November 2012

POLICYMAKERS

HOUSE COMMITTEE CHAIRS
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Molly Hooper]
House Republicans approved their slate of committee chairmen. GOP members backed the chair selection of 19 males at a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill. According to lawmakers in the room, very little was said concerning the lack of females chosen by a select group of House Republicans to preside over the powerful panels in the next Congress. The full slate of House committee chairmen for the 113th Congress is as follows:
Energy and Commerce – Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI)
Judiciary – Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
Science, Space, and Technology – Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX)
… more at the URL below
benton.org/node/140240 | Hill, The | Washington Post
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OWNERSHIP

NEW FCC OWNERSHIP RULES?
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Craig Aaron, president of Free Press, said that his group will sue the Federal Communications Commission once again if the commissioners vote to approve a media ownership rule order without completing court-ordered diversity studies. "If they don't follow the court instructions and do the studies they were supposed to do before moving forward, and if they move forward without public input, then I believe we will have no choice but to take them to court again.” Free Press was among those suing the Kevin Martin-led FCC when it attempted similar changes in 2007. Aaron’s comments came in a press conference held by a number of groups opposed to a draft order circulated by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski that would loosen the newspaper/TV cross-ownership rules, lift limits on newspaper/radio cross-ownership and allow radio/TV cross-ownership, while counting some joint sales agreements toward local ownership caps that are being left in place. Those groups did not go as far as to commit to a suit as well, but said they had "grave" concerns. On the conference call with reporters, Wade Henderson, president and CEO, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, led some harsh criticisms of the commission, suggesting that it was allowing conglomerates to gobble up outlets and homogenize programming. He argued the FCC proposal would continue to keep licenses out of the hands of diverse owners.
benton.org/node/140236 | Broadcasting&Cable | TVNewsCheck
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INTERNET/BROADBAND

US, CANADA AND THE ITU
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The U.S. and Canada have proposed that the upcoming telecom treaty conference in Dubai deal first with proposals to change the definition of telecommunications or who the treaties apply to before getting down to the details of any revisions. Dealing with those "threshold questions" about the scope of the treaties is a crucial first step, they told the International Telecommunications Union in a joint filing. Both countries are concerned about proposals by countries including Russia, China and Syria, that would expand the treaties to include broadband, an effort they see as opening the door to more government control of content and new taxes on Internet traffic. They propose that there be a plenary session to deal with any changes to the preamble or Article 1 of the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs). "If we can resolve those threshold, definitional issues first, it will clarify the terms of the negotiations for the rest of the conference," said Ambassador Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. Delegation.
benton.org/node/140190 | Broadcasting&Cable
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PEOPLE LIE TO THE INTERNET
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Stacey Higginbotham]
Most people view the internet as a place of free-flowing information where people go to learn, develop their business opportunities and can share scientific discoveries. It’s a place where passwords can be shared among family and friends and people don’t use services to cloak their identity, yet it is also where almost half of us lie about relevant personal information. All of this and some other contradictions have emerged from the Internet Society’s Global Internet User Survey. The Internet Society is an organization that tracks the use and influence of the web and releases policy recommendations associated with online access. For its annual survey it asked more than 10,000 people in 20 countries their thoughts on a series of questions. The results in some cases were surprising.
benton.org/node/140184 | GigaOm
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INTERNET AND INTELLIGENT MACHINES
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Jeff Immelt]
The real opportunity for change is still ahead of us, surpassing the magnitude of the development and adoption of the consumer internet. It is what we call the “Industrial Internet,” an open, global network that connects people, data and machines. The Industrial Internet is aimed at advancing the critical industries that power, move and treat the world. There are now many millions of machines across the world, ranging from simple electric motors to highly advanced MRI machines. There are tens of thousands of fleets of sophisticated machinery, ranging from power plants that produce electricity to aircraft that move people and cargo around the world. There are thousands of complex networks ranging from power grids to railroad systems, which tie machines and fleets together. This vast physical world of machines, facilities, fleets and networks can more deeply merge with the connectivity, big data and analytics of the digital world. This is what the Industrial Internet Revolution is all about. The Industrial Internet era has already begun. And during a time when the global economy is recovering but remains volatile and where resources are constrained for people, governments, and companies, what we need most is to not lose sight of a real opportunity to create meaningful change around the world. After all, this is what revolutions are all about. [Immelt is the chairman and CEO of GE]
benton.org/node/140187 | GigaOm
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PRIVACY

