April 2014

Network Neutrality Running Out Of Lives, Which Will Affect Ours

[Commentary] Open Internet. Net neutrality. Whatever you want to call it, it appears to be dying. And if you’re wondering whether you should mourn its death, might as well get that black suit ready.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler appears poised to propose rules (to be voted on at a May 15 meeting) that would officially make preferential treatment of network traffic OK. That is, content providers that want to make sure their online offerings are delivered smoothly and quickly would pay ISPs for the pleasure. However the FCC and others try to paint the new rules, the codifying of what essentially are faster lanes to certain content violates the concept of net neutrality. It could lead to degraded speeds and quality of the flow of content from providers that won’t or can’t pay Comcast, Verizon, AT&T or others. What, then, could that mean? It means that the Googles and Apples and Yahoos and Facebooks and even Netflixes of the world would pay (some of them already do) to play. But what about the startups and smaller companies that have the potential to be the next Netflix? This is what longtime net neutrality proponents have been talking about: Pay to play could kill innovation. And if the tolls start to hurt the big Internet companies’ bottom lines, it wouldn’t be a stretch to expect them to pass along those costs to us, their users, whether that’s in the form of higher subscription fees or downgraded or canceled services. In other words, we lose. And the double-dipping ISPs win.

Welcome to Comcast Country

[Commentary] Comcast argues that its acquisition of Time warner Cable will not decrease competition among cable television or broadband Internet providers because the two companies do not directly compete -- though the reason for that is that they already maintain virtual monopolies in many of their service areas. In Comcast’s case, that monopoly is predicated upon exerting overwhelming political control.

Starting in Philadelphia, Comcast built a hometown political machine and turned it into a national juggernaut. In 2013, the company spent $18.8 million on federal lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s more than all but six other corporations. The company is also a major donor, making nearly $5.5 million in federal political contributions during the 2012 cycle. Recipients of Comcast’s largess include President Obama and Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation in Washington, a veritable Comcast caucus. The effort to sideline concerns about consumer protection was pioneered in Philadelphia in 1999, when Comcast was aided by City Hall in keeping a rival company, RCN, out of the local cable market. Philadelphia is a digital-age company town where the proper relationship between business and government has been turned on its head. Welcome, indeed, to Comcast Country.

[Denvir is a senior staff writer at Philadelphia City Paper]

The promise of a faster Internet for Los Angeles

[Commentary] AT&T's announcement that it might extend ultra-high-speed broadband service to Los Angeles and dozens of other communities across the country was greeted with no small amount of skepticism from the digital punditocracy. And there does seem to be a bit of gamesmanship going on between AT&T and Google, which has also made a habit of announcing potential, rather than actual, deployments of gigabit-speed Internet services.

Nevertheless, state-of-the-art broadband lays the foundation for new businesses and provides a competitive advantage for communities. Officials in Los Angeles should take the opportunity seriously and find out what it would take to persuade AT&T to upgrade its network here. Gigabit Internet service makes the most sense today around college campuses and medical centers, near research hubs and in clusters of high-tech entrepreneurs. At this point, one can only imagine the sort of bandwidth-hogging application that would lead the typical consumer to want that much capacity. But there's a "Field of Dreams" quality to the Internet, with each leap in connection speed quickly being met by an explosion in ways to use it. AT&T is offering Los Angeles a chance to start making that leap, and we can't afford to miss it.

3.5 GHz: New Ideas in the “Innovation Band”

In a speech in March at the Brookings Institution, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler issued a challenge -- let’s confront change in spectrum policy and reorient our perspective from what was to what can be. Now, the FCC is leading by example. The Commission is issuing a detailed proposal for a new service in the 3.5 GHz Band -- the Citizens Broadband Radio Service -- representing a watershed for innovative spectrum sharing policies. 3.5 GHz is an ideal “innovation band.”

Because the federal use in this band occurs primarily around the coasts, it is a great opportunity for intensive wireless broadband use on a shared basis. If the Commission is successful in creating a regulatory environment that encourages the Citizens Broadband Radio Service to flourish, it will simultaneously meet the demands of myriad spectrum uses and users. To be clear, we still have much work before us. The proposal is just that, a proposal. The Commission established a healthy comment cycle to allow for a spirited discussion of the many technical and policy details in the proposal. We are, however, reaching the end of this first chapter in the story of the 3.5 GHz Band. We hope that on the basis of this discussion in response to the proposal the Commission will be able to establish the new Citizens Broadband Radio Service in the rule books. Then the real work can begin, as the private sector invests in technology and networks that bring the service to life.

Could the Comcast-Time Warner merger actually be a good thing for online TV?

[Commentary] The news that Dish aims to launch its online TV service this summer highlighted an interesting factoid: In some cases, big media mergers actually do foster competition -- as long as they come with a solid side of regulatory-imposed conditions, that is.

Dish first announced its plans to launch an internet TV service in March, when the satellite operator struck a far-reaching licensing pact with Disney. Dish’s plan is to stream a smaller and less expensive package of live TV programming to subscribers unable or unwilling to sign up for a full satellite package. Bloomberg reported that the operator is aiming for a $20 to $30 monthly price tag, and that it is targeting younger viewers who prefer to watch their programming on mobile devices. Think of it as pay TV for cord cutters, if you will. The service won’t be completely unbundled, meaning that consumers won’t be able to pick and choose the three networks they’re interested in watching. Dish’s pact with Disney already called for ABC and ESPN to be part of “an Internet delivered, IP-based multichannel offering,” and Bloomberg explained that Dish will have to have contracts with at least two of the four big broadcasters, and at least ten of the highest-rated cable networks, before the new service can launch. It looks like that second broadcaster will most likely be NBC. That’s because the merger between NBC Universal and Comcast in 2011 came with a bunch of conditions imposed by the FCC and the Justice Department, including the requirement to make the same channels it is licensing to traditional cable or satellite operators also available to online video services. In addition to that, NBC is bound to follow the leads of others in this space.

Ads Look to Stand Out Amid the Political Clutter

The 2014 election cycle has ushered in a rush of political advertising, with campaign ads airing as early as last spring and record-shattering spending for the first quarter of the election year. Between television commercials (some top-notch nuggets of narrative storytelling) and web ads (which allow for a more madcap approach), nearly every day seems to bring about a new visual treat. Here is a look at some ads that managed to cut through the clutter: the good, the bad, and the zany.

HBO’s Amazon Deal Without ‘Thrones’ Shows Cable Loyalty

HBO, as it finally opens up some of its prized programming to online-only viewers, is still being careful to preserve the traditional TV business model.

HBO agreed to let Amazon offer some of its older shows to the e-commerce company’s Prime subscribers starting in late May, the first time the Time Warner-owned network has made its content available to anyone outside of the pay-TV universe. While that may appear to be a crack in the pay-TV business, HBO took care to save its most popular shows and current seasons for customers who get a TV bill. For anyone wanting to watch current hits such as “Game of Thrones,” they’ll need to buy a cable or satellite-TV subscription. And HBO Go, the company’s online streaming service, also will still only be available to those with a pay-TV subscription. Time Warner “is set to benefit from the licensing fees with very little or no risk of cannibalization to its existing authenticated HBO Go offering,” said Anthony DiClemente, an analyst at Nomura Holdings.

FBI Informant Is Tied to Cyberattacks Abroad

An informant working for the FBI coordinated a 2012 campaign of hundreds of cyberattacks on foreign websites, including some operated by the governments of Iran, Syria, Brazil and Pakistan, according to documents and interviews with people involved in the attacks.

Exploiting a vulnerability in a popular web hosting software, the informant directed at least one hacker to extract vast amounts of data -- from bank records to login information -- from the government servers of a number of countries and upload it to a server monitored by the FBI, according to court statements. The details of the 2012 episode have, until now, been kept largely a secret in closed sessions of a federal court in New York and heavily redacted documents. While the documents do not indicate whether the FBI directly ordered the attacks, they suggest that the government may have used hackers to gather intelligence overseas even as investigators were trying to dismantle hacking groups like Anonymous and send computer activists away for lengthy prison terms.

New York Police Twitter Strategy Has Unforeseen Consequences

The New York Police Department has long seen its crime-fighting strategies emulated across the country and around the world. So when a departmental Twitter campaign, meant to elicit smiling snapshots, instead attracted tens of thousands of less flattering images of officers, it did not take long for the hashtag #myNYPD to spread far beyond the five boroughs.

The public relations situation in New York City sparked imitators from Los Angeles (#myLAPD) to Mexico (#MiPolicíaMexicana) and over the ocean to Greece (#myELAS), Germany (#DankePolizei) and France (#maPolice). The images, including circles of police officers, in riot gear poised to strike a man on a bench, or hosing down protesters, closely resembled those posted on Tuesday by critics of the Police Department in New York, in which many of the most infamous moments in recent police history had been dredged up by Twitter users.

Dodgers' fans are at the end of their cable

[Commentary] On scratchy radios they listen to Vin Scully for a mere three innings, salvaging what they can of this aberrant young season, brimming with equal amounts promise and poison.

"Come on," insists frustrated Dodgers fan Gary Mandell. "We are talking about a legendary announcer…. It's like taking the brushes away from Rembrandt." There is the sense that maybe we shouldn't make a fuss at all, that the worst thing to do to this Dodgers front office right now is nothing. What if you blacked out 70% of your TV market in a cable standoff, and no one cared? That would be worse than mass protests, advertiser boycotts, sit-ins, and all the other desperate measures Dodgers fans are suggesting to end this debacle, now in its 34th day. One fan believes stalled cars at the gate of Dodger Stadium would rattle their cages. It might also get you beheaded. So silence might be the best protest of all.

Benton

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