton administration demonstrated, economic growth can do more to close federal budget deficits than any of the current plans to increase taxes and cut spending. The Internet and wireless driven economic boom of that era led to GDP growth averaging 4 percent from 1995 to 2000, producing large budget surpluses. Just as in the 1990s, a trillion dollars of private investment can drive rapid growth and productivity. Then the money went primarily into the Internet space; now it should rebuild the two platforms that underlie all modern economies:
The knowledge platform -- the Internet and everything that rides on it -- should be expanded so that the United States leads the world in delivering education, health care, public safety and all government services from the cloud to broadband connected devices.
The power platform -- the electrical grid and automotive engines -- should be rebuilt so as to increase by half the market share of electricity generation provided by natural gas, solar and wind.
To jump-start the reconstruction of these two platforms, Congress and the president should strike four deals that in the aggregate are budget positive:
Tax agreement: Tax carbon-intensive emissions from power plants in return for reducing the income tax rates that will become effective in January.
Incentive reform: Couple utility reform with corporate tax reform, requiring states to remove barriers to private sector investment in clean energy and energy efficiency while increasing other corporate investment incentives.
New wave infrastructure financing: Charter a national "electromagnetic wave bank" that provides long-term financing at low rates for investments in renewable power, energy efficiency, and next-generation data networks, capitalized by allowing technology companies to repatriate some of the nearly $2 trillion currently kept overseas.
Next-Gen government now: Create a CEO-led Digital Transition Commission, to accelerate all government services to the digital platforms, resulting in long-term savings and establishing American leadership in such emerging areas as personalized education and health.
benton.org/node/139377 | San Jose Mercury News
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CABLE BROADBAND AND TV
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Shalini Ramachandran]
Comcast says it is more valuable for the cable operator to pursue customers who will take multiple services than "single play" customers. There’s a debate raging in the television industry in the past few years: whether the rising cost of cable TV and growing online video options are prompting people to cut the cord of pay TV. Quarterly subscriber numbers from pay-TV operators have done little to resolve the debate: in some periods, the industry as a whole has grown slightly, and in others, there has been a marginal decline in the number of cable TV subscribers. Several pay-TV executives say that cord-cutting is still a small trend that has largely stemmed from weak economic conditions. But one little-discussed factor is cable operators' pricing policies, which can prompt people to keep TV even if they don't particularly want it. Cable operators "recognize that their most advantaged product is broadband," said Craig Moffett, analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. "They don't want to sacrifice that advantage by giving the opportunity for customers to cherry pick their best product at a low price and take the rest of your services from somebody else. In effect, they are pricing the broadband at a price that discourages you from taking broadband only."
benton.org/node/139363 | Wall Street Journal
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GOOGLE FIBER AND START-UPS
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Stacey Higginbotham]
Businesses across Kansas City (KS) cheered when Google chose their municipality for its new fiber-to-the-home deployment. Access to a gigabit fiber connection is something most businesses could use — even if they couldn’t use an entire gigabit just yet. But once Google started its roll-out of fiber in both Kansas City (KS) and Kansas City (MO), the business executives and startups were disappointed. Google Fiber was heading to residential users first. Google didn’t really explain its decision, but plenty of business people in Kansas City expressed confusion or complained about the decision in private, while lauding Google publicly. After all a $70, fiber-to-the-home connection for residents was still going to be great for the city. But the startup community wasn’t willing to settle — and since most of them worked from their homes, coffee shops or communal space anyhow, it wasn’t a big leap to decide to find a house in an area slated for fiber and move in.