PETER SWIRE
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Natasha Singer]
Over the last few months, an international effort to give consumers more control over the collection of their online data has devolved into acrimonious discussions, name-calling and witch hunts. The idea was to work out a global standard for “Do Not Track,” a computer browser setting that would allow Internet users to signal Web sites, advertising networks and data brokers that they did not want their browsing activities tracked for marketing purposes. But some industry executives involved in the negotiations have questioned the agenda of privacy advocates, saying their efforts threaten to undermine an advertising ecosystem that fuels free online products and services. At the same time, some technology experts and privacy advocates have accused industry executives of stalling and acting in bad faith. Into this rancorous battle steps a new mediator, Peter Swire, a professor of law at Ohio State University and a former White House privacy official during the Clinton administration. On Nov 28, the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, the international consortium that has been trying to develop technical Do Not Track standards, said that Mr. Swire would take over as co-chairman of its Tracking Protection Working Group.
benton.org/node/140275 | New York Times
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FACEBOOK PRIVACY CHANGES
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Mike Isaac]
Facebook proposes three big things: Some vaguely worded unknown changes to the Messages product, tweaks to how the site presents notifications and, most visibly, that the site can amend the current process of making privacy policy changes. The last point is the one getting the attention. Currently, any proposed privacy changes are put out to the users at large on Facebook’s “site governance” page. From there, a post needs to surpass a certain number of user comments before being put to a vote on whether changes will be made. But here’s where the process breaks down. As the bylaw stands, Facebook requires 30 percent of its user base to vote to block any proposed site changes. A little perspective here: That’s 300 million people, or just under the total population of the United States. Getting that many people to do anything just doesn’t happen. It’s hard enough to get a fraction of that number to vote in a presidential election, much less a lightly publicized Facebook vote.
benton.org/node/140233 | Wall Street Journal
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CHILDREN ON FACEBOOK
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Somini Sengupta]
A federal law intended to protect children’s privacy may unwittingly lead them to reveal too much on Facebook, a provocative new academic study shows, in the latest example of how difficult it is to regulate the digital lives of minors. Facebook prohibits children under 13 from signing up for an account, because of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or Coppa, which requires Web companies to obtain parental consent before collecting personal data on children under 13. To get around the ban, children often lie about their ages. Parents sometimes help them lie, and to keep an eye on what they post, they become their Facebook friends. This year, Consumer Reports estimated that Facebook had more than five million children under age 13. That relatively innocuous family secret that allows a preteen to get on Facebook can have potentially serious consequences, including some for the child’s peers who do not lie. The study, conducted by computer scientists at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, finds that in a given high school, a small portion of students who lie about their age to get a Facebook account can help a complete stranger collect sensitive information about a majority of their fellow students. In other words, children who deceive can endanger the privacy of those who don’t.
benton.org/node/140271 | New York Times
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CONTENT

INTERNET ROYALTIES HEARING
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Jennifer Martinez]
While House Judiciary Committee members did not see eye to eye on whether existing royalty rules for Internet radio services like Pandora should be reformed, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle on argued that broadcasters should start paying royalty fees for playing songs on over-the-air radio stations. The focus of the Judiciary Committee's intellectual property subcommittee hearing on Wednesday centered on weighing the merits of a bill -- the Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA) -- that proposes to put Internet radio services on the same royalty-setting standard as cable and satellite radio. Pandora, a major backer of the bill, hopes this will lower the rates of its royalty payments so they're more level with the royalty fees paid by cable and satellite radio services. Time and again during the hearing lawmakers hammered broadcasters for not being required to pay a performance right to artists for playing their sound recordings on AM/FM radio.
benton.org/node/140230 | Hill, The | AdWeek | The Verge
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ACCESSIBITY

