December 2012

A Narrow Internet Escape

[Commentary] The good news is that last week the U.S. walked out of a United Nations confab in Dubai to regulate the Internet. The not-so-good news is that the movement by unsavory governments to control the Web now has an official U.N. imprimatur, which can only lead to trouble.

The Administration's mistake was in playing along with the ITU in the first place. This White House and State Department have an undying faith in multilateral diplomacy, even when the rest of the world wants to use it to harm U.S. interests. Autocrats rightly see the open Web as a threat to their political control, which is precisely why it is in the U.S. interest to keep the U.N.'s hands off. Given the ITU's Dubai double-cross, the U.S. has good cause to quit the agency. If that's too much, then perhaps the next Secretary of State will make it a theme of his tenure to preach the virtues of an unregulated Internet.

Judge Denies Apple's Request for Ban of Some Samsung Products in US

Judge Lucy Koh denied Apple's request to seek a ban on the sale of some Samsung Electronics products in the US market. "The fact that Apple may have lost customers and downstream sales to Samsung is not enough to justify an injunction," she ruled in a court filing. "Apple must have lost these sales because Samsung infringed Apple's patents. Apple has simply not been able to make this showing." The judge also denied Samsung's request to seek a new trial citing alleged juror misconduct.

Developers worried about new rules for phone apps

The software industry is bracing for new regulations that it says will stifle creativity and saddle small businesses with legal and technical costs to ensure their cellphone apps don't run afoul of the rules. The changes, which the Federal Trade Commission is expected to approve this week, would update a 14-year-old law prohibiting the collection of personal information from preteens. It raises these questions: What is the value of a child's privacy on the Internet, and who should pay for it?

Businesses said they fear that under the trade commission's proposal, routine transfers of data that pose no threat to a child's safety will be treated the same as the improper gathering of information that can be used to create detailed user profiles that are highly valued by advertisers. Responsible software developers will err on the side of caution and the result will be less kid-friendly content available on the Internet, they said. The FTC's chairman, Jon Leibowitz, defended the government's approach. "When you are talking about children, you have to give the benefit of the doubt to privacy," he said.

As Europe Presses Google on Antitrust, US Backs Away

Google seems on its way to coming through a major antitrust investigation in the United States essentially unscathed. But the outlook is not as bright for Google in Europe, as the European Union’s top antitrust regulator prepares to meet with Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission appears to be ready to back off what had been the centerpiece of its antitrust pursuit of Google: the complaint that the company’s dominant search engine favors the company’s commerce and other services in search queries, thwarting competition. Yet in a statement last spring, Joaquín Almunia, the competition commissioner of the European Union, placed the contentions about search bias at the top of his list of concerns about Google. And in a private meeting this month, Almunia told Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC, that European antitrust officials remain focused on that issue, according to two people told of the meeting, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about it. Almunia’s tougher bargaining stance, antitrust experts say, is not merely a personal preference. European antitrust doctrine, they say, applies a somewhat different standard than United States law does. In America, dominant companies are given great leeway, if their conduct can be justified in the name of efficiency, thus consumer benefit. Google has consistently maintained that it offers a neutral, best-for-the-customer result. In Europe, antitrust experts say, the law prohibits the “abuse of a dominant position,” with the victims of the supposed abuse often being competitors. “The Europeans tend to use competition law to level the playing field more than is the case in the United States,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert and law professor at the University of Iowa.

Microsoft Scrutinized by EU Privacy Watchdogs for Policy Changes

Microsoft’s policy changes for its Internet products including Hotmail and Bing are being formally examined by European data protection regulators for potential privacy issues. Updates to Microsoft’s services agreement, which took effect Oct. 19, are being formally reviewed, EU privacy regulators wrote to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer and the head of Microsoft Luxembourg.

Luxembourg’s and France’s data protection commissions are leading the examination, according to the Dec. 17 letter. “Given the wide range of services you offer, and popularity of these services, changes in your Services Agreement and the linked Privacy Policy may affect many individuals in most or all of the EU member states,” wrote Jacob Kohnstamm, who leads the association of EU data protection commissioners. They “decided to check the possible consequences for the protection of the personal data of these individuals in a coordinated procedure.” The review will verify whether the changes could entail new risks for users’ privacy. The examination is also checking whether Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft’s privacy policy meets European standards on notifying users and allowing them a choice of services, Gerard Lommel, head of the Luxembourg privacy regulator, said in an interview in October.