benton.org/node/139148 | GigaOm
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WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
TEXT MESSAGING DECLINES
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Brian Chen]
In countries around the world, text-message traffic has been shrinking because Internet-powered alternatives are becoming so widely used. American carriers have fought off the decline — until now. For the first time, the American wireless market saw a decline in the total number of messages sent by each customer each month, according to a report published by Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst who is a consultant for wireless carriers. In the third quarter of this year, cellphone owners sent an average of 678 texts a month, down from 696 texts a month in the previous quarter. Though that’s a small dip, the change is noteworthy because for several years, text messaging had been steadily growing in the United States. Sharma said it was too early to tell whether the decline here would continue, but he noted that Internet-based messaging services, like Facebook messaging and Apple’s iMessage, had been chomping away at SMS usage. He said the decline would become more pronounced as more people buy smartphones. A bit more than 50 percent of cellphone owners here have smartphones.
benton.org/node/139153 | New York Times | Chetan Sharma | GigaOm
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CONTENT
YOUTUBE CHANNELS
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Peter Kafka]
YouTube has helped fund about 160 “channels” as part of a new strategy to make the video site more TV-like. And just like the TV world, YouTube isn’t going to renew all of last season’s programs. This week, Google’s video site will start offering new contracts to some of the channel programmers/creators it signed up in the last year. But not all of them: YouTube figures it will end up re-investing in up to 40 percent of its original channels by the time the renewal process is done. YouTube will handle renewals in batches, starting with the first set of channels that launched in January of this year. The new deals will largely mirror the ones YouTube set up last year, where the programmers got advances of up to $5 million to produce videos that would live exclusively on the site for more than a year.
benton.org/node/139042 | Wall Street Journal | | FastCompany
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
ACADEMIC DREAM TEAM
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Benedict Carey]
A look at an effort by a team of social scientists to help their favored candidate in the 2012 presidential election. This election season the Obama campaign won a reputation for drawing on the tools of social science. The book “Victory Lab,” by Sasha Issenberg, and news reports have portrayed an operation that ran its own experiment and, among other efforts, consulted with the Analyst Institute, a Washington voter research group established in 2007 by union officials and their allies to help Democratic candidates. Less well known is that the Obama campaign also had a panel of unpaid academic advisers. The group — which calls itself the “consortium of behavioral scientists,” or COBS — provided ideas on how to counter false rumors, like one that President Obama is a Muslim. It suggested how to characterize the Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in advertisements. It also delivered research-based advice on how to mobilize voters.
benton.org/node/139373 | New York Times
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RERUNS AND THE REELECTION
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Jim Rutenberg]
It was called “the Optimizer,” and, strategists for President Obama say it is how he beat a better-financed Republican opposition in the advertising war. Culling never-before-used data about viewing habits, and combining it with more personal information about the voters the campaign was trying to reach and persuade than was ever before available, the system allowed Obama’s team to direct advertising with a previously unheard-of level of efficiency, strategists from both sides agree. “Future campaigns ignore the targeting strategy of the Obama campaign of 2012 at their peril,” said Ken Goldstein, the president of Kantar Media/CMAG, a media monitoring firm that tracked and analyzed political advertising for both campaigns. “This was an unprecedented marrying of detailed information on viewing habits and political predispositions.”
benton.org/node/139371 | New York Times
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HOW OBAMA’S TECH TEAM DID
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Derrick Harris]
When it comes to presidential elections, it helps to know your way around some disruptive technologies. The team of technologists that helped re-elect Barack Obama – led by Obama for America CTO Harper Reed and comprised largely of other political novices and accomplished hackers — certainly had that going for them. However, when the prize is the highest office in the land — and possibly the fate of the free world — it also helps to know your role. A presidential campaign is not a tech startup; it has to innovate on tight deadlines and in an environment where failure really is not an option. So although it had to move fast, for example, Reed’s team couldn’t afford to re-invent the wheel because it could maybe shave 5 milliseconds off of page-load time for a web page. Or, as Reed put it a phone call with me on Monday morning: “Our goal [was] to be the force multiplier, not to be a technology experiment.” It was there to make sure the president’s foot soldiers — the folks who really do affect the results — could execute their ground-game without having to worry about technology failing them. Reed’s team just had to take the tools at its disposal and use them to their fullest extent so that old-world and potentially time-consuming techniques such as calling phones and knocking on doors were done as efficiently as possible.
