September 2013

Video isn’t breaking the internet: The industry giants are

[Commentary] We’re not nearing some technical tipping point where Netflix, YouTube, Hulu or even pay TV’s on-demand applications are about to break the web. No, it’s worse. We’re at the point where the web giants, Internet service providers, backbone providers and content companies are all trying to make their own set of rational decisions about delivering video to avoid having their servers or network assets sit idle while also trying to avoid over-investment. And as a result, consumers are stuck in the middle with no way to know what’s wrong or who’s at fault when their online video stream sucks. So whether it’s a peering battle between Verizon and Cogent that causes a poor Netflix experience or an inability to get a high quality YouTube stream at lunchtime, the consumer experience can sometimes feel like an afterthought. The problem is that video delivery on the web is fragmented.

Media doesn't hold back on President Obama

[Commentary] In recent months, and especially since the start of the Syria mess, President Barack Obama has been enduring some of the toughest and most widespread press criticism of his four-and-a-half years as President.

It isn’t just coming from the usual suspects on the right. Increasingly, the skepticism is coming from the center and even from the left — from White House reporters, progressive editorial boards, foreign policy experts and MSNBC hosts. And President Obama has mostly himself to blame for the recent wave of media negativity (although the Republicans have been glad to lend a hand). To hear the press tell it, his handling of the Syria crisis has been confusing and contradictory at best, making him appear weak on the international stage. His Administration’s persecution of whistleblowers and surveillance of the press are at odds with the promises he made as a candidate. His inability to push a progressive agenda through congress makes him appear ineffective.

How Al Jazeera America Tackled the Crisis Over Syria

In its coverage of the Syrian crisis, the fledgling Al Jazeera America cable news channel provided viewers with content that often resembled what Americans saw on other US cable news outlets, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center.

The showdown over Syria's chemical weapons is the first mega-story to break since Al Jazeera America's much-publicized launch on Aug. 20. One major question was whether the channel-an offshoot of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera network-would present news largely through a US perspective or provide an alternative, more global, view of events. The findings in this report suggest that if Syrian coverage is any indication, Al Jazeera America is targeting its programming at the domestic US audience its owner has long tried to reach. The analysis of cable coverage during a crucial week in the Syria story found that in a number of areas-where stories originated, the focus of stories, key messages in stories and the mix of reporting and opinion-Al Jazeera America was largely in sync with its US cable news competitors, most often CNN.

The White House to Host Convening on Food Marketing to Children

The White House, led by First Lady Michelle Obama and the White House Domestic Policy Council, will host a convening about food marketing to children.

Let’s Move!, the First Lady’s initiative to ensure all our children grow up healthy, works to make the healthy choice the easy choice for American families. Mrs. Obama will speak to key stakeholders engaged on the issue of food marketing to children, including food and media industry executives, advocates, parent leaders, government agency representatives and researchers. The convening’s goal is to create a constructive dialogue and collaborative process for developing real solutions that support families in making healthier choices, including leveraging the power of marketing to promote healthy products and decreasing the marketing of unhealthy products to kids.

The Internet of things will save the US from the great stagnation

Innovation guru Michael Mandel estimates that the “internet of things”—the increasing number of machines equipped with internet-connected sensors—will expand the US economy by $600 billion and $1.4 trillion in 2025, roughly the equivalent of boosting GDP by 2% to 5% over the intervening time period.

That could be the difference between so-so growth to the kind of stable growth that drives down debt and unemployment. More broadly, the argument he’s making is a reply to economists like Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen who fear that the big gains in productivity that supported an expanding middle class and the modern welfare state won’t be replicated anytime soon. This has major social repercussions—namely a scenario known as the great stagnation. The internet, for all the ways its changed our lives, has offered its gains largely in the form of consumer surplus—free stuff on the internet you used to pay for, in short—that is great and important but not necessarily money in your pocket. Today’s internet of things is limited to consumer surplus. But the future internet of things will be a different beast, because by definition it takes the internet out of the world of abstraction and into industries—manufacturing, energy, transportation—where productivity gains would have a more tangible impact.

US Government Blew $321 Million on Redundant IT Programs

When you have an information technology budget as large as that of the United States government, monitoring expenditures can be tough. And $82 billion is a beast of an annual budget. So many agencies, so many allocations. How do you ensure that you’re not doubling up or spending on redundant programs? Well, if you’re the federal government, you don’t. You blow hundreds of millions of dollars on duplicative IT programs and then wait for the Government Accountability Office to apprise you of them. To wit, a new GAO study that found 12 redundant IT investments at three key federal agencies — the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services. Between 2008 and 2013, these agencies spent $321 million on programs the GAO determined to be potentially duplicative. Among them: Four overlapping enterprise information security investments at the HHS, and a pair of dueling dental care management programs at the DOD.

