The Federal Communications Commission announced that in January 2014 it will hold its first significant spectrum auction in more than five years. The FCC said that it will auction off a 10MHz portion of nationwide spectrum known as the PCS H block on January 14, setting a minimum price of $1.56 billion. Some of the proceeds will go toward creating a mobile network for police, fire and other first responders.
A Q&A with Jeffrey Eisenach, who will lead the new Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Eisenach is an economist who has spent time at the Federal Trade Commission, the Office of Management and Budget, and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. James Glassman, the founding executive director of the George W. Bush Institute and author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, will join the center as a visiting fellow. The center will disseminate its work through a new blog, TechPolicyDaily.com, which will feature the work of Eisenach, Glassman and a number of affiliated scholars.
Free Press, the American Cable Association, and Rainbow PUSH filed petitions to deny all or part of Sinclair/Allbritton station deal. ACA is targeting all the stations, Free Press the four involved in sharing agreements, and Rainbow Push a single station, but is seeking a decision that would have impact on all the others. In filings with the Federal Communications Commission, the groups took aim at the spin-offs required by FCC local ownership rules. They argue the spin-offs are in name only and allow Sinclair to continue to control the stations.
Twitter announced its plans to go public, fittingly, in a tweet. But 140 characters didn’t begin to answer the many questions for Silicon Valley, Wall Street or Washington as the microblogging service prepares for its much anticipated IPO. Here are five questions for Washington policymakers as the company moves toward its IPO.
[Commentary] Joel Klein, the chief executive of Amplify and an executive vice president of News Corporation, says education is “ripe for disruption.” Entrepreneurs sound boldly unconventional when they talk about disrupting an industry, but they also sound as if they’re willing to break something in order to fix it — or just to profit from it. Klein, who was chancellor of New York City’s public schools from 2002 to 2011, begins from the premise that our schools are already broken.
Republican leaders in the House Commerce Committee are opposing the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) attempt to change the way it calculates the viewership of some television stations.
Reps. Fred Upton (R-MI) and Greg Walden (R-OR), the chairs of the panel and its subcommittee on Communications and Technology, wrote to acting FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn asking her not to change rules that determine when a group of television stations hit the limit for total national audience. “While we are not convinced that the existing limitations on broadcast ownership as a whole are appropriate or necessary in today’s competitive media marketplace, we have particular apprehension about this proposed change and its effect on the business decisions of broadcast station group owners,” they wrote in the letter.
[Commentary] It was Retransmission Week in Washington, which was very much like Shark Week on Discovery, except that sharks swimming through bloody chum in an eating frenzy are generally more likable than lobbyists circling a congressional hearing room. Two committees — the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet and the House Communications Subcommittee — held hearings that gave pay-TV operators a platform to air their grievances and renew their call for retransmission reform. The National Association of Broadcasters and the American Television Alliance (ATVA), the consortium of pay-TV operators that is leading the charge on retransmission reform, battled it out with old-fashioned display ads in congressional publications and then in back-to-back phoners with the media. And TVNewsCheck even got in on the action, posting a column in which ATVA chief spokesman Brian Frederick challenged NAB's assertion that Time Warner Cable, Dish and DirecTV were purposefully causing retransmission blackout to get the attention of Congress. My big takeaway from the week is that ATVA is making progress, at least in convincing lawmakers that a problem exists. Judging by their comments, I would say there is growing concern about the blackouts that periodically deprive constituents of their favorite broadcast TV shows. “[O]ur top priority will be to protect the interests of consumers,” said Howard Coble (R-NC), chairman of the House judiciary panel. “When there’s a dispute and it results in a blackout, consumers are left with no recourse."
The US Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) awarded grants under the State and Local Implementation Grant Program (SLIGP) to the following states to help in planning for the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet): Florida - $4.9 million, Hawaii - $872,075, Indiana - $2.3 million, Mississippi - $1.5 million, New Mexico $1.8 million, and West Virginia $1.1 million. All the recipients are required to provide a matching contribution of at least 20 percent. Additional grants will be awarded on a rolling basis.
CenturyLink may only be serving Omaha (NE) with a 1 Gbps Fiber to the Home (FTTH) service, but it's keen on seeing what competitive results it produces and whether they can be potentially replicated in other markets. Stewart Ewing, CFO of CenturyLink, said the company will look at the results it gets from this pilot network. "I think we'll use that as a test bed to see again how well we can compete and penetration rates in that market versus other markets where we don't have Fiber to the Home," Ewing said. "If it makes sense to roll out fiber to other areas we'll potentially look at other areas, but that's out in the future as opposed to right now where we want to look at Omaha to see what kind of results we get there."
[Commentary] There’s a quote, often attributed to Ben Franklin, that sums up why America should expand broadband in schools and libraries: “Tell me, and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Without access to the World Wide Web, without being involved in it, digital media literacy simply can’t be taught – and without that, our nation will never fully enter the digital age. We can’t just tell Americans why broadband matters. We have to show each other how it works by teaching it in our schools and libraries and offering it in the neighborhoods they serve. That’s why the E-rate program is a good idea. Connecting classrooms and libraries to the Internet could not be smarter. Well-funded and well-run, the E-rate program can make the digital world real for at least half the population of the United States.
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