benton.org/node/139370 | GigaOm
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ORCA DIDN’T FAIL
[SOURCE: ars technica, AUTHOR: Sean Gallagher]
Conservative bloggers have arrived at the "anger" stage of grieving, going so far as to accuse contract developers of sabotaging the Mitt Romney campaign's "get out the vote" efforts. But Romney campaign Digital Director Zac Moffatt said that Project Orca was relatively successful -- and that it was not a determining factor in Romney's election-night loss. Project Orca was a Web-based app developed to help the Romney campaign track which supporters had voted and to help poll watchers report any potential voter suppression, fraud, or other irregularities back to the campaign for follow-up by its legal team. Volunteers at polls across the country were to access Orca from their smartphones and feed all data back to the main Romney campaign site inside the Boston Garden. But Orca caused widespread frustration after user credentials were issued improperly. At one point during election day, Comcast cut off inbound traffic to Orca's servers because it was mistaken for a denial of service attack. And even while the system was working, the high volume of data being sent to the server caused such slow response that it appeared to some users that the system had crashed. Moffatt acknowledged frustration with the system. But he also insisted things weren't quite as dire as some accounts from frustrated volunteers suggested. "I can tell you that data from 91 percent of counties in the targeted states came in," Moffatt said, "and that we had 14.5 million people who were marked as having voted. And there were 4,397 reports of incidents that we were able to pass to our legal department."
benton.org/node/139369 | Ars Technica
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CELLPHONES AND POLLING
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Quentin Hardy]
Traditional polling is getting more expensive and less reliable. The emerging online alternatives are promising, but have problems of their own. Problems with the polls may also mean problems for the people who read them. The fundamental difficulty has to do with changes in phone technology and human habits. Much of the polling data you see comes from phone calls. Caller identification has made it easier to ignore calls from polling outfits. Cell phones have caller ID, and people are likely to be using them from any number of places, where they don’t want to be disturbed. Last May, the Pew Research Center published a report which said that the number of households responding to phone polls has fallen from 36 percent in 1997 to 9 percent today. If this trend continues, at some point response rates will be too low to show good representation. Even if pollsters do get through, and convince people to cooperate with an in-depth poll, taking these kind of surveys to an increasingly mobile population is more expensive. A 1996 Federal law states that calls to cell phones have to be hand-dialed, not generated by computer. That increases the time in getting the answers.
benton.org/node/139043 | New York Times
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PRIVACY
NOT HARD FOR AUTHORITIES TO GET YOUR E-MAIL
[SOURCE: Associated Press, AUTHOR: Richard Lardner]
Your e-mails are not nearly as private as you think. The downfall of CIA Director David Petraeus demonstrates how easy it is for federal law enforcement agents to examine emails and computer records if they believe a crime was committed. With subpoenas and warrants, the FBI and other investigating agencies routinely gain access to electronic inboxes and information about email accounts offered by Google, Yahoo and other Internet providers. "The government can't just wander through your emails just because they'd like to know what you're thinking or doing," said Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Homeland Security Department who's now in private law practice. "But if the government is investigating a crime, it has a lot of authority to review people's e-mails." Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, federal authorities need only a subpoena approved by a federal prosecutor — not a judge — to obtain electronic messages that are six months old or older. To get more recent communications, a warrant from a judge is required. This is a higher standard that requires proof of probable cause that a crime is being committed.
benton.org/node/139374 | Associated Press
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TELECOM
PAY PHONES AND PRISONS
[SOURCE: IDG News Service, AUTHOR: Grant Gross]
US prisons, immigration detention centers and telecommunications carriers are charging "exorbitant" rates on collect calls made by inmates, and the Federal Communications Commission should step in to set rates, a coalition of 110 human rights groups, lawyers, and professors said. The expensive collect-call charges make it difficult for immigrants in detention to contact their families, legal counsel and human rights organizations, the groups said in a letter sent last week to the FCC. Problems with prison phone rates are "well documented" by past media and government reports, said the letter, organized by Holly Cooper, associate director of the University of California Davis Immigration Law Clinic. A request for the FCC to address prison phone rates has been pending since 2003, Cooper noted.