Here’s the case for stricter regulation of broadband incumbents

A Q&A with Public Knowledge's Harold Feld. Feld was criticized by American Enterprise Institute's Jeffrey Eisenach in an earlier interview. Here Feld is asked to respond to some of Eisenach's arguments.

The Internet isn’t making us dumb. It’s making us angry.

In a study of 70 million posts on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, Rui Fan and a team of others at Beihan University tracked the spread of joy, sadness, anger and disgust across the social network. According to the MIT Technology Review, they found that angry tweets were far more likely to be retweeted by others — or be the subject of angry responses — up to three degrees away from the original user. Joy, disgust and sadness weren't nearly as influential over others, the researchers learned.

Mexico sees its first open-source village cellphone network

The communications revolution that swept the globe missed the Zapotec village of Talea de Castro high in the mountains of southern Mexico, where making any sort of call meant trudging to a community telephone line and paying what could be a day's wages for a crackly five-minute conversation. All that has changed, thanks to an ingenious plan that backers hope can bring connections to thousands of other small, isolated villages around the world. Using simple radio receivers, a laptop and relatively inexpensive Internet technologies, the people of the village have leapfrogged into the 21st century by setting up what amounts to their own mini-telecom company — one capable of handling 11 cellphone calls at a time at a small fraction of what they used to pay.

Native Advertising Workshop

Federal Trade Commission
December 4, 2013
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/09/nativeads.shtm
Agenda: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/11/nativeads.shtm

The Federal Trade Commission will host a workshop on December 4, 2013 in Washington, DC 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 Commission 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?

Agenda

9:15 Registration

10:00 Welcoming Remarks
Edith Ramirez
Chairwoman, Federal Trade Commission

10:15 A Historical FTC Perspective: Advertorials, Infomercials, and Paid Endorsements
Lesley Fair
Staff Attorney
Bureau of Consumer Protection, Federal Trade Commission

10:30 The Wall Between Editorial and Advertising: Its Origins and Purpose
Nicholas Lemann
Professor of Journalism
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

11:00 Panel 1
Sponsored Content in Digital Publications: The forms it takes and how it operates

Moderator:
Laura M. Sullivan, Staff Attorney
Division of Advertising Practices, Federal Trade Commission

Panelists:
Tessa Gould, Director of HuffPost Partner Studio
Huffington Post

Todd R. Haskell, Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer, Hearst Magazines Digital Media
Hearst Corporation

Lisa LaCour, Vice President of Global Marketing
Outbrain Inc.

Chris Laird, Marketing Director, Brand Operations
The Procter & Gamble Company

Ash Nashed, Chief Executive Officer, Adiant

Adam Ostrow, Chief Strategy Officer, Mashable, Inc.

Steve Rubel, Executive Vice President and Chief Content Strategist
Edelman

12:30 Lunch Break

1:30
Lessons of Nauru
Bob Garfield, Co-host of On the Media and MediaPost columnist

2:00 Panel 2
Consumer Recognition and Understanding of Native Advertisements

Moderator:
Michael Ostheimer, Staff Attorney
Division of Advertising Practices, Federal Trade Commission

Panelists:
Jamie Cole, Creative Director, Red Barn Media Group

Michelle De Mooy, Senior Associate, National Priorities
Consumer Action

David J. Franklyn, Professor, Director of the McCarthy Institute for IP and Technology Law
University of San Francisco School of Law

Dan Greenberg, Chief Executive Officer, Sharethrough
Co-Chair of Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Native Advertising Taskforce

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Lecturer in Residence and Director of Information Privacy Programs, Berkley Law & Technology Center

Jeff Johnson, Principal Consultant, UI Wizards

3:30 Break

3:45 Panel 3 The Way Forward on Transparency: A discussion of best practices

Moderator:
Mary K. Engle, Associate Director
Division of Advertising Practices, Federal Trade Commission

Panelists:
Laura Brett, Staff Attorney
National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus

Sid Holt, Chief Executive, American Society of Magazine Editors

Amy Ralph Mudge, Partner, Venable LLP

Jon Steinberg, President and Chief Operating Officer, BuzzFeed Inc.

Robin Riddle
Global Publisher of WSJ Custom Content Studios, The Wall Street Journal

Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen

Mike Zaneis, Senior Vice President, Public Policy and General Counsel,
Interactive Advertising Bureau

5:30 Closing Remarks
Jessica Rich, Director
Bureau of Consumer Protection, Federal Trade Commission

Read more about FTC Native Advertising Workshop (updated)

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