December 2012

Facebook is making changes to its privacy settings.

First, it is improving some privacy protections. The company is adding a new top-level control, called Privacy Shortcuts, that will allow people to quickly change who can see their “stuff” (as Facebook calls it) and who can contact them through the Web site. The shortcut will also feature a one-button link to block someone on Facebook. The company is also introducing a higher level of control on the site’s Activity Log, a feature that allows people to hide or remove things that appear on their Facebook timeline. People will now be able to quickly view and control comments, photos and posts that have been tagged by others. But when Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh away. The company is eliminating the ability for people to hide themselves on Facebook’s search, a control, that until now, has existed in the privacy settings on the company’s Web site.

Google is one of the leading players in a modern-day Silicon Valley morality tale, particularly now, since it is among the American multinationals using sophisticated international tax shelters to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes.

According to Bloomberg, nearly $10 billion in revenue and $2 billion in taxes due disappeared into a Bermuda Triangle of shell corporations, offshore subsidiaries and clever accounting maneuvers such as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich”. Even for Google’s biggest fans, it’s now a fair question: Whatever happened to the unofficial company motto "Don't be evil"? To be fair, nothing Google did was illegal — the company simply executed well-known tax loopholes to perfection in the interest of maximizing returns to shareholders. Moreover, Google is hardly the only tech company caught with their Bermuda shorts pulled down around their ankles. Across Europe, there has been an outcry against tax-avoiding multinationals, with an emphasis on cracking down on the offshore tax activities of the tech world’s biggest players, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. In the UK earlier this month, British lawmakers took turns publicly admonishing the leaders of some of America's biggest companies, claiming that they aren’t paying their “fair share” of taxes. These are not just harangues from our cash-strapped European friends, they are evidence of a fundamental change to the way we view Silicon Valley’s most successful tech companies.

Broadcast television enjoyed an impressive third quarter, as overall network spend soared 35 percent versus the year-ago period. According to data just released by Nielsen, the broadcasters booked north of $5.33 billion in Q3 ad sales, a significant improvement over the $3.95 billion raked in during the period spanning July 1 and Sept. 30, 2011.

A good deal of that extra volume was funneled toward NBC, thanks to its coverage of the 2012 London Summer Olympics. The Peacock scared up $1.2 billion in ad sales during the 17-day event. More evenly distributed political dollars also swelled broadcast’s coffers to some extent although the vast majority of the estimated $3.3 billion spent by various campaigns and SuperPACs was allotted to local TV. Broadcast’s strong showing also came on the heels of the 2012-13 upfront, during which the networks wrote some $9.15 billion in commitments on their prime-time inventory.

There’s a schism between the people who believe you can build a business charging for content — and those who believe you can’t. In the last couple of years, the scales have been tipping toward the pay model. While the vast majority of digital content is still gratis, a fifth of U.S. newspapers were charging online by this summer, and a fifth of tablet users pay for news. But what makes content worth paying for? Which content services create a really compelling experience for users and how have they done it? With that question in mind, we gave our media reporters—Robert Andrews, Laura Hazard Owen, Jeff John Roberts and Janko Roettgers—a hypothetical allowance of $100 and asked them to tell us how they’d spend it on digital content.

Here’s what they said.

• Robert Andrews: 3 months of Spotify ($30); Soma FM ($2.99 month); Ancestry.co.uk subscription ($62.71).
• Laura Hazard Owen: New York Times Saturday-Sunday subscription (3 months -- $39.60); Byliner Plus subscription (3 months -- $7.99); Eat Your Books subscription (3 months -- $7.50); Worldreader donation ($14.93).
• Jeff John Roberts: MLB.tv ($120); The Magazine (3 months -- $5.97); Downton Abbey ($14.99/season)…
• Janko Roettgers: Netflix subscription (2 months -- $16); Hulu Plus subscription (2 months -- $16); Spotify (2 months -- $20); Vudu (4 rentals -- $20); Kindle e-book ($12); $10 worth of apps; Miami Connection ($6).