benton.org/node/139031 | IDG News Service
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CYBERSECURITY
MILITARY CYBER RANGE MOVES FROM LABORATORY TO DEPLOYMENT
[SOURCE: nextgov, AUTHOR: Dawn Lim]
A test range for Defense personnel to hone computer attack capabilities is slated to receive a multimillion dollar boost as the system transitions from the Pentagon research wing’s laboratories into deployment. The platform, created under a program called the National Cyber Range, is providing infrastructure for the Pentagon to advance its drive to develop more offensive tools that will hunt down intruders and thwart computer attacks. Defense intends to award $80 million to Lockheed Martin Corp. for five years to support operations at the facility, contract databases indicate. The range, housed in a “specially architected sensitive compartmented information facility with appropriate security protocols,” is equipped with custom-configured government and Lockheed Martin-owned hardware and software, federal databases reveal. The test lab, a mini-model of the public Internet and other institutional networks, “provides for the modeling of cyberattacks,” a special notice reveals.
benton.org/node/139022 | nextgov
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POLICYMAKERS
GROUP OPPOSES BERMAN FOR STATE
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Brendan Sasso]
Demand Progress, a liberal advocacy group, launched a campaign urging President Barack Obama not to pick Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) as his next secretary of State because of the lawmaker's support for controversial anti-piracy legislation. The group warned that as the nation's top diplomat, Rep Berman would undermine Internet freedom. "If we're serious about promoting global Internet freedom, it's hard to imagine a worse pick," Demand Progress wrote in a petition to the president and the Senate. Rep Berman, a 15-term lawmaker, lost his congressional seat last week in a bitter intraparty battle with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) in California's redrawn 30th congressional District. The Hill and other publications have reported that Berman's name is now being floated to replace Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is expected to step down sometime next year.
benton.org/node/139152 | Hill, The
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COMPANY NEWS
VERIZON WIRELESS TO PAY CO-OWNERS $8.5 BILLION
[SOURCE: Verizon Wireless, AUTHOR: Press release]
Verizon Wireless announced that its Board of Representatives has declared distributions aggregating $8.5 billion to its owners, which are payable on or prior to December 31, 2012. The distributions will be paid in one or more tranches, with each tranche paid in proportion to the owners’ partnership interests on the payment date. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc., which owns 55 percent of the partnership, and Vodafone Group, which owns 45 percent of the partnership.
Bloomberg reports that while the payout was down from last year, it exceeded the expectations of some shareholders and may come as a relief to Vodafone investors, who have less control over how much money is distributed because they’re the minority owners. Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. mobile-phone carrier, has served as a profit engine for the two companies. Its margins topped analysts’ estimates last quarter as sales of smartphones helped boost customers’ bills.
benton.org/node/139142 | Verizon Wireless | Bloomberg
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STORIES FROM ABROAD
STATE-FUNDED NEWS
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Mathew Ingram]
[Commentary] There have been calls for a restructuring of the British public broadcaster in the wake of scandals involving sexual-abuse charges against prominent British citizens. But does the BBC just need to be shaken up, or does its entire mandate for public journalism need to be reviewed? Supporters argue that there is a place for an impartial source of journalism, one that will undertake the kinds of investigative projects that other outlets do not — and that would be a great rationale for the existence of a state-funded news entity, if that’s all the BBC and its counterparts did. But the reality is that they also produce a vast quantity of regular news and entertainment as well. Is that really something that residents of Britain need to subsidize with their taxes? If governments want to fund the creation of news and journalism, maybe they would be better off finding some way to do that by financing independent entities, the way the Knight Foundation and other non-profit trusts do, instead of propping up anachronistic players like the BBC.
benton.org/node/139139 | GigaOm
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