The Federal Communications Commission has adopted a Memorandum Opinion and Order to resolve a complaint by Bloomberg against Comcast Cable that Comcast violated neighborhooding condition of the Comcast/NBCU transaction, deleting it as an agenda item for its Sept 26 meeting.
Edits and proposals continued to circulate around the Federal Communication Commission's eighth floor (where the commissioners reside) over the issue of when the UHF TV station discount would no longer be in effect, according to FCC sources. However, industry sources were saying Sept 26 would likely be the effective trigger date. The process was described as still in flux by all those sources. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, if it is voted at the FCC's public meeting on Sept 26 as planned, is expected to exempt deals currently submitted to the FCC -- most notably Tribune/Local TV, which would be affected by the change. But it is unclear whether the trigger will be Sept 26 or when the order is finally voted, which would take at least a couple of months. That issue was said to be the source of the "flux." The FCC is almost certain to vote to eliminate the discount, which counts only 50% of a UHF station toward the FCC's 39% cap on one broadcast group owner's national audience reach.
Belo shareholders voted in a special meeting to approve a deal for Gannett to acquire Belo for $13.75 a share - or about $1.5 billion in cash - and assume $715 million of Belo's debt. The deal needed a two-thirds majority of the votes to be approved.
Once completed, Gannett's TV station portfolio will jump from 23 to 43. The company, which owns USA TODAY, will become the fourth-largest owner of network TV affiliates in households reached, behind CBS, Fox Broadcasting and Sinclair Broadcast Group.
HBO has long said that it has no plans to sell subscriptions directly over the Internet, but Netflix CFO David Wells suggested that the cable channel should rethink that decision.
“We believe that if they were direct-to-consumer, there would be materially more subscribers that would pay for it in the US,” Wells said. Wells made that suggestion when asked about Netflix’s addressable domestic market, which he said was between 60 million and 90 million subscribers — a number that is just slightly below the roughly 100 million households that pay for TV services in the US. Netflix has made these estimates before — but this was the first time that an executive suggested that these numbers could be within reach for HBO as well if it decided to embrace standalone subscriptions. However, HBO has consistently said that it is not interested in that kind of distribution model.
[Commentary] The New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program and Open Technology Institute jointly submitted recommendations to the Federal Communications Commission outlining ways to modernize the Commission’s E-rate program. Our recommendations underscore a more modern understanding of how connectivity is leveraged by schools, libraries and communities throughout the country.
While capacity has been lagging in schools and libraries throughout the country, we increasingly need more of it to meet 21st century demands. Further, we provide several specific recommendations addressing the need for greater program parity. Some of the proposed funding changes put forward by other stakeholders -- such as allocating E-rate dollars to schools on a per-pupil basis -- could actually lead to greater inequity due to the highly variable cost of broadband service across the country. In thinking through alternative funding structures for the program, making sure the funding structure takes into account these variations is crucial. We also caution against tying E-rate funding to specific educational outcomes. Additionally, we urge the FCC to look for ways to promote greater equity in E-rate’s treatment of support for our country’s youngest learners. Currently, the FCC recognizes state definitions of elementary and secondary schooling for funding decisions—unfortunately, in some cases this has led to unequal access to support.
[Lindsey Tepe is a program associate in the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation]
Revelations about the American government’s ongoing electronic surveillance have sent shockwaves across the globe, but few countries have reacted as boldly as Brazil, where lawmakers are currently considering a plan to cut ties — quite literally — with the US.
Previously, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff announced plans to create an undersea fiber-optic cable that would funnel Internet traffic between South America and Europe, bypassing the US entirely. Rousseff also urged legislators to pass an amendment that would force Google, Microsoft, and other US web companies to store data for Brazilian users on servers located within Brazil, while the country's postal service has already begun developing an encrypted domestic email system. Rousseff's proposals rest upon the premise that by routing web traffic away from American soil and keeping data within Brazil, the Brazilian government could more easily control and secure citizens' online information. But experts say the plans would do little to stop the NSA from spying on Brazilian communications, and some worry that they could lead to a more fractured Internet.
A Q&A with California State Sen.
Darrell Steinberg. Gov Jerry Brown (D-CA) signed a bill regarding advertising to minors that also allows them to remove content they post online. The legislation, SB 658, quickly attracted attention for that "eraser" provision which required all Web sites where a California minor is registered to have a way to delete content they themselves have posted. Some have criticized the legislation as out of sync with how the Internet operates or sounding similar to the "right to be forgotten" proposals that have emerged elsewhere in the world. The Washington Post talked to the author of the bill, California Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg. Sen. Darrell Steinberg said that the second part of the bill, the so-called eraser button bill, would require Internet companies to provide an easy-to-use method for a minor to delete a posting or a picture from a Web site before it's transmitted to a third party. “The purpose, of course, is to allow minors — and we've all been teenagers who sometimes act in ways that they regret a few moments or an hour later or makes their parents looking over their shoulder say "why did you post that?" —to remove it before it can be embarrassing to themselves or harmful to somebody else.” Asked how the eraser legislation differs from the delete buttons that most social media sites already have, Sen. Steinberg replied: “I think a lot of young people don't know — it's not always easily accessible to delete and it can still be accessed even if it is deleted I think in many instances with the right kind of technology… And we've seen, whether it's cyber-bullying, whether it's the posting of an inappropriately picture or a derogatory comment about a third party … and this allows them to, yes, if recognized in a very timely manner, to be able to take it back.” He went on to say that it is not always very clear how to use the delete button and that even if something is deleted, that it is potentially retrievable as far as he understands. “Would this stop other people from being able to copy things and repost them? No. We're not overselling the provision for that very reason,” Sen. Steinberg said.
Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, called on the public to help defend his agency's powers as Congress mulls restrictions aimed at protecting privacy.
"We need your help. We need to get these facts out," Alexander said during a cybersecurity summit at the National Press Club. "We need our nation to understand why we need these tools." He warned that if Congress hampers the NSA's ability to gather information, it could allow for terrorist attacks in the United States similar to last week's massacre in a mall in Nairobi, Kenya. "If you take those [surveillance powers] away, think about the last week and what will happen in the future," he said. "If you think it's bad now, wait until you get some of those things that happened in Nairobi."
The leader of the embattled National Security Agency doubled down against calls from Capitol Hill to restrict US government surveillance programs — a campaign he attributed to “sensationalized” reporting and “media leaks.”
On the same day that key Senate lawmakers pledged to bring new oversight to the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander mounted a public defense of his agency: He stressed the intelligence community isn’t “listening to Americans’ phone calls and reading their e-mails,” and he urged technology and government leaders to help “get the facts out” and “get our nation to understand why we need these tools” in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures. Alexander also commended companies for cooperating with the federal government, and he made a plea for more power — particularly to thwart terrorists who have elevated their activities to cyberspace. “Over 950 people were killed in Kenya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan,” Alexander said at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit, referencing recent violence in the region, “and we’re discussing more esoteric things here. Why? Because we’ve stopped the terrorist attacks here.” “We’ve been fortunate, and it’s not been luck,” the general continued. “It’s our military that’s out [front], and it’s our intelligence community back here. They can’t do it without tools. So we’re going to have a debate in this country: Do we give up those tools? I’m concerned we’ll make the wrong decision.”
[Commentary] Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) spoke on the Senate floor for almost 19 hours. The talk is not technically a filibuster — he can't actually block the Senate from going about its business — but symbolically, it's more or less the same thing. The point is to show one's opposition to something through a demonstration of physical will. Which is why you can forgive conservatives for being upset with the mainstream media's coverage of the Cruz affair. When a Democrat like Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis filibusters against abortion restrictions, she is elevated to hero status, her tennis shoes become totems. When Sen Cruz grandstands against Obamacare, he is a laughingstock in the eyes of many journalists on Twitter, an "embarrassment" in the eyes of The New York Times editorial board. Yes, the difference between filibustering and grandstanding plays a part. Equally important is the fact that Cruz's theatrics are frustrating members of his own party. But, part of the disparity in coverage is due to the fact that the mainstream media, generally speaking, don't admire Sen Cruz the way they admired State Sen Davis — or rather, they admire him only insofar as he makes for tragicomic theater, whereas they admired her on the merits.
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