March 7, 2013 (MetroPCS, T-Mobile)
BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2013
Senate hearing on cybersecurity today http://benton.org/calendar/2013-03-07/
WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
No US Justice Dept objection to MetroPCS, T-Mobile USA merger
T-Mobile Planning Job Cuts Ahead of MetroPCS Deal Closure [links to web]
Why It's Suddenly Illegal to "Unlock" Your New Cell Phone - analysis
California lawmaker to present bill revoking cellphone unlocking ban [links to web]
Comscore: Android still top US smartphone OS, but iPhone top smartphone and iOS gaining [links to web]
T-Mobile Shouts Back at AT&T While its Network Team Quietly Builds Away [links to web]
How utilities are using cellular communications today [links to web]
All work and no play? Mobile wipes out 8-hour workday [links to web]
App Building, the Do-It-Yourself Way [links to web]
OWNERSHIP
Free Press Not Assuaged By MMTC Study Proposal
Copyright reformers launch attack on DMCA’s “digital locks” rule
Apple: No, the App Store Is Not a Monopoly
Time Warner Ends Talks With Meredith and Will Spin Off Time Inc. Into Separate Company [links to web]
TELEVISION
TV Is Changing Before Our Eyes - op-ed [links to web]
Survey says: People start caring about Internet on their TVs, but price trumps everything [links to web]
Show Me the Moneyball: March Madness Generates $1 Billion in Ad Sales [links to web]
DirecTV Bemoans Rising Program Costs [links to web]
INTERNET/BROADBAND
Telecom Firms Seek to Curb Publicly Funded Web Services
Will FreedomPop Disrupt US Broadband with Free internet? [links to web]
Online gambling: How long until it's legal everywhere? [links to web]
PRIVACY
Microsoft Backs School Privacy Bill Taking Aim at Google
CONTENT
The new economics of media: If you want free content, there’s an almost infinite supply - analysis [links to web]
Are These New Startups The Future Of Media? [links to web]
ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
How the fastest-growing media site could help Democrats win the next election [links to web]
LOBBYING
K St. ready for cybersecurity cash grab [links to web]
Samsung’s Patent Spat With Apple Spurs US Lobbying Push [links to web]
GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
House bill would require police to obtain search warrant to access e-mails
Attorney General Holder defends prosecution of Web activist Swartz [links to web]
JOURNALISM
Cronkite Awards Announced [links to web]
HEALTH
Charting the Course for 2013 to Harness Health IT to Bring Down Costs and Improve Quality in Health Care - press release [links to web]
Sequester will hit EHR incentive program [links to web]
Finding Hidden Side Effects, With Web Search Data [links to web]
LABOR
T-Mobile Planning Job Cuts Ahead of MetroPCS Deal Closure [links to web]
Comcast/NBCU Doubles Commitment to Hire Vets [links to web]
Tracking Sensors Invade the Workplace [links to web]
STORIES FROM ABROAD
EU’s Message: Anybody Else Feel Lucky? - analysis
Dear Brussels, You Are Fighting Last Century’s Battles - analysis
Why Microsoft probably couldn’t care less that the EU just fined it $732 million - analysis
Computer Scientists Measure the Speed of Censorship On China’s Twitter
Brussels ends probe into telecoms groups
Brussels to soften data protection rules
For App Makers, China Is Untapped and Untamed [links to web]
WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
JUSTICE OK WITH METRO/T-MOBILE
[SOURCE: Dow Jones, AUTHOR: Friedrich Geiger]
The U.S. Department of Justice has no objections to the merger between T-Mobile USA and mobile operator MetroPCS Communications, according to Deutsche Telekom. Approvals from the Federal Communications Commission, the Committee on Foreign Investment and MetroPCS shareholders are now the remaining hurdles for the merger. MetroPCS shareholders are set to vote on the merger on April 12.
benton.org/node/147152 | Dow Jones | ars technica | GigaOm
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WHY IS IT ILLEGAL TO UNLOCK YOUR PHONE?
