January 2013

Silicon Valley lobbied hard in Washington in 2012, and despite some friction with regulators, fared fairly well. In 2013, though, government scrutiny is likely to grow. And with this scrutiny will come even greater efforts by the tech industry to press its case in the nation’s capital and overseas.

In 2012, among other victories, the industry staved off calls for federal consumer privacy legislation and successfully pushed for a revamp of an obscure law that had placed strict privacy protections on Americans’ video rental records. It also helped achieve a stalemate on a proposed global effort to let Web users limit behavioral tracking online, using Do Not Track browser settings. But this year is likely to put that issue in the spotlight again, and bring intense negotiations between industry and consumer rights groups over whether and how to allow consumers to limit tracking. Congress is likely to revisit online security legislation — meant to safeguard critical infrastructure from attack — that failed last year. And a looming question for Web giants will be who takes the reins of the Federal Trade Commission, the industry’s main regulator, this year. David C. Vladeck, the director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, has resigned, and there have been suggestions that its chairman, Jon Leibowitz, would step down.

[Commentary] There's a crass old joke about how you can never buy beer, just rent it. Who would think that the same joke applies to book buying in the digital age? But that's the case.

Many people who'll be unwrapping iPads, Amazon Kindles or Barnes & Noble Nooks on Tuesday morning and loading them with bestsellers or classics won't have any idea how limited their rights are as their books' "owners." In fact, they won't be owners at all. They'll be licensees. Unlike the owners of a physical tome, they won't have the unlimited right to lend an e-book, give it away, resell it or leave it to their heirs. If it's bought for their iPad, they won't be able to read it on their Kindle. And if Amazon or the other sellers don't like what they've done with it, they can take it back, without warning. All these restrictions "raise obvious questions about what 'ownership' is," observes Dan Gillmor, an expert on digital media at Arizona State University. "The companies that license stuff digitally have made it clear that you own nothing."

Free Press filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission on media ownership diversity and its conclusion was that a recent ownership report showed abysmally low levels of station ownership by women and minorities.

"We appreciate the opportunity to comment on the data," said Free Press policy director Matt Wood, "which still shows shockingly low levels of broadcast ownership diversity. But the FCC's truncated comment period - during the holiday season, no less - is hardly a serious attempt to address this matter.... Releasing these numbers is the first step the FCC needs to take, but it's not enough. Just having the numbers in hand won't satisfy the mandate of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected the agency's attempts to weaken ownership rules on two prior occasions." Free Press wants the FCC to study the impact of the chairman's proposal on those "abysmally" low numbers, suggesting that analysis would result in the conclusion they any more deregulation cannot be justified.

In Verizon's reply brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the company essentially counts all the ways it says the Federal Communications Commission got it wrong in its defense of the network neutrality/open Internet rules, including what it says is the FCC's first claim that it has the direct authority to regulate the Internet.

Verizon said: 1) The FCC's reasoning that the order "escapes" a statutory ban on common carrier regulations is wrong and flatly conflicts with existing doctrine; 2) the commission relies on "far too slender a thread" to support its claim of Internet regulatory authority; 3) contrary to the FCC's assertion, broadband providers are speakers, whose speech the FCC has curtailed without justification; and 4) the order is arbitrary and capricious because there is no record of abuse.