January 2014

Bringing People Together Through Affordable Internet Access

[Commentary] The ICTD -- the International Conference on Information & Communications Technologies and Development – which took place in Cape Town in December 2013, provided a launch platform for a key piece of research by the Alliance For Affordable Internet (A4AI), a new coalition of public sector, NGOs and enterprises including Alcatel-Lucent with a shared aim of seeing affordable access to mobile and fixed-line Internet in the developing world.

Via a combination of advocacy, research and knowledge-sharing, the alliance aims to facilitate the target of the UN-backed Broadband Commission’s target of realizing entry-level broadband services priced at less than 5% of average monthly income. With an estimated two-thirds of people in developing countries unable to access the Internet, the A4AI focuses on creating the conditions for open, efficient and competitive broadband markets via policy and regulatory reform. For example, a key finding of the A4AI report is that for those living on less than USD $2 per day, entry-level broadband costs on average 40% of monthly income. In many countries this figure exceeds 80% or 100%. As a result, hundreds of millions of people are economically denied online access, deepening the digital divide and constraining economic and social progress.

Why Capital New York’s $6,000 paywall will probably work

[Commentary] When Politico’s owner bought Capital New York, the move came as a surprise to many of us, but it could certainly be seen as a concrete assertion of the viability of Politico’s business model, which is hybrid but features aggressively priced premium subscriptions -- paywalls, and expensive ones. Actually, the secret to Capital New York is that it only has to sell 600 or so subscriptions to break even, and it’s probably going to do better than that.

Vox and Ezra Klein: testing the limits of the digital-news expansion

[Commentary] Last November, Vox turned heads when it bought Curbed Network, a trio of cheeky real estate, food, and style sites, for a mix of cash and stock valued at $20-$30 million. At the time, a new era of consolidation was reported to be taking hold among a new cadre of digital powers, Vox being foremost among them. Reuters writer Felix Salmon quoted Henry Blodget, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The Business Insider saying: “Somebody’s going to build the Time Inc of digital media.” The idea being that costs for back-office, technology, sales and other functions can be shared among a growing number of titles. The Vox acquisition of Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein and his team, which includes Melissa Bell and Dylan Matthews, as well as Matthew Yglesias of Slate, does nothing to throw cold water on that theory.

The story on journalism’s print side is one of retrenchment or, at best, holding on for dear life. The one bold experiment in print expansion has already hit a wall. Print is still basically a disaster area. Meanwhile, a few digital publishers are succeeding, or least expanding. Even if the number of winners is small, their success stands in sharp contrast to a difficult landscape for the news generally. And here’s where things get interesting. Ezra Klein told David Carr that the goal of the site is to go beyond politics and policy and serve as a prism on the rest of the news. That sounds valuable. The question is whether it can also be profitable. It is beyond question that a new generation of digital journalism has arrived. The growth of Vox, for instance, feels measured, deliberate, and organic. Now it is about to learn whether its model and popularity can be translated to policy analysis and some as-yet-to-be-determined take on public-interest news.

Snowden: NSA conducts industrial espionage too

The US National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will grab any intelligence it can get its hands on regardless of its value to national security, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden said.

Snowden said the NSA does not limit its espionage to issues of national security and he cited German engineering firm, Siemens, as one target. "If there's information at Siemens that's beneficial to US national interests -- even if it doesn't have anything to do with national security -- then they'll take that information nevertheless," Snowden said. Snowden also told the German public broadcasting network he no longer has possession of any documents or information on NSA activities and has turned everything he had over to select journalists. He said he did not have any control over the publication of the information.

Ericsson and Samsung reach agreement on licensing terms

Ericsson and Samsung have reached an agreement on global patent licenses between the two companies.

The cross license agreement covers patents relating to GSM, UMTS, and LTE standards for both networks and handsets. Ericsson is committed to licensing its standard-essential patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms for the benefit of the industry. It believes that licensing according to FRAND principles strikes the appropriate balance between incentivizing companies to innovate and contribute technology to open standards and maintaining the overall royalty rates at a reasonable level to allow new entrants access to the market.

Sprint ramps up LTE in 40 new markets, but still nothing in SF, Seattle

Sprint continues to add new small cities and towns to its LTE footprint by the dozen, but two of the largest and most tech-focused cities in the country, San Francisco and Seattle, still haven’t seen a lick of LTE coverage.