[SOURCE: CommLawBlog, AUTHOR: Mitchell Lazarus]
If you buy something, it’s yours, to do with as you want. Right? Don’t be silly. We first encountered the concept of limited ownership with purchases that lacked any physical existence, like e-books and online music. If I buy an online movie from Amazon, I can watch it on my Kindle Fire forever – but I can’t donate it to my local library. I can buy a book for my Kindle reader, but having read it, cannot pass it on to my wife. We don’t fully own these things because they’re not really things. They are made of bits, not atoms. What we buy is only a license for particular uses. But when we buy an actual thing, made of atoms, then it’s ours, and we can use it in any way that we want. Not anymore. Not if the thing is a cell phone. A phone configured for a particular carrier is said to be “locked.” Before it can be used with a different carrier, it must be “unlocked.” It is possible to buy an unlocked phone and take it to the carrier of your choice. But that has a downside: you will pay full price for the phone and probably pay the same monthly carrier rate as someone who bought the same phone at a steep discount. It is also possible to unlock the phone you already have, just by downloading and running software from the Internet. Not hard to do – but it might get you hauled up before a federal district judge.
benton.org/node/147142 | CommLawBlog | NPR
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OWNERSHIP
FREE PRESS, MMTC AND MEDIA OWNERSHIP
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Free Press is not assuaged by the Federal Communications Commission's support of a proposed diversity study by the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council that will look at the advertising market and the impact of proposed FCC media ownership rules changes on diversity. According to an FCC filing, in a phone conversation late last week with an aide to FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, Free Press policy director Matt Wood said he had serious concerns that the study's ability to provide the kind of analysis required by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals when it remanded FCC rules back to the commission for better justification of proposed diversity efforts. He also suggested that the study was far from an independent analysis. "[W]e contend that a study endorsed by the broadcast and newspaper lobbies, and carried out by an analyst who has on several occasions expressed support for weakening the very rules he seeks now to evaluate, cannot be substituted for independent research and agency action."
benton.org/node/147183 | Broadcasting&Cable
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COPYRIGHT REFORMERS
[SOURCE: ars technica, AUTHOR: Joe Mullin]
Supporters of copyright reform are hoping that 2013 is the year they get some real momentum going. In the wake of the news that the White House and Federal Communications Commission now support consumers' rights to unlock their cell phones, a new coalition called has launched an effort to repeal the section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that forbids breaking "digital locks." The group has a website called FixTheDMCA.org, which lays out the problem in a simple, graphical way, and provides tools for people to contact their Congressional representatives. The group's goal is to build support for a repeal of section 1201 of the DMCA, the so-called "anti-circumvention" clause. That won't be an easy task, since the entertainment industry has fought hard to make digital lock-breaking illegal. When creating DVD copy-protection, for instance, the industry was keen to make sure that getting around such technology would be illegal.
benton.org/node/147181 | Ars Technica
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DOES APPLE HAVE MONOPOLY APP STORE?
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: John Paczkowski]
Apple has urged a U.S. District Court judge to dismiss a lawsuit claiming it has a monopoly over iOS apps, saying it has done no wrong. Apple argued that requiring developers to sell their apps through its iTunes App Store and nowhere else is not an antitrust violation, nor is charging developers a 30 percent cut of their proceeds for distribution. Just because there are no third-party storefronts peddling discounted iPhone apps doesn’t mean Apple is abusing a monopoly position over iOS apps. The company doesn’t set the price for paid applications. The plaintiffs in the case brought their suit against Apple in 2011, claiming that their inability to legally buy iPhone apps from anywhere but the App Store was proof that Apple is a monopolist.
benton.org/node/147166 | Wall Street Journal
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INTERNET/BROADBAND
TELECOM FIRMS SEEK MUNICIPAL BROADBAND BANS
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Danny Yadron]
Sensing a threat to their business model, telecom companies are pushing more states to curb the spread of publicly funded high-speed Internet access, arguing the networks could squash competition. Time Warner Cable Inc., Windstream Corp., Comcast and AT&T are among the companies that have gotten involved in the push in various states. In Georgia this year, Arkansas-based Windstream is leading the charge for a bill that would outlaw new public broadband service in census tracts where a private company offers some kind of broadband. Small-town mayors and county boards have pushed back, saying they want to build or improve networks because private companies won't. At least 19 states have placed some sort of limit on publicly funded Internet networks. The spread of such legislation comes as Americans are increasingly relying on high-speed Internet the same way earlier generations relied on telephone service or broadcast television.
