October 2013

The Benton Foundation announced that Rebecca Ellis has joined the organization as Writing Associate for the foundation’s Headlines service. Ellis will report directly to Kevin Taglang, who has recently been promoted to Executive Editor. Since 1996, the Benton Foundation has provided free, daily summaries of articles from the consumer and trade press concerning the quickly-changing communications policy landscape. Taglang will focus on creating new content and resources for Benton’s readers. To help guide Benton’s effort to expand its communications news and analysis services, the foundation announced that Robert A. Cohen recently joined its Board of Directors. Cohen is a leading media management consultant with extensive executive and operations experience. He specializes in developing profitable business strategies for existing digital and print businesses, launching and repositioning media brands, integrating print and digital media, and improving subscription, membership, and retail sales for websites, magazines, newspapers, newsletters and other properties. “The Benton Foundation now has the right people and the right tools in place,” said Executive Director Adrianne Furniss, “to deliver to communications policymakers and advocates the news and analysis they need to advance discussions that ensure that media and telecommunications serve the public interest and enhance our democracy.”

The US may just have lost that much more control over the way the Internet is governed.

Ever since its creation, the core functionality of the Internet has more or less been under the direct supervision of the US, by way of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions Contract. But now, after an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) summit meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay, many of the major bodies responsible for Internet governance are calling for "accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing." Milton Mueller, writing for the Internet Governance Project, reported on this meeting with no small amount of sangfroid, describing the released statement as "an explicit rejection of the US Commerce Department’s unilateral oversight of ICANN.” Mueller attributed this movement away from the US' default oversight to backlash from "the Snowden revelations about NSA spying on the global Internet," and noted that "You know you’ve made a big mistake, a life-changing mistake, when even your own children abandon you en masse."

Gen. Keith Alexander and his senior leadership team at the National Security Agency are angry and dispirited by what they see as the White House's failure to defend the spy agency against criticism of its surveillance programs, according to four people familiar with the NSA chiefs' thinking.

The top brass of the country's biggest spy agency feels they've been left twisting in the wind, abandoned by the White House and left largely to defend themselves in public and in Congress against allegations of unconstitutional spying on Americans. Former intelligence officials closely aligned with the NSA criticized President Barack Obama for saying little publicly to defend the agency, and for not emphasizing that some leaked or officially disclosed documents arguably show the NSA operating within its legal authorities. "There has been no support for the agency from the President or his staff or senior administration officials, and this has not gone unnoticed by both senior officials and the rank and file at the Fort," said Joel Brenner, the NSA's one-time inspector general, referring to the agency's headquarters at Fort Meade (MD). The weak backing from top administration officials has aggravated the relationship between Gen Alexander and the White House, where he has never been warmly embraced.

AT&T and Verizon envision a blended wireless and wireline service world, but regulatory executives from both telecommunications companies said that a lack of regulatory clarity in transitioning their legacy time-division multiplexing (TDM) networks to Internet protocol (IP) is a key barrier.

"In 2009, the Federal Communications Commission set some very ambitious objectives, one of which was a complete shutdown of the TDM architecture and merge to IP by 2017," said James Cicconi, senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs for AT&T. "We're here in 2013 and not a single thing that I can discern has been done to advance that objective." Cicconi said that he has gotten little, if any, guidance from the FCC on the next step. And Craig Silliman, senior vice president of public policy for Verizon, said that while the telco has benefited from a "light touch" regulatory approach for advancing its wireless business, legacy voice service regulations have hindered its wireline moves.