This is getting embarrassing. Sprint said it just rolled out LTE in 40 new markets, including some sizable cities like Milwaukee, Salt Lake City and Providence (RI). The carrier is now bragging about a footprint encompassing 340 markets, but that boast is open to interpretation. For instance, in its list of cities, Sprint counts the borough of Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn/The Bronx as four separate markets, while most of us tend to think of them as one city New York.

BitTorrent throttling in US creeps back up

Most US Internet users enjoy unfettered access to the Web. But that could be changing, if the upwardly creeping percentage of throttled BitTorrent users is any indicator.

For more than five years, a Google-backed organization called Measurement Lab has offered a throttling detection program called Glasnost. The latest data from M-Lab, compiled by TorrentFreak, shows that 14 percent of US Glasnost users experienced slower speeds while using BitTorrent between December 2012 and December 2013. The United States fared well overall, ranking 10th among countries where at least 100 tests were performed. But compared to 2013 data, US service providers appear to be slowing down a greater percentage of BitTorrent connections. Cox, for instance, throttled 13 percent of connections over the last year, compared to 6 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Verizon jumped from 3 percent to 6 percent over the same period, though its percentages are still the lowest of the major service providers. Comcast, whose large-scale BitTorrent throttling in 2007 inspired M-Lab's research, jumped to 13 percent in the last year, from just 3 percent in the first quarter of 2012.

Tech, telecom vendors spend millions on lobbying in DC

Google, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon Communications ranked among the top spenders on US government lobbying in 2013, with Apple and Facebook increasing their lobbying expenses significantly, according to year-end lobbying reports.

Comcast ranked fifth among all organizations in US government lobbying spending through the first three quarters of 2013, and the company spent $20.7 million for the full year, compared to $14.7 million in 2012, according to lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Office of the Clerk in the US House of Representatives. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group representing cable TV and broadband providers, ranked ninth through the first three quarters, and spent $19.9 million for the full year. AT&T ranked 11th, Google 13th and Verizon 17th in lobbying expenses for the first three quarters.

"Policymaking in Washington is all about how much money you can throw around," said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project director. "These tech guys are increasingly willing to spend whatever it takes to buy what they want."

Yes, the right is behind on campaign tech. But it’s seizing the mantle on tech policy.

When it comes to technology, Republicans are often said to lag behind Democrats. Conservatives are still learning to utilize voter data, a key liberal weapon in the last presidential race, to their advantage. Some GOP operatives say privately that the party remains dominated by a consultant class that's less than adept with the latest political technology. Yet even if they aren't quite as technically nimble on the campaign trail as their liberal counterparts, Republicans are starting to get in front of tech-related issues in an important way. It may not flip the outcome of any races anytime soon, but a growing Republican focus on tech may lead to a broader identity shift for the GOP that helps it draw in more money, more natural constituencies -- and perhaps more victories.

The Republican National Committee took a big step in that direction with a vote rejecting the National Security Agency's bulk phone records collection. With the resolution, which calls the program "an intrusion on basic human rights," conservatives reversed a decade-long tradition (at least) of defending the spy agency from criticism. Not a single committee member opposed the vote, as MSNBC's Benjy Sarlin pointed out. That's remarkable when, as recently as last summer, the measure failed to get enough support for a vote at all. The resolution's passage officially puts the party on the right side of the surveillance issue for civil libertarians who accuse the NSA of an unconstitutional privacy violation.

Enough is enough, Silicon Valley must end its elitism and arrogance

[Commentary] When computers were just for nerds and large corporations, Silicon Valley’s elite could get away with arrogance, insularity and sexism. In most industries, discriminating on the basis of gender, race, or age would be considered illegal. Yet in the tech industry, venture capitalists routinely show off about their “pattern recognition” capabilities. They say they can recognize a successful entrepreneur, engineer, or business executive when they see one. The pattern always resembles Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or them: a nerdy male.

Women, blacks, and Latinos are at a disadvantage as are older entrepreneurs. VCs openly admit that they only fund young entrepreneurs and claim that older people can’t innovate. Silicon Valley has an important role to play in solving the world’s problems. It is the epicenter of innovation. Most technologists I know have a social conscience and want to do whatever they can to make the world a better place. Yet the power brokers -- most venture capitalists, super-rich angel investors, and CEOs consistently show a disregard for social causes. They display a high level of arrogance, demand tax cuts for themselves, and have a don’t-care attitude. As demonstrated by the Perkins letter, this sends the wrong message to the world and holds Silicon Valley back. It is time for the Silicon Valley elite to smell the coffee and realize that the world has changed -- and that they must too. It is time for tech entrepreneurs to focus on solving big problems and giving back to the world.

[Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Innovation and Research at Singularity University]

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