March 2013

T-Mobile USA Merger With MetroPCS Clears Last Regulatory Hurdle

Deutsche Telekom AG’s plan to merge its U.S. unit T-Mobile USA with MetroPCS Communications cleared the last regulatory hurdle, leaving the decision to MetroPCS shareholders next month. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States approved the deal, Bonn-based Deutsche Telekom. The merger of the nation’s fourth- and fifth-largest wireless carriers was cleared by the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice last week.

FCC: Sprint buyout decision likely on track for late May

Sprint's buyout by Japanese carrier Softbank should be right on track for a late May conclusion, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, hinted on March 20. Specifically, the FCC head said that his organization's review is on schedule with the typical 180-day review period, after which the FCC hands down a yay or nay decision. In this case, the 180-day count ends on May 29.

People will give up their personal info if you give them a good reason

We face a constant barrage of requests for our personal information every day, and more often than not our first concern is who has access to that information and how will it be used. At GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference, a panel of experts from the worlds of biology, location analytics and data science talked about how the concepts of personalization and privacy concerns don’t have to be at odds with each other. People will give up their personal information if you give them something they find personally valuable, Ken Chahine of Ancestry.com, Naveen Jain of Inome and David Shim of Placed agreed. Just like people used to be afraid of browser cookies and their implications for privacy and now accept them as standard, Shim, Placed’s founder and CEO, said he believes our attitudes toward our location data will undergo the same transition once people understand the inherent value of what they’re getting back in exchange for what they’re giving up.

Simon & Schuster will give authors direct access to piracy data for their books

Simon & Schuster will offer authors data on how and when their books are being pirated online, CEO Carolyn Reidy said. Simon & Schuster, like many other publishers, works with a company called Attributor “to track and remove infringing copies of digital, audio and print titles published by Simon & Schuster from online sites.” Authors will now have access to Attributor’s data through the Simon & Schuster Author Portal, which also lets them track their book sales. Literary agents will have access to the data as well.

AT&T Told to Pay $27.5 Million After Losing Two-Way Trial

AT&T was told to pay $27.5 million for infringing a Colorado company’s patents for controlling how audio or video is streamed online.

AT&T’s U-verse TV services infringed two patents owned by Two-Way Media LLC, the federal jury in San Antonio said. The jury rejected AT&T’s efforts to have the patents deemed invalid. The Two-Way patents cover live streaming technology as well as ways to record detailed usage data by customers, according to the company’s lawyers at Susman Godfrey. Boulder, Colorado-based Two-Way had sued Akamai Technologies Inc. and Limelight Networks over the same technology; those two companies settled. The trial focused on three Two-Way patents. The jury found U-Verse infringed two of them. AT&T said it would seek to have the verdict overturned.

Supreme Court Copyright Decision May Spur Congress to Revise Laws

A day after a U.S. Supreme Court decision allowed books and movies bought legally abroad to be resold in the U.S., members of House Judiciary Committee raised the possibility that the decision's biggest impact could be to spur Congress to revamp the nation’s copyright laws.

Already examining those laws because of concerns that digital technology has left them badly outdated, members of the House Intellectual Property and Internet Subcommittee suggested the high court decision provides one more reason to act. “Yesterday’s opinion raises some concerns,” said Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA). Rep. George Holding (R-NC) repeatedly questioned Registrar of Copyrights Maria Pallante about the effect of the court decision.

A Farewell to Commissioner McDowell and a Nod to the "Rational Regulator"

[Commentary] While in the works for a while, today's formal announcement by Federal Communications Commissioner member Robert McDowell that he will be departing the FCC leaves a hole in the FCC's ranks that will be difficult to fill.

In many regards, Commissioner McDowell was a throwback to an earlier time, both at the FCC and in Washington, in that his tenure was distinguished not just by his congenial nature, but by an abiding adherence to his regulatory principles, rather than to reaching a particular result. While I suspect he might bristle at being described as a "rational regulator," preferring instead to be known as a "devoted deregulator," Commissioner McDowell represented a common-sense approach to the communications industry and the business of regulating it.

School Districts Seek Faster Internet Connections

Teachers across the country want to personalize learning through technology, districts are putting 1-to-1 computing initiatives in place, tablet devices are flooding into classrooms, and the 2014-15 deadline for online testing under the Common Core State Standards is drawing near. But none of those approaches or plans is possible without high-speed broadband connections.

The Federal Communications Commission has made it a priority to get such fast, reliable connections to every school. It released a national broadband plan in 2010 with recommendations to achieve that goal, and it is slowly modernizing regulations for the federal E-rate program, which reimburses districts for many connectivity expenses. Though nearly every school is connected to the Internet, not all of them have the kind of connections that allow teachers and students to make full use of digital tools. Schools should have at least 100 megabits per second for their broadband connections by 2014-15, says a report issued last year by the State Educational Technology Directors Association, referring to the speed at which information is delivered to a computer. That's the same speed that the assessment coalitions behind online testing of the common-core standards suggest. But many schools do not have such high-speed connections, says Douglas Levin, the executive director of the Glen Burnie, Md.-based SETDA. Even worse, he says, some think they do—and are paying for such service—without really having it available.

How hard should it be for the government to read your e-mail?

In 1986, it would have been strange to keep an email for longer than six months. First of all, not that many people -- 10 million, maybe, compared to hundreds of millions today -- had email accounts. And for those that did, keeping email that long would have been a luxury, an egregious use of limited storage space. Service providers didn’t have space to keep back-ups of old emails on their servers: They deleted them. That was the world in which Congress first legislated what access law enforcement could have to email and other electronic communications, when it passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

And in that world, it seemed perfectly reasonable to give fresh e-mails -- communications younger than 180 days -- strong legal protections, while worrying less about emails that hung around for longer than six months. The result is that, under current law, government officials don’t need a warrant to get access to all those old emails you’ve archived, ignored, deleted, or let hang out forever in your inbox. And if they subpoena your email, they can get all of them -- not just the ones that might be relevant to their investigation. Civil liberties and Internet privacy advocates have been pushing for years to reform ECPA, the bill that covers all this access, which was last updated in the post-9/11 PATRIOT Act.

Executives Press European Antitrust Chief on Google

With the European inquiry into Google’s search engine practices entering a third year, a group of 11 web businesses sent a joint letter to Europe’s top antitrust official, asking him to compel Google to change its business practices to ensure that smaller rivals are not unfairly harmed.

The letter, organized by one of the original complainants in the case, a British online shopping service called Foundem, asked the European competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, to take a hard line in ongoing negotiations with Google to produce “effective and future-proof” concessions that will protect small European competitors. “We are becoming increasingly concerned that effective and future-proof remedies might not emerge through settlement discussions alone,” the letter signed by the group stated. “In addition to materially degrading the user experience and limiting consumer choice, Google’s search manipulation practices lay waste to entire classes of competitors in every sector where Google chooses to deploy them.”

Benton

Search