YOUTUBE CAPTIONING
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Hayley Tsukayama]
YouTube announced that it is expanding support for its automatic captioning service for six European languages. The company said that its service will now display captions in German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch. That brings the total number of languages up to 10: YouTube already generates automatic captions for English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. As with the current languages, viewers will be able to see the captions by clicking the “CC” button in the lower right-hand corner of eligible videos. The company provides the auto-captions as a baseline transcript of what’s going in its videos. However, since speech recognition technology isn’t perfect, it also provides editing tools to improve the quality of the captions on its site.
benton.org/node/140198 | Washington Post
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VIRAL VIDEO AND THE DEAF
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Hayley Tsukayama]
Viral videos may be good for sharing ideas and spreading funny foreign pop hits, but they are also leaving millions of deaf and hearing-impaired people out of the loop. Online video is becoming a more ubiquitous part of American life. Netflix videos made up one-third of online data used in the United States last year. YouTube expects 90 percent of online traffic to be video in the next few years. By 2016, Cisco estimates that 1.2 million minutes of video will be streamed or downloaded every second. That video explosion has been great for small film and TV producers, who are able to reach an audience without a big studio budget, and fans of niche programming. But in some ways, it has left the deaf and hard-of-hearing community starting from scratch after years of advocating for captions on traditional television. “We could be back to square one,” said Christian Vogler, director of the Technology Access Program at Gallaudet University.
benton.org/node/140196 | Washington Post
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WIRELESS/SPECTRUM

EFFECTIVE SPECTRUM POLICY
[SOURCE: AT&T, AUTHOR: Joan Marsh]
[Commentary] Proponents now seek to dramatically change the way the Federal Communications Commission’s spectrum screen is applied in ways that would create marketplace uncertainty and lead to arbitrary results that threaten to reduce competition, investment, and innovation. It is not radical change in the essential workings of the spectrum screen that is necessary. Instead, the FCC should take more modest steps to update the screen and ensure that it is applied in a way that best promotes competition, innovation, and investment.
First, the FCC should update the screen to include all of the available spectrum that is “suitable” for mobile wireless services. Most prominently, the FCC should correct a current glaring omission by including in the screen the entire 194 MHz of BRS and EBS spectrum held almost entirely by Sprint/Clearwire, rather than the mere 55.5 MHz the FCC has included to date. That spectrum is in use today and there is no principled basis upon which it can continue to be excluded from the screen. The FCC should also conduct annual rulemakings to update the spectrum screen inventory as new allocations are brought online.
Second, the FCC should reaffirm that the “safe harbor” provided by the screen is truly safe – i.e., that the FCC will not entertain spectrum aggregation-related challenges to any proposed spectrum acquisition that does not exceed the safe harbor level. This step is necessary to restore predictability to the workings of the screen, which the FCC has long recognized promotes innovation and investment.
Third, the FCC should make clear that its case-by-case analysis of proposals to exceed the safe harbor level in any local market will remain tightly focused on whether the spectrum available to competitors and potential competitors remains sufficient to enable robust facilities-based competition to continue. This analyses should be informed by the reality that today’s screen, which is set at one third of suitable and available spectrum, is almost certainly too low and holdings in excess of the screen in some markets may promote the public interest by putting fallow or under-deployed spectrum to its best and most valuable uses.
benton.org/node/140211 | AT&T
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA

LEFT-LEANING SILICON VALLEY
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Nate Silver]
President Barack Obama won the nine counties of the Bay Area by margins ranging from 25 percentage points (in Napa County) to 71 percentage points (in the city and county of San Francisco). In Santa Clara County, home to much of the Silicon Valley, the margin was 42 percentage points. Over all, President Obama won the election by 49 percentage points in the Bay Area, more than double his 22-point margin throughout California. Although San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley have long been liberal havens, the rest of the region has not always been so. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the Bay Area vote over all, along with seven of its nine counties. George H.W. Bush won Napa County in 1988. Republicans have lost every county in the region by a double-digit margin since then. But Democratic margins have become more and more emphatic. Obama’s 49-point margin throughout the Bay Area this year was considerably larger than Al Gore’s 34-point win in 2000, for example, or Bill Clinton’s 31-point win in 1992. The reason is that Democrats’ strength in the region is hard to separate out from the growth of its core industry — information technology – and the advantage that having access to the most talented individuals working in the field could provide to Democratic campaigns. Companies like Google and Apple do not have their own precincts on Election Day. However, it is possible to make some inferences about just how overwhelmingly Democratic are the employees at these companies, based on fund-raising data. Over all, among the 10 American-based information technology companies on Fortune’s list of “most admired companies,” President Obama raised 83 percent of the funds between the two major party candidates.
benton.org/node/140264 | New York Times
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TECH AND THE NEW CONGRESSIONAL CLASS
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Tony Romm]
Google, Facebook and Microsoft regularly take business risks to boost their bottom lines. But those companies were much less interested in taking political risks this election season and supporting congressional newcomers. The three tech firms, combined, gave to only a few members of the incoming House and Senate freshman classes, even as telecom behemoths like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast together showered more than half of all newly elected lawmakers with big bucks in the 2012 cycle, according to a POLITICO analysis of campaign-finance data. The decision to avoid new congressional candidates is understandable for an industry that’s relatively new to the Washington influence game: Google only this year hit the gas on its election giving, and Facebook’s political action committee is not very old. Still, those three tech industry leaders are lagging behind other companies and sectors that long have used campaign dollars to develop policy champions on Capitol Hill.
benton.org/node/140262 | Politico
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BUDGET

