Attorney General Eric Holder called on Congress to create a strong, national standard for quickly alerting consumers whose information may be compromised by cyberattacks. This legislation would strengthen the Justice Department's ability to combat crime, ensure individual privacy, and prevent identity theft, while also helping to bring cybercriminals to justice.
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt plans to dole out $1 million to companies around the world to help them upgrade their communication technology. That's worth about 833 shares of Google. "I think I should put my money where my mouth is," said Schmidt. "Google's mission is to connect the world. We want a free, open Internet for everyone in the world." Schmidt did not identify the companies that would receive the cash.
[Commentary] Does intellectual property law conflict with free market principles? Most free market advocates, being fans of property rights, probably don’t think so. In recent years, however, a group of dissenters has been getting an increasing amount of notice and press. Intellectual property supports personal and economic freedom.
[Schultz is Senior Scholar and Co-Director of Academic Programs at George Mason University School of Law's Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property]
[Commentary] Fear of tipping dominates information technology. The most famous example of this was PC and Mac where an orientation towards business led to a greater variety of software titles being available for Windows than Mac which wasn’t dislodged until the use of the Internet became the primary use case for a computer.
It has been hard for us observers of the industry to notice the draw that might tip the market between iOS and Android. At its heart, tipping relies on their being a compelling and somewhat broad-based use case for developers to choose one platform over another. The lack of multiple platform adoption was seen as a barrier and not an opportunity for developers. This actually has implications for developers. If there was just one platform out there, then established and independent developers would be able to think of developing for the same market and be on a more equal playing field. However, when there are two platforms, this gives established firms an advantage (twice the market) compared to independent ones. This also suggests that the platform that can most effectively match apps to consumers will be advantageous for entrepreneurial developers. Finally, this analysis also suggests that Apple’s surprisingly low share price valuation being based on the idea that if it doesn’t innovate it will suddenly lose it all, is incorrect. That fragility only makes sense in a winner-take-all mobile environment and it doesn’t look like that is the environment we have here.
[Commentary] For every Olympics since 1994’s Lillehammer Games, Andy Billings has broken down how much time the primetime broadcast spends covering male athletes and female athletes. Usually, men get significantly more of the clock time. But when Billings, who directs the University of Alabama’s sports communications program, and his collaborators ran an initial data-crunch on the first week of the Sochi Olympics, NBC’s coverage was looking more equitable.
Through Valentine’s Day, NBC spent 47.6 percent its time covering men and 37.6 percent of its time covering women, with the remainder going to pair sports, like ice dancing. That counts as an improvement. “It’s a 10-percent gap favoring male athletes, which is smaller than normal,” said Billings. At the last winter Olympics, in Vancouver, the gap was 20 percent. By the end of the two weeks, the gap had narrowed even further: Men got 45.4 percent of clock time, women 41.4 percent, and pairs 13.2 percent. Normally, the US sports media spends -- if we’re being generous -- less than 5 percent of its time covering women in sports. Sociologists Cheryl Cooky and Michael Messner have been conducting a longitudinal “Gender in Televised Sports” study, and in 2009 they found that during a six-week sample, ESPN’s Sports Center spent 1.4 percent of its time on women, and three local affiliates dedicated 1.6 percent of their sports coverage to female athletes. This was “the lowest proportion ever recorded” in the study, but even the record highs were unimpressive—8.7 percent in 1999; 6.3 percent in 2004.
In January, US President Barack Obama banned national spying on the leaders of nations that are close allies, but that doesn’t mean the US has stopped spying in friendly countries. Rather than target German chancellor Angela Merkel, the US National Security Agency is now spying on over 300 German politicians and businesspeople, including some of her top aides, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported, citing an unnamed NSA employee.
The local commercial broadcast television and radio industry contributes $1.24 trillion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 2.65 million jobs to the American economy annually, found a new study by Woods & Poole Economics with support from BIA/Kelsey.
The analysis, which breaks down broadcasters' influence on the economy of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, concluded that both television and local radio broadcasting's economic impact will continue to grow in the coming years. The analysis found that direct employment from local commercial broadcasting, which includes jobs at local television and radio stations as well as in advertising and programming, is estimated at more than 313,000 jobs, generating more than $55 billion annually in economic impact. Broadcast television accounts for over 188,000 of these jobs, as well as over $32 billion in GDP, while broadcast radio contributes 125,000 jobs that result in almost $23 billion in GDP.
[Commentary] Notwithstanding Comcast’s open Internet access commitment made to close the NBC Universal acquisition, the company has executed a preferential access deal with Netflix. For me the primary question is what kind of discrimination does “better than best efforts” routing constitute?
At the risk of giving an inch so Comcast can take a mile, I consider paid peering a reasonable quality of service discrimination with several caveats. First the possibility exists that payments flowing directly from Netflix to Comcast are largely offset by reductions in the direct payments the company makes to content distribution networks like Level 3 and Cogent. Netflix and its customers benefit from higher quality of service with fewer intermediary carriers and routers. More direct traffic routing probably accords Comcast greater leverage upstream with Netflix and similarly situated content providers. But without adequate oversight nothing prevents Comcast from making paid peering -- and the surcharge it incorporates -- standard operating procedure. In other words, little remains of plain vanilla “best efforts” routing: Comcast can demand similar payments from other content providers and distributors backed up by a not so veiled threat that it simply will not have adequate downstream delivery capacity to accommodate even what it previously was able to handle. Perhaps other content providers, generating less traffic, can continue to squeeze by with standard best efforts routing. But why would a competitor of Netflix risk the consequences knowing that ISPs like Comcast can throttle, degrade and create artificial congestion without FCC sanction.
[Commentary] Consumers ought to understand what opportunities and threats arise from an even more non-neutral Internet. Expect existing trends to become entrenched with new impacts, which can be defined as extended or developing trends. Expect the following extended trends:
[Commentary] Netflix and Comcast announced that they’ve come to terms on an interconnection agreement. In general, the deal means that Comcast and Netflix will connect their networks as peers, which cuts middlemen Cogent, Level 3, and Tata out of the path between their networks. While very few people find it controversial that Netflix has to pay Cogent, Level 3, or Tata to carry their packets to the hundreds of Internet service providers in the US with who serve limited areas, there is a fairly widespread belief that Comcast should provide packet carriage for free to anyone who can directly connect to their network.
A corollary to the belief about free carriage is a belief that this deal changes the Internet or makes network neutrality irrelevant. These kinds of arrangements -- known as “paid peering” -- have been going on since the days of AOL, but have become more prominent since the rise of video streaming. The bottom line to American consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs is whether paid peering is harmful to their long-term interests, not whether it violates any obscure and poorly reasoned principles such as net neutrality. Commercial interconnect deals have NOTHING TO DO WITH NET NEUTRALITY. Implying otherwise shows a complete lack of regard in understanding how traffic is and has been exchanged across networks for the past twenty years. These companies need to interconnect where their pipes are fattest and most numerous, close to both server resources and eyeballs. There’s no better way to ensure this happens than by making a formal deal and paying some money. And make no mistake, no matter how much Netflix is paying Comcast to deliver its TV shows, it will still cost Comcast much, much more to deliver them from their points of interconnection to its end users. And I doubt Comcast’s return on assets, share price growth, and annual growth rate will match those of Netflix any time soon. So take it easy, it’s not the end of the Internet or even a new chapter: this really is business as usual, the kind of arrangement that Internet firms have to make when traffic becomes concentrated in a few hands.
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