January 2013

Al Jazeera in America

[Commentary] Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network, has long wanted to gain a bigger American television audience, and it may have finally found a way to do that by buying Current TV. But as the deal was being signed, Time Warner Cable announced it would immediately stop carrying Current, a struggling channel partly owned by former Vice President Al Gore. While the cable company has the legal right to cut off Current, the decision is unfortunate and could block access to an important news source. Doubts about the independence of Al Jazeera do not justify removing it from cable and satellite systems. With the exception of a few places, like Washington and New York City, Al Jazeera English is not available to most American viewers. Why not let them make up their own minds about the network and its journalism?

Time Warner Cable Says It Will Keep ‘Open Mind’ on Reinstating Al Jazeera

Time Warner Cable minced no words when it announced that it was dropping Current TV, just hours after Al Jazeera acquired the channel. “Our agreement with Current has been terminated and we will no longer be carrying the service,” the distributor said. “We are removing the service as quickly as possible.”

Critics of the distributor’s decision didn’t hold back, either, calling it cowardly, shameful and just plain dumb. On Twitter and Facebook, many people assumed that Time Warner Cable was expressing corporate opposition to Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news giant, by taking Current off its cable systems in the United States. But executives at the cable company said the channel wasn’t removed for political reasons. It had more to do, they said, with Current’s low ratings and its contract, which had a “change of ownership” clause that allowed it to be terminated. Time Warner Cable, which has 12 million subscribers, enough to make it the second-largest cable company in the country, has taken a hard line against low-rated channels. That said, Time Warner Cable doesn’t want to be seen as outwardly hostile to Al Jazeera, especially at a time when other major distributors are keeping Current on their cable systems.

Why Al Jazeera’s Cable Move Could Cost Much More Than $500 Million

Al Jazeera could have been the first really serious player to make a big bet on Web video news. Instead it’s placing a giant bet on cable TV. Why?

Al Jazeera wants to be on American cable TV because of optics. That is: Its Qatari owners think being on American cable TV will validate it as a Very Serious News Operation, like CNN — just being on YouTube won’t cut it.
Al Jazeera wants to be on American cable TV because it thinks being on American cable TV is a great business. The tough thing about this argument is that the odds are against it.

Library of Congress has archive of tweets, but no plan for its public display

In the few minutes it will take you to read this story, some 3 million new tweets will have flitted across the publishing platform Twitter and ricocheted across the Internet. The Library of Congress is busy archiving the sprawling and frenetic Twitter canon — with some key exceptions — dating back to the site’s 2006 launch. That means saving for posterity more than 170 billion tweets and counting, with an average of more than 400 million new tweets sent each day, according to Twitter. But in the two years since the library announced this unprecedented acquisition project, few details have emerged about how its unwieldy corpus of 140-character bursts will be made available to the public. That’s because the library hasn’t figured it out yet. “People expect fully indexed — if not online searchable — databases, and that’s very difficult to apply to massive digital databases in real time,” said Deputy Librarian of Congress Robert Dizard Jr. “The technology for archival access has to catch up with the technology that has allowed for content creation and distribution on a massive scale. Twitter is focused on creating and distributing content; that’s the model. Our focus is on collecting that data, archiving it, stabilizing it and providing access; a very different model.”

Cable Industry Draws Scrutiny For Putting Internet Users On A Scale

The cable industry wants Internet users to go on a diet. Cable companies have been testing a new business model that charges customers based on how much data they use, and penalizes them for exceeding those limits. Time Warner, the nation's second-largest cable provider, now offers such tiered plans to customers nationwide. The industry says so-called "usage-based pricing" -- which resembles most wireless plans -- is a sensible option for light Internet users and a way for companies to manage networks that have become congested by the explosion of data-heavy online video. Yet the industry's shift away from one price, all-you-can-eat service has drawn scrutiny from consumer groups, regulators and lawmakers who worry the new model is motivated by a desire to boost profits when users go over their caps and protect cable TV from competing Internet services like Hulu and Netflix.

