February 2014

American Enterprise Institute calls to merge FTC, FCC

The right-leaning American Enterprise Institute wants to merge the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In a comment submitted to the House Commerce Committee, a team of scholars affiliated with the think tank argues that the country’s communications law should be rewritten to combine the “FCC’s industry expertise and capabilities with the generic statutory authority of the FTC.” They criticized the FCC’s current “silo-based” approach, which applies different rules to different forms of communication, like television and telephone service. The agency’s current structure “is a poor fit for the modern, converged, communications marketplace,” they wrote.

Phoning From Prison, at Prices Through the Roof

Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative writes to The Haggler. For most people, talking on the phone is cheap. But for many families with a loved one behind bars, astronomical phone bills mean they have to choose between covering their living expenses and staying in touch. The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission has new rules that will cap the cost of interstate calls at 21 to 25 cents a minute starting on Feb. 11. The FCC also proposed to limit the account fees, but a federal court suspended that proposal after the phone companies sued. While the FCC’s moves constitute significant progress, more than 80 percent of the affected families are not receiving calls across state lines and will thus remain unprotected once the FCC’s regulation goes into effect. In-state calls will continue to be exorbitantly high. One example: Global Tel Link charges families in Alameda County (CA) as much as $12.75 for a 15-minute call from a loved one in the county’s jail. Could the Haggler look into this?

Tech’s Diversity Problem Is Apparent as Early as High School

In three states, not a single girl took the Advanced Placement exam in computer science last year. In eight states, no Hispanic students took it. And in 11 states, no black students took the test. The data -- compiled by Barbara Ericson, director of computing outreach at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing -- illustrates just how deeply the tech industry’s lack of diversity reaches.

It also shows how rapidly the United States is falling behind in educating young people for computing jobs, which are growing more than twice as fast as the average for all occupations. “It matters because we don’t have enough people studying computer science in the United States to fill the projected number of jobs in the field,” Ericson said. Computer science stands out from other math and science courses in its lack of diversity. Over all, just 18.5 percent of students who took the AP exam in computer science were girls, while nearly half of calculus test takers were girls and more than half of biology test takers were girls, Ericson said.

AT&T Sweetens Offer for Family Plans

AT&T, the second largest American phone carrier, said it would offer a cheaper phone plan for families with multiple devices. It was AT&T’s latest big move amid intense competition coming from rivals, especially T-Mobile US.

Under the new plan, AT&T is offering families unlimited minutes, unlimited texting and 10 gigabytes of data to share among themselves. The price for monthly service depends on the number of phone lines in the family. A family of two can pay $130 a month, a family of three can pay $145, a family of four can pay $160 and any additional line after that will cost an extra $15. Customers who are brand-new to AT&T either have to sign up for AT&T’s Next program, which allows the customer to spread payments of the device over up to 26 months; bring their own device; or pay for the full price of the phone. So the new family plan may be more expensive than some of AT&T’s other plans if each family member chooses a high-end smartphone. But it can be a good deal for families where at least a few people — like the children — choose cheaper smartphones.

Supply of news is dwindling amid the digital media transformation

[Commentary] The word is out that we're embarking on a new golden age of journalism. In recent months some of the hottest names in the business -- the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, Nate Silver of the New York Times, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian -- have jumped from their old perches to join or launch new digital news ventures aimed at melding their grasp of 21st-century technology to the old verities of news reporting and writing. It's exciting, and dangerous.

The danger is that these changes won't usher the old standards and goals of journalism into the future so much as relegate them to the past. And that may already be happening. If so, it will be a shame, because the leaders in the digital transformation of the news are among the most accomplished and promising voices in the field, who have delivered important reporting with real impacts on politics, government and business. What's unclear is whether their new business models will support the aggressive and expensive journalism that regional and national newspapers became known for during the last few decades, their era of peak profitability.

How Facebook changed our lives

What did we poor humans do before the advent of Facebook? Let's see, we smiled when we "liked" something, we dialed the phone to "update" friends and "tagging" was a kids' game.

The upside of those innocent pre-social media times: intimacy. The downside: intimacy. If you wanted to reach a huge group, it meant sending an e-mail with a cc list that looked like the phone book. At the heart of this business boom is a service that over the past decade has revolutionized and expanded -- for better or for worse -- the way humans interact. A million of us liked the site in 2004, then 250 million five years later. Today, Facebook has 1.2 billion users. Even if the site were to disappear or wildly reinvent itself in the next decade, our habits are forever altered.

Stars aligning for data security legislation

After headline-grabbing hacks at familiar retailers, lawmakers and analysts say the time could be right for a new data security law.

Three different committees in Congress will probe whether a new federal law might need to be enacted to protect shoppers' data. Since more than 100 million people may have had their data stolen in recent weeks, advocates say now is as good a time as any. “These threats affect everybody," said Delara Derakhshani, policy counsel with Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports. “So policymakers and regulators and legislators I think are aware of this... We do think that the time is right, right now, especially in light of all these revelations."

NSA nominee unknown to privacy advocates

Vice Admiral Mike Rogers, President Obama’s nominee to take over the helm of the National Security Agency (NSA), is mostly a stranger to privacy and civil liberties advocates.

They say that Vice Admiral Rogers will have a lot of work ahead as he takes over for Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA’s current chief, during a period of dramatic changes to soothe concerns about the agency’s snooping on millions of Americans. Vice Admiral Rogers has spent more than 30 years in the Navy, and is an expert in cryptology. Since 2011, he has led the US Cyber Fleet, the Navy’s cyber command. Before that, he served as the director of intelligence for both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Pacific Command. As NSA director, Vice Admiral Rogers will also be taking over the US Cyber Command. “He’s probably in the more traditional role of the director of the NSA, to be less of a public figure. It’s only in the last few years really that people like Alexander and [former Director Michael] Hayden have emerged in a very prominent way,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said. “In that respect, the selection is not that surprising. But our focus really is on the changes ahead, and I think that’s likely the question that he’s going to be facing,” Rotenberg said.

Lawyers for Lavabit founder: judges may dismiss civil liberties concerns

Civil rights lawyers expressed concern that judges reviewing the contempt of court case brought against Lavabit, an e-mail service that was used by the National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, were dismissing privacy concerns raised by the case as a “red herring” that had been “blown out of proportion”.

The founder of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, is challenging a contempt of court order brought against him when he initially refused to hand over the encryption keys to his secure email service. The case is now with the fourth US circuit court of appeals in Richmond (VA). Judges Roger Gregory, Paul Niemeyer and Steven Agee presided over a hearing on Jan 28. A decision is expected within 45 days. If Levison’s appeal is rejected, he will be held in contempt of court and it will be unlikely that the legal issues surrounding the case will be resolved.

Senate staff hears tech groups, PTO on weak software patents

Tech companies met with Senate Judiciary Committee staff, arguing for and against expanding a patent review process to software patents.

As the committee considers a patent reform bill from Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), it is weighing proposals from other committee members, including one from Sen Charles Schumer (D-NY), which would create additional scrutiny for low-quality software patents.

Benton

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