Federal Communications Commission member was in Texas calling for 100% school access to 100 Mbps Internet service by 2015, and one gig by the end of the decade. Commissioner Rosenworcel was in town to speak to the International Society for Technology in Education annual conference. That followed a speech last week in California on the same topic, where she urged her audience to "reboot, reinvigorate and recharge the E-Rate program."
What's in a slogan? To the Federal Trade Commission, which is trying to goad an industry into adopting voluntary guidelines on data privacy issues, a catchy phrase might offer a lot of value.
Take Do Not Track. The FTC made a lot of headway when it coined the term—a riff off Do Not Call—to advocate for stricter online privacy laws. Faced with new regulation, the advertising industry acted preemptively, and worked with the FTC to develop its self-regulatory online ad program that gives consumers the ability to opt-out of targeted ads. Now FTC Commissioner Julie Brill has come up Reclaim Your Name, the slogan of her ongoing, year-old campaign calling for data brokers to give consumers access to their own data on a centralized website. It remains to be seen if a simple slogan can help Commissioner Brill convince that industry to follow her lead. Perhaps the press will help her in her cause?
European television networks often find creative inspiration in the U.S. Now, they also want to cash in on TV the American way.
A lucrative strategy among U.S. free-to-air broadcasters has been to charge "retransmission" fees to pay-TV companies for the right to air their content. The broadcasters have leverage because roughly 90% of Americans have cable or satellite TV, where they often watch free-to-air channels through set-top boxes. Some free-to-air broadcasters, therefore, argue their content should come at a price. Unfortunately, European broadcasters have had a tougher time squeezing retransmission fees from cable and satellite companies. A key reason: It is hard for most broadcasters to restrict access to their content.
But things may be about to change, thanks to increasing demand for high-definition, or HD, channels. Broadcasters have gained negotiating power by offering HD versions of their content that isn't always available via antenna. Pay-TV companies need such channels to entice customers to pay for HD packages.
Verizon Communications is in talks to acquire one, and maybe two, struggling Canadian mobile-phone carriers, as it mulls a push north of the border.
Verizon has signed a nondisclosure agreement with Mobilicity, a small upstart wireless carrier in Canada, in preparation for talks over a possible deal, according to a person familiar with the matter. This person said Verizon executives have told Mobilicity that any talks with the company would be contingent on separate discussions now under way about a possible acquisition by Verizon of Wind Mobile, another small carrier in Canada. It is unclear how Verizon would structure any deal with either company, or what valuation it is putting on either or both privately held companies. A previous expression of interest for Wind, reported earlier this year by The Wall Street Journal, valued the company at about 500 million Canadian dollars ($476 million.)
As privacy and data security heat up on Capitol Hill in the wake of news over the National Security Agency's surveillance programs, a group of the nation's largest telecommunications companies formed the 21st Century Privacy Coalition.
The coalition will be co-chaired by two big-name Washington insiders familiar with privacy and data security issues: former Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz of Davis Polk & Wardwell and former Rep Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) of FaegreBD Consulting, who took on privacy and data security policy when she served as chairwoman of the House subcommittee on commerce, manufacturing and trade. Founding members of the new coalition include AT&T, Comcast, CTIA-The Wireless Association, Directv, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and the U.S. Telecom Association. The coalition will concentrate on updating U.S. privacy and security laws.
The Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau seeks additional comment on certain fees related to inmate calling services (ICS).
Comments in the record in the above-referenced proceeding indicate that ICS providers may charge ICS account holders fees that appear ancillary to making calls, such as account setup fees, account replenishment fees, account refund fees, and account inactivity fees. The Bureau requests that parties provide data and information about such fees. Specifically, the Bureau request that parties identify any Ancillary ICS Fees that ICS providers charge in connection with the provision of interstate ICS, the level of each fee, total amount of revenue received from each fee, and cost of providing the service for which the fee recovers. The Bureau also requests that parties identify any portion of ancillary service costs that are shared or common to provision of other services, and explain how these costs, and recovery of them, are apportioned among the services to which they are shared or common. To evaluate how costs associated with providing ancillary services relate to ICS providers’ overall costs, the Bureau requests additional service provider cost data, discussed below.
The Bureau also notified the public that certain publicly-available inmate calling services (ICS) contracts may be considered as part of the record in this proceeding.
Comments are due July 17, 2013; reply comments due July 24, 2013.
Dish Network is withdrawing its offer to buy up Clearwire’s outstanding shares, calling it quits after Sprint trumped its bid. The path is clear for Sprint to buy up the half of the WiMAX operator it doesn’t already own and take control over Clearwire’s considerable spectrum holdings.
The Pentagon is paying $5 million for virtual battlefield technology to practice and launch offensive cyberattacks, according to government business documents. National security firm Apogee Research was awarded the contract on June 24. The project is part of Plan X, an initiative launched last year under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to rehearse and manage what officials call "cyberwarfare in real-time, large-scale, and dynamic network environments."
[Commentary] In the 21st century, is trying to stay off the radar really possible? The answer is no, unless -- and this is a big hurdle to clear -- you are willing to give up the thousands of conveniences and opportunities that the digital world seduces us with.
If you wanted to be not so much off the grid as off the matrix but still be in the United States, you'd have to be willing to live in a cabin way out in the woods somewhere, have no utilities, spend only cash, grow most of your own food, never, ever, ever get sick and, if you were really serious, break the law by not filing your taxes and being generally unaccountable as a citizen. If that appeals to you then the best of luck to you because it would be, in modern America, very, very difficult to pull it off, and the way things are going, within a few years it will become truly impossible. Why? Because as the recent NSA intelligence gathering revelations demonstrated, if there's some data that might have any bearing whatsoever on national security, homeland security, law enforcement, or taxation, then there's some raving bureaucrat somewhere who wants to pigeonhole said data just in case. Once those little nuggets of data have been collected, collated, and corralled you are in the matrix, er, system forever.
Negotiators at the World Intellectual Property Organization have finalized terms on a copyright treaty that would provide more book access to the world’s blind and visually impaired.
The treaty makes it legal to make copies of copyrighted material accessible to the blind community by converting it to formats such as Braille books, audio recordings or large-print books without first having to seek permission from copyright holders in every instance. Advocates for the visually impaired say that fewer than one percent of all the world’s books are accessible in these formats. The treaty would make it possible for converted texts in a given language to be available in multiple countries.
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