Spectrum Costs Put KPN Recovery on Hold

Carlos Slim could do with a dose of Dutch courage. Shares in telecom operator Royal in which Slim's América Móvil holds a 28% stake, sank 14% after it paid a record-beating €1.35 billion ($1.78 billion) to secure fourth-generation mobile-phone spectrum in the Netherlands.

That is equivalent to one-fifth of KPN's already hammered stock-market value before the auction results were announced. A pickup in the shares looks further away than ever. The Dutch spectrum auction's results exceeded even the most aggressive expectations, raking in €3.8 billion compared with consensus forecasts for around €1.4 billion. KPN says a large contributor was the regulator's decision to reserve low-frequency spectrum for a new operator, which went to Sweden's Tele2 TEL2-B.SK 0.00% . That left three other bidders competing for two paired blocks of spectrum. KPN now faces the double hit of greater competition: Tele2 is known for aggressive pricing and has been in the Netherlands for 15 years. That should shoot down early hopes that KPN's shares—having halved from where Slim bought—might have hit rock bottom.

Daniel Inouye, Hawaii’s Quiet Voice of Conscience in Senate, Dies at 88

Senator Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), who went to Washington at the birth of his state in 1959, dominated public life in the Hawaiian islands for more than 50 years and became a quiet voice of national conscience during the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra affair, died on in Bethesda (MD). He was 88.

A hero of World War II who lost his right arm in combat in Europe, Sen Inouye served two terms in the House of Representatives early in his career and was first elected to the Senate in 1962. He was the first Japanese-American elected to both the House and the Senate. After the death of his West Virginia colleague Robert Byrd in June 2010, Sen Inouye became the Senate’s senior member, with a tenure nearing 48 years, and president pro tempore, making him third in the line of presidential succession, after the vice president and speaker of the House. Mr. Byrd’s death also made him the highest-ranking public official of Asian descent in United States history. Months later, he was elected by another overwhelming margin to his ninth consecutive six-year term

Sen Rockefeller: Violence in media, video games 'must be addressed'

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) called for tougher regulations to protect children from violent images on television, the Internet and in video games. Sen Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newton (CT) is a "wakeup call" for federal action. "While we don’t know if such images impacted the killer in Newtown, the issue of violent content is serious and must be addressed," he said. He said that by the time most children are 18 years old, they have already been bombarded by tens of thousands of violent images in the media. "As parents, research confirms what we already know — these violent images have a negative impact on our children’s well-being," he said.

TV Should Lead Push to Reduce Violence

[Commentary] Twenty-seven killed, including 20 children. As President Barack Obama said: “We have been through this too many times.” By the end of this week, National Association of Broadcasters President Gordon Smith, National Cable & Telecommunications Association President Michael Powell and Motion Picture Association of America President Christopher Dodd have to sit down to figure out what they can do to help curb the gun violence like that in Newtown (CT) that stunned the nation. They have to pledge that the TV business is going to step up and become part of what should be a national, multipronged effort to stop such killing. (Dodd, a former Connecticut senator, should also rally the movie industry to the cause.)

Gun Violence Petition Continues to Break Records on We The People

A petition advocating stricter gun regulations that was posted to the White House’s We the People website shortly after a deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown (CT) Dec 14 had been signed over 150,000 times by the afternoon of Dec 17. That easily makes it the most popular petition ever posted to the 16-month old White House site.

Several thousand new signatures were still being added to the petition each hour. The petition asks President Obama to “Immediately address the issue of gun control through the introduction of legislation in Congress.” The president pledged to use “whatever power this office holds” to prevent future mass gun violence during a memorial ceremony for Sandy Hook victims Sunday night but has yet to offer specific plans. The most popular We the People petition prior to the Sandy Hook shootings was from a Texas resident asking permission for his state to secede from the union. It has been signed by 120,000 people. Similar petitions from residents of all 50 states were posted in the days following President Obama’s November reelection.

Benton

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