benton.org/node/147210 | Wall Street Journal
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PRIVACY
MICROSOFT VS GOOGLE
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Jacob Gershman, Shira Ovide]
Massachusetts lawmakers could soon consider a bill that would restrict the commercial use of data gathered while children use computers at public schools. Its stated purpose is protecting privacy. An unnamed focus of the bill—backed by Microsoft -- is Google. The bill, introduced in January, appears to take aim at Google's growing business of providing basic software like email and word processing over the Internet, which, in turn, is a growing threat to Microsoft's cash-cow suite of Office tools. The proposed legislation would prohibit companies that provide schools with "a cloud-computing" service—a digital service accessed via the Web—from using the information gleaned from schoolchildren for advertising or other commercial purposes. Microsoft acknowledges it is behind the Massachusetts legislation and that the bill is aimed at business practices employed by Google. The move opens a new front in a long-running battle between the software rivals in which Microsoft has run advertisements questioning Google's privacy practices and pressed regulators to more closely police Google's activities.
benton.org/node/147208 | Wall Street Journal
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GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS PRIVACY ACT
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Brendan Sasso]
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced legislation that would require police to obtain a warrant before accessing private online communications or mobile location data. Reps. Ted Poe (R-TX) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA) have signed on as co-sponsors of the legislation, the Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act. Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, police only need a subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to read e-mails that are more than 180 days old. Police simply swear an e-mail is relevant to an investigation, and then obtain a subpoena to force an Internet company to turn it over. When lawmakers passed ECPA more than 25 years ago, they failed to anticipate that email providers would offer massive online storage. They assumed that if a person hadn't downloaded and deleted an electronic message within six months, it could be considered abandoned and wouldn't require strict privacy protections.
benton.org/node/147173 | Hill, The
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STORIES FROM ABROAD
ANYONE ELSE FELLING LUCKY?
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: John Paczkowski]
The European Commission’s announcement of $732 million in sanctions against Microsoft is an inevitable and expected comeuppance for the software giant’s failure to comply with the terms of an antitrust settlement requiring it to offer consumers a choice of Web browsers. But it’s also a warning to other companies with which the agency has regulatory issues — one in particular. Google. As EU competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia said today, “Legally binding commitments reached in antitrust decisions play a very important role in our enforcement policy because they allow for rapid solutions to competition problems. Such decisions require strict compliance. A failure to comply is a very serious infringement that must be sanctioned accordingly.” A pat explanation for the EC’s sanctions against Microsoft, but also a clear “feeling lucky, punk?” warning to Google: Don’t make empty promises. Because the financial implications can be staggering: Fines of up to 10 percent of the company’s annual global sales. In Google’s case that’s potentially billions of dollars.
benton.org/node/147187 | Wall Street Journal
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MICROSOFT AND THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Ina Fried]
While everyone else has turned their attention to mobile, European regulators have remained doggedly focused on making sure consumers have plenty of choice of browsers when they bother to boot up their desktop.
The issue seemed passe when the EU revisited it back in 2009 and seems all the more so four years later. Windows and Internet Explorer have continued to lose share over those four years on the desktop itself, and the real growth in the Internet is from billions of mobile devices. To be fair, Microsoft did agree to offer European consumers the option of a ballot to choose which browser they wanted. Even Redmond admits it made a mistake. “We take full responsibility for the technical error that caused this problem and have apologized for it,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We provided the (European) Commission with a complete and candid assessment of the situation, and we have taken steps to strengthen our software development and other processes to help avoid this mistake — or anything similar — in the future.” But, at this point, might regulators want to turn their attention elsewhere?
