Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says his company's shocking $19 billion acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp represents a "great fit" for the growing social network. Zuckerberg says the two companies' "shared goal to help connect everyone in the world" helped prompt the multi-billion dollar acquisition.
The Federal Communications Commission’s decision to take up new network neutrality rules will “put the consumers back in the driver’s seat,” according to Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA).
“In fact, if the consumer isn’t in the driver’s seat, then it’s going to change the Internet,” Rep Eshoo said. “I don’t know anyone that would raise their hand and say ‘I’m for blocking and I’m for discriminatory practices,’” she added. Rep Eshoo is the top Democrat on House Commerce subcommittee on Communications and Technology, and is vying to be the top Democrat on the full committee.
A coalition of more than three dozen privacy groups is urging the White House to push for privacy legislation.
The alliance marked the two-year anniversary of President Barack Obama's "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights," which he introduced in 2012, to call for a federal law codifying privacy protections in the United States. "The key to progress is the enactment by Congress of this important privacy framework," the coalition said in a letter to the White House sent. "Only enforceable privacy protections create meaningful safeguards." The groups that endorsed the letter included the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, the Center for Digital Democracy and Public Knowledge.
In the treasure hunt that is the search for more spectrum, the National Telecommunications & Information Administration has discovered something of a mother lode: Namely, over 400 MHz of spectrum now in government hands that could potentially be freed up. The question is, how?
The White House is now pushing a method forward in a move that could appease hungry cable operators and help the cause of broadcasters. The White House wants input on which, or which combination, of at least nine different approaches will work to incentivize, or require, federal spectrum users -- the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense among them -- to give up spectrum for wireless broadband. Cable operators are among those pushing for more of it, including through a newly created coalition, WiFi Forward, which wants to goose the government effort to free up the 400 MHz the NTIA has identified. Broadcasters will benefit as well, since the more spectrum the government can get from its own, the less pressure there is -- or should be -- to get it from broadcasters.
The last five years have been a heckuva stretch for the Sinclair Broadcast Group. After nearly collapsing under the weight of the economic downturn in 2009, the Baltimore-based station group has roared back, leading a consolidation surge that’s restored local TV broadcasting’s luster on Wall Street even as it reshapes the industry. With the great expansion, Sinclair has moved to the top ranks of TV broadcasting. And Sinclair is big.
By number of stations (owned or operated), it ranks first with 162 stations in 77 markets, assuming all pending deals close. By TV homes reached, it is second with coverage of 38.7% of the US. By 2012 revenue, it is sixth with nearly $1.3 billion, behind only Fox, CBS, Gannett, NBC and Tribune. But Sinclair’s impact goes beyond its sheer size. Lately, it has begun leading the charge for a new broadcast standard that it believes will open up new business opportunities and provide broadcasters with the tools to mine a rich future. Through operational allies -- so-called sidecar companies like Cunningham Broadcasting -- that technically own the stations, Sinclair achieves the financial benefit of multiple properties without violating Federal Communications Commission rules. Now, of the 77 markets Sinclair is in, it has multiple stations in 49, or more than 60%. Consolidation -- locally and nationally -- has given Sinclair tremendous clout in its dealings with the Hollywood syndicators. After all, with Sinclair, a syndicator can clear nearly 40% of TV homes. Retransmission is a key element in Sinclair’s growth formula. When it buys stations, it gets an immediate uptick in revenues from the newly acquired properties by locking in its most-favored-nation status on retransmission payments. Followers of Sinclair in the financial markets see programming as a logical next step.
The team at Southern Stars, a small software company in San Francisco, had always been interested in space. They make stargazing apps after all. “It’s been a spectator sport for us.
We like to read about NASA landing Curiosity on Mars, but we never thought about it from a participatory angle,” founder Tim DeBenedictis said. They launched a Kickstarter in 2012. For $1 to $10,000, backers could book time on the satellite to take photos and broadcast messages. The campaign raised just over $115,000. DeBenedictis said reaching that number took serious work. He talked to people every day to spread awareness. The campaign’s big break came when Star Trek actor George Takei posted about it on Facebook. DeBenedictis said raising the money was only half the battle. It turns out that communicating with a CubeSat once it is in space is very, very expensive and difficult. Southern Stars figured that NASA had some kind of system in place for small teams to talk to their satellites, but that isn’t at all the case. Everyone builds their own system to communicate.
Netflix launched a new user interface (UI) for smart TVs and connected devices in 2009. It tried to give users a flat and clean way to navigate through the company’s catalog. But the UI also treated each and every title the same, presenting endless rows of box cover art. That’s why in early 2012, Netflix began an ambitious redesign process that involved seven A/B tests, a new image format and a complete rewrite of Netflix’s TV rendering engine.
[Commentary] It wasn’t long after Comcast and Netflix finally settled a festering peering dispute that people starting claiming that this resolution means the end of network neutrality. But it’s not. For better or worse, the legal framework governing net neutrality in the US -- the recently gutted Open Internet Order -- doesn’t touch the issue of network interconnection and peering. But even if Netflix (and other companies) paying Comcast for direct access to its network isn’t a violation of net neutrality, it is a concern.
The fear is that Netflix can’t provide a decent-quality video streaming service unless it pays to peer with Comcast, either directly or through a transit provider that has a direct interconnection. Netflix has mitigated this issue by paying transit providers that peer directly with Comcast to carry its traffic. But as anyone who covers the Internet knows, Internet giants benefit if they can control their own infrastructure and costs as they get bigger. With 30 percent of US broadband traffic, Netflix is certainly big enough to want to control the costs of delivering its bits to the end consumer. Given that Microsoft, Google and many others have already decided to pay Comcast for a direct connection or pay a transit provider with a direct connection, Comcast has now enshrined its version of peering -- one that requires companies that send a lot of traffic to its network to pay. Another issue is that Comcast is setting the rates to let content providers get their traffic onto its network rates in a relative vacuum. These agreements aren’t transparent, even within the industry. These rates could go up over time, and they essentially act as a tax on the Internet that the web content companies have to pay to ensure their service gets to the end user. They pay this tax directly if they are a big enough provider, or indirectly by locating their servers in places that peer directly with Comcast or buying transit.
The peering agreement confirmed by Comcast and Netflix had been discussed by engineers for both companies for months, as consumers reported continued declines in their video streaming quality. But the turning point came at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), when the CEOs of the sparring companies got involved in those talks alongside engineers, a mark of how significant this deal is: CEOs almost never get involved in peering agreements.
At the annual Vegas tech confab, both Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings first met with senior engineers and staff to discuss an interconnection agreement, reported and confirmed by the companies. Having the top executives of the company involved shows two things: one that this is an important strategic deal for both companies and also that the technical questions about how the Internet should work are only part of the equation -- business considerations matter, too.
[Commentary] In discussions about the Internet of Things, the lines between the concepts of “security,” “privacy,” “data integrity” and “liability” quickly get blurred. To discuss these issues seriously, we must separate them out and clarify the most important issues that need to be addressed for each.
Security and privacy are a constant in every Internet of Things conference. In public institutions, security and privacy could be ranked as the number one concern. People are simply not comfortable with the idea of having 50 billion connected devices posing 50 billion potential threats. But I’ve found that talks that start with the words security and privacy are soon blended with the concepts of data integrity and liability. I’d like to drill down into these concepts to clarify what each of them mean for the Internet of Things and open the discussion on the most important issues.
[Asin is co-founder and CEO of Libelium, a hardware provider for wireless sensor networks used in Smart Cities and Internet of Things projects]
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