ITC confirms investigation of Samsung at Ericsson's request

The U.S. International Trade Commission is investigating Samsung for possible trade violations in response to a complaint filed by Swedish network equipment vendor Ericsson.

The ITC said it's investigating whether a wide range of Samsung products, including smartphones, tablets, and televisions, are being imported to the U.S. in violation of U.S. trade law. Ericsson says the products infringe some of its patents. If the ITC agrees, it can stop the products being imported. The investigation follows a complaint filed by Ericsson on Nov. 30. The ITC will assign the case to an administrative law judge for an evidentiary hearing and review the judge's findings, it said. Ericsson's headquarters are in Stockholm, but the company also has a U.S. subsidiary in Plano, Texas.

Protect democracy by fighting media consolidation

[Commentary] What if I told you that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was again up to its old game of encouraging more media consolidation — more broadcast outlets owned by big companies? “That can’t be,” you might say. “Weren’t those earlier attempts done under the George W. Bush administration’s FCC, and didn’t Barack Obama go on record against more consolidation and for more media diversity when he first ran for president?” It surprised me, too.

I thought the reconstituted commission that took control in 2009 would preserve local media and reassert the public interest in a diverse news and information ecosystem that is the foundation of our civic dialogue and, indeed, our system of self-government. The problems facing newspapers and minority broadcasters are real, but allowing Rupert Murdoch to purchase two of the largest daily newspapers in the country to combine with the rest of his media empire is not the solution. We have a right to expect that the FCC will promote the vitality and diversity of our information infrastructure, starting by upholding the common-sense cross-ownership restrictions, and then moving on to some serious protection of the public interest, like making broadcast licensing dependent upon service to our local communities and to all our people.

FTC Issues 2012 Update of Horizontal Merger Investigation Data Report

To promote transparency in merger enforcement, the Federal Trade Commission released an updated staff report on the agency’s major investigations of horizontal mergers.

The update adds four more years of data to the agency’s previous report, which was issued in 2008. Horizontal mergers involve two firms that are competitors or have overlapping lines of business. The new data provide information on the levels of market concentration involved in the FTC’s investigation of 264 mergers, covering 1,372 markets over a 16-year period. The data tabulations use two statistics from the agency’s Horizontal Merger Guidelines to measure market concentration: 1) the post-merger Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), and 2) the change in the HHI, which reflects changes in market concentration before and after a particular merger. They also track the number of “significant competitors” in the markets in these cases. Data on HHIs are available for 1,359 markets and data on significant competitors are presented for 1,143 markets. The HHI reflects the overall composition of the market and the distribution of market shares of the competing firms.

Google concedes defeat in China censorship battle

Google has reluctantly conceded defeat in its latest effort to combat online censorship in China, after a year of behind-the-scenes brinkmanship over sensitive search terms banned by authorities. The search company has quietly dropped a warning message shown to Chinese users when they search for politically sensitive phrases, after Beijing found new ways to cut them off from the web.

Google and Chinese authorities have been involved in a tense game of cat-and-mouse over the issue since May last year, when the feature was unveiled by the US company in an attempt to improve search for Chinese citizens. The standoff came to a head in December, when Google finally decided to drop the feature because users were still being disconnected by Chinese authorities. A source in China said Google decided it was "counterproductive" to continue the technical dispute, despite several attempts to get around it.

Patent Office asks the public for advice on software patents

The US Patent and Trademark Office invited the public to participate in a "software partnership" next month to "enhance the quality of software-related patents." The process will begin with two roundtable events, one in Silicon Valley and another in New York City. The events are defined as opportunities "for an informal and interactive discussion of topics relating to patents that are particularly relevant to the software community." Here's the one substantive topic currently identified for discussion: "how to improve clarity of claim boundaries that define the scope of patent protection for claims that use functional language."

Benton

Search