Consumers certainly have.
benton.org/node/147185 | Wall Street Journal
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MICROSOFT AND THE EU
[SOURCE: Quartz, AUTHOR: Christopher Mims]
Here’s why Microsoft need not care about the €561 million ($732 million) fine: According to its latest 10-Q statement, the company has $51 billion in overseas cash burning a hole in its pocket. That money represents profits earned overseas, much of it in Europe, that Microsoft refuses to bring home to the US because to do so would be give up 35% of it in corporate taxes. Indeed, the not-so-secret history of Microsoft’s acquisition of Luxembourg-based Skype is that the $8.5 billion Microsoft paid for Skype was just a few (giant) bills off the company’s wad of overseas cash. In 2011, Microsoft had just $42 billion in overseas cash holdings, or $9 billion -- an entire Skype’s worth -- less than it does now. Granted, Microsoft is going to miss the half billion dollars in US cash equivalent (if it were repatriated and US taxes paid) that the EU will be extracting from the company, but given that Microsoft can’t figure out what else to do with its cash, that may simply be the cost of maintaining market share for its desktop browser.
benton.org/node/147145 | Quartz
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THE SPEED OF CENSORSHIP
[SOURCE: Technology Review, AUTHOR: ]
The Chinese version of Twitter is a microblogging service called Weibo which launched in 2010. Dan Wallach at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a few pals reveal the results of a detailed study of censorship on Weibo. Their method has allowed them to reconstruct the censorship techniques used by the government, to calculate the number of workers who must be involved and even to discover their daily work schedules. Wallach and co say their data point to a number hypotheses about what’s going on. Since the highest volume of deletions occur within 5-10 minutes of posting, Weibo must be censoring them in near real time. If an average censor can scan around 50 posts a minute, that would require some 1400 censors at any instant to handle the 70,000 posts pouring in. And if they work 8 hour shifts, that’s a total of 4200 censors on the payroll each day. Even then, this work force must have some technological help. Wallach and co say the data suggests Weibo has a number of techniques in operation. The first is keyword alerting. When a keyword appears, the post is immediately flagged for censors.
benton.org/node/147146 | Technology Review
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E5 INVESTIGATION ENDS
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Daniel Thomas]
The five largest European telecoms groups have been cleared of antitrust practices by Europe’s competition regulator following the end of a long-running Brussels probe. The European Commission said that it had closed a preliminary investigation into the extent of group discussions between Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Vodafone, France Telecom and Telecom Italia. The chief executives of the four former state-backed incumbents and Vodafone had met to discuss the development of new technology standards for mobile services, which caused concern among the Brussels competition watchdog. However, the companies had agreed to transfer responsibility for such technical standard setting to trade groups such as the GSMA even before the start of the investigation. The commission said that this was “a positive step that reduces the risk of standard setting work affecting competition negatively”. The group was nicknamed within the industry as the “E5”, which met occasionally although always with the presence of a lawyer taking notes of the discussions. Company executives have acknowledged in the past that the five telecoms groups risked competition complaints given the extent of their business across many of the EU’s 27 member states, with about four-fifths of EU mobile customers buying their mobile subscriptions from one of the four incumbent operators.
benton.org/node/147198 | Financial Times
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EUROPEAN PRIVACY RULES
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: James Fontanella-Khan, Bede McCarthy]
Brussels will be forced to water down tough data protection rules in a move that will come as a relief to tech groups after many of the EU’s member states called for a softer approach to the privacy push. The climbdown will be welcomed by companies that collect large amounts of personal data, such as Google and Facebook, which have lobbied furiously against the proposed regulation, as well as the US government. Washington has repeatedly voiced its concern that the rules, which include the power to fine companies up to 2 per cent of global turnover for breaching onerous data protection standards, were targeted specifically at US technology groups. Resolving the transatlantic dispute over data protection rules could ease the way towards a new EU-US trade agreement over the next two years, which boasts huge commercial potential but is also rife with complications. The plan will be softened after at least nine countries – including the UK, Germany, Sweden and Belgium – said they were opposed to several proposed measures that could add heavy burdens on businesses at a time when EU countries are hoping that data-related companies will help boost economic growth.
benton.org/node/147196 | Financial Times
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