TECHNOLOGY CAN FIX THE BUDGET CRISIS, SAY FORMER FCC OFFICIALS
[SOURCE: National Journal, AUTHOR: Adam Mazmanian]
A pair of Clinton-era telecom regulators and “card-carrying Democrats” want to bring back some of the economic magic of the go-go 1990s with an ambitious plan to accelerate growth, shrink the national debt while revolutionizing the delivery of government services, and help slow global warming. The plan from former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt and his former chief of staff, Blair Levin, is outlined in an e-book called The Politics of Abundance: How Technology Can Fix the Budget, Revive the American Dream, and Establish Obama’s Legacy. It modestly proposes that huge economic growth can be spurred through reconfiguring the way energy is produced, purchased, and consumed. At the same time, the government can generate new efficiencies and savings using broadband applications in health care and education. All it’s going to take is a grand bargain between Republicans and Democrats in which revenue from a big new emissions tax that targets energy generated by nonrenewable sources and from utility regulation reform is swapped for lower personal and corporate tax rates and a reduction in taxes U.S.-based multinationals pay on repatriated foreign profits. It sounds like a pipe dream, but Hundt and Levin think it’s possible. “We did not put one thing in that we thought Republicans would overwhelmingly oppose,” Hundt said at the Hudson Institute in Washington. The two are shopping their plan to policymakers, lobbyists, industry leaders, and think tankers.
benton.org/node/140192 | National Journal
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TELECOM

USF REFORM AND THE FISCAL CLIFF
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Rural telecom providers have taken their complaints about the Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Fund (USF) reforms to the White House, tying the issue to the "fiscal cliff" negotiations. The USF funds telecom build-outs in high-cost areas where there is not a business case absent the government subsidy. The FCC is moving that support for phone service in high-cost, particularly rural, areas to broadband deployment, the new must-have telecom service, and to reform subsidies to reflect the move of voice to IP delivery. The goal is also to provide a "glide path" for that migration given that the switch-over will take time, though rural carriers suggest it is more like a crash landing for their particular economies. In a letter to President Barack Obama, the Rural Broadband Alliance asked to include language in fiscal cliff legislation suspending some of the reforms and require the FCC to submit them to the Federal State-Joint Board for their recommendations. The carriers say the "well-intentioned but misguided" changes -- part of the FCC's migration of support from traditional telecom to broadband -- has led to job cutbacks and consumer rate increases.
benton.org/node/140193 | Broadcasting&Cable
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RADIO/TELEVISION

LET LOCAL RADIO STATIONS BLOOM
[SOURCE: nextgov, AUTHOR: Bob Brewin]
The Federal Communications Commission expects to take the final steps in processing 6,000 pending FM translator licenses Nov 30, which will then open the process for local groups to apply for low-power FM stations. The FCC said new low-power FM licenses will result in an expansion “of truly local voices” in the media landscape under the Local Community Radio Act signed by President Obama in December 2011.
benton.org/node/140174 | nextgov
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GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS

