April 2014

Starbucks pulls in brand recognition to build New York Times subscriptions

Starbucks is teaming up with the New York Times on a promotion that doles out free access to the publisher’s newly launched mobile news product.

Starbucks’ My Starbucks Reward members can receive 12 weeks of access to the New York Times’ new NYT Now mobile application. What is interesting about this initiative is the fact that Starbucks is essentially leveraging its brand reputation to drive mobile app downloads and adoption for the New York Times’ initiatives.

FCC Repack Schedule Troubles Stations, Vendors

Broadcasters are expressing concern that the timetable proposed by the Federal Communications Commission to repack TV spectrum following the auction to wireless carriers is unworkable and that the consequences for failure to meet the deadlines under consideration are too severe.

The proposals include a 39-month window to complete channel relocation following the completion of the auction. Failure by a broadcaster to finish the channel change in that time will result in that station going dark until the work is completed.

Another proposal states that if a station is unable to complete the channel change within a year of going dark, it will be required to forfeit its broadcast license.

The order, expected to go to the commissioners for approval at their May or June open meeting, will address what the reorganized 600 MHz band will look like, provide details about the auction process, lay out the impact of the auction on broadcasters, including the repack, the reimbursement process and time line, and what happens after the repack.

Remarks of FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai Before The University Of Pennsylvania Law School South Asian Law Students Association

I’m a big believer in the benefits of diversity. And one of its most important forms is intellectual diversity.

When it comes to issues of the day, South Asian-Americans, just like other minority communities in our country, don’t speak with one voice. There are South Asian-American liberals, conservatives, and moderates. There are South Asian-American Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. This is how it should be.

Like the subcontinent itself, South Asian-Americans are diverse in every way. Our particular upbringing and heritage influences the way many of us see the world. I’ll never be able to dance bhangra properly; some of you might not savor idlis, sambar, and bisibelebath as much as I do. More broadly speaking, my view is that as a society, we should get away from the notion that if you have a certain skin color, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, you should think a certain way. And if you don’t think that way, you are somehow betraying your roots or identity.

Each of us is unique. And each of us has the right, and I’d argue the obligation, to make up our own mind. We should embrace the diversity within our community and insist that those outside of our community recognize it as well.

Kagan Puts Retransmission in Perspective

In a report that is sure to be fully embraced by the broadcast community, SNL Kagan said that retransmission consent fees, also known as the bane of multichannel video service providers, account for just 8.9% of total fees distributors pay to networks and is expected to rise to just under 13% by 2017.

The Kagan report comes just weeks after the Federal Communications Commission moved to prohibit Joint Sales Agreements where two of the top four stations in a market join forces to negotiate retransmission deals. Part of the reason for the ruling was to prevent what some MVPDs have said was onerous pricing for retransmission and to stop blackouts of channels. In its analysis, SNL Kagan said they saw little evidence for either.

The research house said that rising retransmission fees are just one factor in escalating programming costs -- others were the additional expense of TV Everywhere and multiplatform agreements, increasing costs for cable network programming (especially sports), and additional channel launches.

Google’s search juggernaut is showing some cracks

The numbers: Google reported first quarter net income of $3.45 billion, slightly up on 2013, but well shy of consensus estimates for $4.3 billion, according to FactSet.

Revenue was $15.4 billion, up 19% on 2013, but only $12.2 billion once commissions paid to partners for traffic were taken out. FactSet expectations were for revenue of $12.4 billion, after the partner commissions. With a miss on both profit and revenue, Google shares have sunk by about 6% in after-hours trade.

The takeaway: The average cost per click for advertisements (a measure of how much Google charges advertisers in its auction-based systems) fell by 9% during the quarter, while traffic acquisition costs -- the amount it pays to partners for traffic (for example to Apple for default Google searches via the Safari browser on iPhones) rose to $3.23 billion compared to $2.96 billion in 2013.

SOPA Defeat Haunts Efforts to Rein In Illegal Copying, British Official Says

“It’s going to be five years before anybody puts his head above the parapet again.” That’s how Michael Weatherly, a member of the British Parliament and intellectual property adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron, handicapped the prospects for a fresh legislative push against online piracy in the United States.

Following the defeat in 2012 of the Stop Online Piracy Act, movie companies and other advocates for copyright owners both here and in Britain have been pointed toward voluntarism. That has meant, among other things, agreements under which Internet service providers send escalating warnings to those who are believed to be downloading copyrighted material illegally.

But Weatherly also talked of escalating pressure -- legal and otherwise -- on those who advertise on sites where illegal downloading is taking place. “There are some laws in place, but we might need to beef up a couple of them a bit more,” suggested Weatherly, who spoke of an effort to “strangle the advertising revenue from the illegal sites.”

How a common law enforcement tool could be abused to spy on you illegally

Privacy advocates are warning that the legal gray area in a key court case may make it easier for the government to spy on Americans illegally.

By using what's called a pen trap order -- a type of judicially approved surveillance mechanism that's only supposed to capture metadata about electronic communications -- it appears that the government has the theoretical ability to capture the content of those communications as well. The case involves Lavabit, the secure e-mail service used by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

Broadly, the case is about whether the government can force an Internet company like Lavabit to hand over its encryption keys. In a ruling, a federal appeals court sided with law enforcement. But a closer look at just how the government can obtain the keys has civil liberties scholars very worried. If the government can use an order that's restricted to metadata to obtain keys it could then use to decrypt content, then a nefarious actor could gain access to content without jumping through the judicial hoops necessary for demanding content.

China launches campaign to purge Internet of porn, rumors and, critics say, dissent

China has unfurled a vigorous new campaign to clean up the Internet, to purge it of everything from pornography to “rumors” that might undermine Communist Party rule, a crusade that critics say is a renewed attempt to silence grass-roots voices and stifle dissent.

Censorship of the media and Internet is routine in China, but the new campaign appears to represent a significant tightening of the screws, a bid to bend the Web to the will and values of the Communist Party -- to ensure, in the words of blogger Zhang Jialong, that “party organs, and not the Chinese grass roots, have the loudest voice on the country’s Internet.”

The drive, to “sweep out porn, strike at rumors,” will run from mid-April until November, the party’s news portal Seeking Truth declared that part of the stiffer controls on freedom of expression and the Internet that have been imposed since President Xi Jinping took power in 2013.

Snowden calls Putin to talk NSA

Edward Snowden called into a Russian state television program and asked President Vladimir Putin about whether Moscow has surveillance programs similar to those exposed by the former government contractor.

The exchange between Putin and Snowden appeared to be a piece of theater designed to embarrass the Obama Administration amid heightened tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine.

“I’ve seen little public discussion of Russia’s own involvement in the policies of mass surveillance,” Snowden, a former government contractor facing espionage charges in the US, told Putin via video message. “So I’d like to ask you: Does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals? And do you believe that simply increasing the effectiveness of intelligence or law enforcement investigations can justify placing societies, rather than subjects, under surveillance?”

In response, Putin said that bulk collection programs “cannot exist’ under Russian law. “We don’t like a mass system of such interception,” Putin said, according to a translation from state-run broadcaster Russia Today. He said that the government has “some efforts like that” to track “criminals and terrorists,” but that was highly regulated and did not amount to "mass scale" surveillance.

Study says national cyber plan hurts US

A new report claims that the Commerce Department’s voluntary cybersecurty framework could end up undermining the online protections it seeks.

The report from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center claimed that the plan amounts to “opaque control” of the Internet, which could undermine the “spontaneous, creative sources of experimentation and feedback that drive Internet innovation.”

Companies, the authors wrote, “already have intrinsic incentives to develop cybersecurity solutions” without a formal government plan. Those standards, in fact, are based on industry norms and market trends which “are more robust, effective, and affordable than state-directed alternatives,” they added.

The voluntary framework released by the Commerce Department in February outlines how financial services firms, power companies and other critical infrastructure businesses can beef up their protections against cyberattacks. Supporters have said that the guide is a step towards safer networks and critical protections against a future impending cyberattack.

Lawmakers and administration officials have warned of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” for which the US is currently unprepared. But study authors Eli Dourado and Andrea Castillo say that that kind of rhetoric is overblown and serves as a distraction from the steady stream of data breaches and cyber spying that authorities should be going after.

Benton

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