April 2014

If political races have become data wars, conventional wisdom has it, the Democrats clearly have the advantage in 2014 and 2016.

After all, the stockpiles of data from President Barack Obama's two campaigns have been deposited in the party's armory alongside the software to put it to good use.

But while the party as a whole navigates a newly treacherous political landscape -- none other than Nate Silver predicted the Democrats could actually lose control of the Senate -- individual campaigns across the country may struggle to use something as big and complex as President Obama's data trove, which was built for a nationwide campaign.

Despite the party's mission to provide unified, fresh data and underlying standardized technology platforms for all, there's a limited pool of practitioners who know how to put all this stuff to use for the more than 6,000 races in 2014. Over 1,000 state party staff and activists were trained to use the database platform by the Democratic National Congress in 2013, both in person and through webinars, learning how to do things like run queries using SQL, a database-management-programming language. But even if a small campaign has the money and wherewithal to hire a voter-file manager, most will have limited analytical resources.

[Commentary] To avoid being shut down, Aereo must persuade the Supreme Court that it has a legal home within these technologies and the elaborate regulatory rules that have sprung up around them.

One way Aereo will try to do that is by likening its legal position to cases involving the Sony Betamax, which let consumers record analog TV signals onto magnetic tape, and to Cablevision’s remote DVR service. Taken together, those cases, handed down 25 years apart, established that consumers have a “fair use” right to record shows, and that no “public performance” takes place when the consumer plays them back later on. Aereo says its tech does the same thing. As the company will tell the Court, it is Aereo’s subscribers -- not Aereo -- who determine when the recording starts and stops, and when the show will start playing back.

History may help Aereo too in rebutting the argument that Aereo, if it were operating legally, it would be paying signal retransmission fees like cable and satellite companies do. As Aereo points out in its brief, the retransmission fees (which now account for about 10 percent of broadcasters’ revenue) don’t flow from the Copyright Act, but from a separate law that Congress passed to promote competition in different sectors of the TV industry. The implication is that, if these fees should be extended further, it’s a job for Congress and not the Supreme Court.

Finally, Aereo will try to tell the court that the local over-the-air TV signals that its antennas detect are free, and always have been. In the history of TV, Aereo says, these local signals stand apart and are part of an historical bargain in the TV industry under which the big broadcasters get access to public spectrum in return for beaming information to the public.

[Commentary] African American ownership of Federal Communications Commission-licensed television broadcast stations has declined from a high of 21 stations, to just three. This is despite statutory requirements for diversity and inclusion in the use of the public airwaves.

While we have long advocated for increasing minority ownership of licensed broadcast television and radio facilities, as communications technologies have converged and emerged, our advocacy has expanded to explore matters such as:

• How policies that advance minority entrepreneurship can help stimulate economic opportunity, generate wealth, and enhance innovation in the communications industries, and
• How universal broadband adoption can create jobs, promote STEM education, and enable the creation of diverse content and applications for telehealth, digital education, and entrepreneurship.

We advocate that the FCC should require the applicants to include specific factors promoting greater minority inclusion in these transactions, such as partnerships and spinoffs. We believe greater minority participation will ultimately drive more competition, promote the delivery of new and innovative services, and help create a more robust economy for all Americans.

People of color should also be spectrum owners, not just consumers and suppliers, and the public interest requires this.

Frontier Communications is ready to serve rural school districts with its own last mile services but says the Federal Communications Commission should not extend funding to other competitors to overbuild where they already provide service.

In an FCC filing, Frontier said that the regulator should take advantage of the fact that Frontier and other incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) serving "rural areas have already deployed fiber deep into rural America."

"The FCC should not waste scarce E-rate funding to overbuild existing middle-mile fiber when companies like Frontier have already invested the intensive capital necessary to provide it," wrote Frontier in an FCC filing. "Instead, the Commission should focus its efforts on determining how the existing fiber facilities that Frontier and other ILECs have in place today can bring the desired services to all schools and libraries, including those in rural areas."