KEEPING E-MAIL PRIVATE
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Editorial staff]
[Commentary] If you left a letter on your desk for 180 days, you wouldn’t imagine that the police could then swoop in and read it without your permission, or a judge’s. But that’s just what law enforcement officers can do with your e-mail. Using only a subpoena, government agents can demand that service providers turn over electronic communications they have stored, as long as those communications are more than six months old. Protections are even weaker for opened e-mail or documents stored in the “cloud.” The advertisements that the Postal Service piles into your mailbox every day are legally sacrosanct; the medical notifications your health-insurance company sends to your Gmail account are not. This bizarre reality is thanks to the 1986 Electronic Privacy Communications Act, a law written before anyone dreamed that Americans would send, receive and store so much private information over third-party services such as Gmail or would draft documents using cloud computing that they intend to keep confidential. Now Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the 1986 law’s original author, wants to amend it into the 21st century.
benton.org/node/140267 | Washington Post
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EDUCATION

EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE
[SOURCE: Technology Review, AUTHOR: Tom Simonite]
Although the intricacies of human psychology may never be fully explained, Internet companies seem to have some parts of it figured out. By tracking millions of users, Google, Facebook, and the gaming company Zynga have learned how to position every “I agree” button, text box, and virtual cow to entice people to click. A company called Knewton, in New York City, is now trying to use similar techniques in service of an arguably more laudable goal—helping students learn faster. The startup, founded in 2008, offers courses like SAT preparation and remedial math that are mostly aimed at people about to start or return to college. They are offered online by schools including Arizona State University. Last November, Knewton signed a deal to use its technology in digital classes being produced by the educational giant Pearson. “When a student takes a course powered by Knewton, we are continuously evaluating their performance, what others have done with that material before, and what [they] know,” says David Kuntz, VP of research at Knewton. He is a veteran of the education business who pioneered the introduction of computer algorithms to the design of standardized tests, like the LSAT. Knewton calls its approach “adaptive learning,” and tracking which questions a student gets right or wrong is just the starting point. Knewton, which has raised $54 million in investments, says its software also monitors how long students take to answer a question and whether they revisit it, and even draws clues from a student’s mouse movements. “We know if they are waving their mouse around trying to decide between option A and C,” says Kuntz.
benton.org/node/140179 | Technology Review
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HEALTH

MEDICARE AND EHRs
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Reed Abelson]
The conversion to electronic medical records — a critical piece of the Obama administration’s plan for health care reform — is “vulnerable” to fraud and abuse because of the failure of Medicare officials to develop appropriate safeguards, according to a sharply critical report to be issued by federal investigators. The use of electronic medical records has been central to the aim of overhauling health care in America. Advocates contend that electronic records systems will improve patient care and lower costs through better coordination of medical services, and the Obama administration is spending billions of dollars to encourage doctors and hospitals to switch to electronic records to track patient care. But the report says Medicare, which is charged with managing the incentive program that encourages the adoption of electronic records, has failed to put in place adequate safeguards to ensure that information being provided by hospitals and doctors about their electronic records systems is accurate. To qualify for the incentive payments, doctors and hospitals must demonstrate that the systems lead to better patient care, meeting a so-called meaningful use standard by, for example, checking for harmful drug interactions.
benton.org/node/140274 | New York Times
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HIT PRIVACY
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Amy Dockser Marcus, Christopher Weaver]
The U.S. has strict privacy laws guaranteeing people access to traditional health files. But implants and other new technologies—including smartphone apps and over-the-counter monitors—are testing the very definition of medical records. Some legal experts say the 1996 U.S. law governing patient access to their health files—HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act—hasn't kept up with technology. The law gives patients the right to access information held by doctors and hospitals. However, the raw data gathered by an implant isn't held by a doctor or a hospital: Typically it goes directly to the device maker, which provides a summary report to the doctor. Because of this, the raw data falls outside the scope of HIPAA's patient-access requirements. In addition, Medtronic said, business agreements with doctors and hospitals restrict it to relaying information only to them.
benton.org/node/140272 | Wall Street Journal
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Analysis

November 2012

November 29, 2012 (House Committee Chairmen)

Mediator Joins Contentious Effort to Add a ‘Do Not Track’ Option to Web Browsing

Medicare Is Faulted on Shift to Electronic Records

Heart Gadgets Test Privacy-Law Limits

For Children, a Lie on Facebook Has Consequences, Study Finds

In DC, Social-Media Surveillance Pays Off

Keeping e-mail private

Mixed news for AT&T in Consumer Reports wireless survey

In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns