September 2013

Facebook and Twitter Blocked Again in Iran After Respite

Internet users in Iran lost access Sept 17 to Facebook and Twitter, a day after they were surprised to find that they could get on the sites without having to evade a government’s firewall that had blocked direct access to the Web sites for years.

Iranian officials said that a technical glitch resulted in the temporary unblocking of the sites, which the government had walled off from Iranian users in 2009, saying they were being used by antigovernment protesters to organize demonstrations. To reach the sites, many Iranians began using virtual private network, or VPN, software to connect through computers located outside the country, though the telecommunications ministry eventually deployed technology to block much of that kind of traffic as well.

Accelerating Broadband Infrastructure Deployment Across the United States

One way the Administration is working to bolster broadband deployment is by reducing barriers for companies to install broadband infrastructure on Federal properties and roads.

The Federal Government owns or manages nearly 30 percent of all land in the United States, including 10,000 buildings nationwide. These properties can provide excellent pathways for deployment of broadband infrastructure. That’s why, last year, President Obama signed an Executive Order to make broadband construction projects along Federal roadways and properties cheaper and more efficient. The White House announced new steps to build on this progress, including the launch of several new tools and resources to help make it easier for companies to build out high-speed Internet, particularly in underserved communities, and the release of a progress report on implementation of the President’s Executive Order. Both the tools and the report were developed by a Federal Working Group made up of 14 Federal agencies charged with managing Federal properties and roads.

Some of the tools and resources for broadband carriers released, in response to recommendations from the Working Group, include:

An interactive mapping tool that allows carriers and communities to view and identify opportunities to leverage Federal properties for the deployment of high-speed Internet networks. For example this map can help the wireless industry identify Federal rooftops where commercial antennas can be placed to support wireless networks. The national map includes data on broadband availability, environmental or historic information, property locations, and contact information so companies can easily obtain more information. The map was built with open government data, displayed in a new way to make it easier for carriers to take advantage of Federal assets in planning or expanding their networks.
A “Dig Once” guide, which includes best practices and policies to help carriers time their broadband deployment activities to periods when streets are already under construction—an approach that can reduce network deployment costs along Federal roadways by up to 90 percent.
A new broadband inventory toolkit that can serve as a one-stop shop for companies to access permitting forms, lease agreements, and other Federal broadband application documents from various agencies. This web page will make it easier for carriers to navigate the process for accessing Federal lands and properties, which can involve multiple Federal and state agencies that have their own processes for granting access to their assets.

[Ron Hewitt is the Director for the Office of Emergency Communications at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Martha Benson is the Public Buildings Service Assistant Commissioner at the General Services Administration’s Office of Real Property Asset Management. Ron Hewitt and Martha Benson are the Co-Chairs of the Broadband Deployment on Federal Property Working Group.]

CoSN Survey Reveals that 99 Percent of K-12 Districts Need Increased Bandwidth

In the fall of 2013, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) partnered with Market Data Research (MDR) to survey school district leaders from around the country on E-rate, broadband and education networks. The purpose of this data collection is to inform the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on the specific needs of school districts as well as serve as a benchmark for how E-rate’s funding source is used in schools nationwide.

Here are the findings:

99% of districts responding to the survey indicated the need for additional Internet bandwidth and connectivity in the next 36 months.
Only 7.5% of those surveyed felt E-rate funding fully met their district’s needs.
Schools identified cost as the two biggest barriers: a) the on-going monthly costs (71%), and b) cost of capital or upfront/nonrecurring expenses (60%).
20% of respondents identified geography as a barrier to increasing connectivity in their schools and 11% indicated their Internet providers were either at capacity or could not expand capacity.
Only 57% of the elementary schools, and 64% of the secondary schools report 100% of their classrooms have wireless internet connectivity.
More than 37% of the districts participate in consortium buying and some participate in more than one purchasing cooperative.

E-rate Funding Needs Speedy Recovery to Get Schools Up to Par

[Commentary] Seventeen years ago, a bipartisan group of legislators thrust American classrooms into the 21st century with their successful championing of the E-Rate – an Internet access program that still brings the world to classrooms and libraries across the United States. However, investment in the E-Rate has slowed at a time when innovation in teaching, educational technology and curriculum has accelerated.

The use of multimedia is improving interactivity and engaging young learners like never before. Virtual learning is skyrocketing. However, live streaming, video content and webcasts require fast Internet connections. E-Rate investment has remained essentially flat since the program’s second year, with the program having to turn down more than $2 billion in internal connections applications in each of the past two years due to insufficient funds. As a result, many of our students are connected to the Internet but at speeds that degrade the ability to make use of it for teaching and learning. Hoping to catch up to the competition by spending the same amount on broadband as 15 years ago is a recipe for failure, leading America to a permanent place at the bottom of the world academic rankings.

Cell Internet Use 2013

63% of adult cell owners now use their phones to go online, a figure that has doubled since Pew first started tracking internet usage on cell phones in 2009. In addition, 34% of these cell internet users say that they mostly go online using their cell phone. That means that 21% of all adult cell owners now do most of their online browsing using their mobile phone—and not some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer. They account for 21% of the total cell owner population. Young adults, non-whites, and those with relatively low income and education levels are particularly likely to be cell-mostly internet users.

Modernizing America’s communications lifeline

[Commentary] One in five Americans is not connected to broadband at home and low-income Americans remain disproportionately on the wrong side of this digital divide.

Among families earning less than $30,000/year, one in three is completely offline, and barely half are connected if you remove smartphones from the equation. We need to make sure that low-income Americans, in both urban and rural areas, aren’t missing out on the benefits modern communications, from searching and applying for jobs online, to working from home when a child is sick, to taking classes online, consulting with doctors remotely, or accessing essential government services. This is why it is so critical that we have an efficient and effective Lifeline program. The FCC’s Lifeline Broadband Pilot, currently underway, is testing strategies for increasing broadband adoption among low-income consumers through 14 selected projects, within 21 states and Puerto Rico, using both wireline and wireless technologies. The data the Pilot produces will guide us all as we consider the future of Lifeline and in Congress, the Broadband Adoption Act would allow households that qualify for Lifeline support to choose support for landline service, mobile service or broadband. All of us must work together to ensure that the United States remains a global leader in the digital age and that no American is left unconnected. Closing our digital divide and providing a modern communications lifeline will go a long way toward ensuring that our nation is a worldwide leader in the generations to come.

The Definition of Advertising Has Never Been More Unclear

[Commentary] For most of the past 100 years, if a marketer said he needed a new advertising campaign, everybody knew what that meant. The machine turned on. The marketer called the agency of record’s account team. The account team composed a brief capturing the strategy and called in the wild and wooly creatives to bring it to life. The writers and designers applied their art to one or more of these four finite canvases: the television commercial, full-page print ad, radio ad or billboard. Maybe they would sprinkle in a few coupons. The public played along, too; with no ad blockers or DVRs, they just consumed advertising (or ignored it) en masse. It all just worked. But it doesn’t anymore. Now, there is no machine or even consensus on the basic definition of advertising. And that is the source of both opportunity and crisis.

[Rothenberg is the president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau]

FTC Native Advertising Workshop on December 4, 2013 Will Explore the Blurring of Digital Ads With Digital Content

The Federal Trade Commission will host a workshop on December 4, 2013 to examine the practice of blending advertisements with news, entertainment, and other content in digital media, referred to as “native advertising” or “sponsored content.”

Increasingly, advertisements that more closely resemble the content in which they are embedded are replacing banner advertisements – graphical images that typically are rectangular in shape – on publishers’ websites and mobile applications. The workshop will bring together publishing and advertising industry representatives, consumer advocates, academics, and government regulators to explore changes in how paid messages are presented to consumers and consumers’ recognition and understanding of these messages. The workshop builds on previous FTC initiatives to help ensure that consumers can identify advertisements as advertising wherever they appear. This includes recent updates to the Search Engine Advertising guidance, the Dot Com Disclosures guidance, and the Endorsements and Testimonials Guides, as well as decades of law enforcement actions against infomercial producers and operators of fake news websites marketing products. The FTC invites the public to submit original research, recommendations for topics of discussion, and requests to participate as panelists. The Commission also invites the submission of examples and mock-ups that can be used for illustration and discussion at the workshop.

Topics the workshop may cover include:

What is the origin and purpose of the wall between regular content and advertising, and what challenges do publishers face in maintaining that wall in digital media, including in the mobile environment?
In what ways are paid messages integrated into, or presented as, regular content and in what contexts does this integration occur? How does it differ when paid messages are displayed within mobile apps and on smart phones and other mobile devices?
What business models support and facilitate the monetization and display of native or integrated advertisements? What entities control how these advertisements are presented to consumers?
How can ads effectively be differentiated from regular content, such as through the use of labels and visual cues? How can methods used to differentiate content as advertising be retained when paid messages are aggregated (for example, in search results) or re-transmitted through social media?
What does research show about how consumers notice and understand paid messages that are integrated into, or presented as, news, entertainment, or regular content? What does research show about whether the ways that consumers seek out, receive, and view content online influences their capacity to notice and understand these messages as paid content?

FTC Seeks Public Comment on kidSAFE’s Proposed Safe Harbor Program Under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule

The Federal Trade Commission is seeking public comment on a proposed safe harbor program that the kidSAFE Seal Program has submitted for Commission approval under the agency’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule.

The Rule includes a “safe harbor” provision designed to encourage increased industry self-regulation in this area. Under this provision, industry groups and others may ask the Commission to approve self-regulatory guidelines that implement the protections of the Rule. Companies that comply with the FTC-approved guidelines receive safe harbor from agency enforcement action under the Rule. The FTC’s COPPA Rule requires that operators of commercial websites and online services directed to children under the age of 13, or general audience websites and online services that knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, must post comprehensive privacy policies on their sites, notify parents about their information practices, and obtain parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing any personal information from children under the age of 13. Since the Rule took effect on April 21, 2000, five groups – Aristotle, Inc., the Children’s Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, the Entertainment Software Rating Board, TrustE, and PRIVO – have received Commission approval for their safe harbor programs. In a Federal Register notice to be published shortly, the FTC is seeking public comment about the proposed kidSAFE program; whether the proposed program provides “the same or greater protections for children” as those contained in the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule; whether the mechanisms used to assess operators’ compliance are effective; whether incentives for operators’ compliance with the guidelines are effective; and whether the program provides adequate means for resolving consumer complaints.

The comment period will last for 30 days, until Oct. 18, 2013.

Just how connected do you want to be?

[Commentary] If all the connectivity efforts of today did in fact become successful, a decade from now, we are looking at connected traffic lights, sensor-laden parking lots and roads, connected everything at home, locks that can be locked and unlocked digitally, pills with digestible silicon, smart tattoos and washable sensors in fabrics. Many of these are commercial or nearly commercial today and will likely attain reasonable to massive scale over the next decade. Of course, there are several impediments to truly seamless connected everything. But, given the level of interest and efforts, we will get closer and closer to this utopian connected world for sure. A lot of good things will come out of it – automation at home making things easier for us, personalization that will allow our devices to be so much more proactive and useful, global energy savings, better healthcare, etc. But, as we look forward to all that, what happens to our privacy and the security of the information we generate, access and share? It’s a good thing that “social” is teaching us how to be less private and more revealing – because, it’s about to get a lot worse.

[Narayanan is an engineer at Google]

Benton

Search