June 2014

Mayors Strongly Back Network Neutrality

The National Conference of Mayors has approved a resolution supporting Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules and calling for "comprehensive nondiscrimination" -- no paid priority -- to be a "key principle" in any FCC rulemaking creating new rules.

That came in a resolution--among 261 pages worth of them--adopted at their annual meeting in Dallas, which ended on June 23. They mayors also called on the White House and Congress to back the FCC, and the latter, if necessary, to "enshrine access to a free and open Internet and give the FCC a clear mandate."

As for paid prioritization, which has become a hot-button issue for the FCC's proposed new rules and their "commercially reasonable" standard for allowing some types of discrimination, the mayors were clearly supportive. The mayors also added their support to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's plan to preempt state laws that impede municipal broadband, saying they were a "significant limitation" to competitive broadband.

Amazon Accused by Booksellers of Antitrust Violation in Germany

German book publishers have formally accused Amazon of violating the country’s competition laws and have asked the antitrust authorities to investigate.

The formal complaint comes nearly two months after Amazon stopped shipping books from a leading German publisher, the Bonnier Media Group, amid a dispute over dividing revenue from e-book sales.

The German Publishers and Booksellers Association said it had submitted its complaint to the Bundeskartellamt, the federal antitrust authority, laying out what it viewed as Amazon’s abuse of its market-dominant position in Germany and urging the officials to take action against the Seattle-based company.

New York and Chicago Libraries Loan Hot Spots like Books

Against the tug of today’s digital economy, New York and Chicago public libraries are experimenting with two projects to take the Internet to the people by loaning Wi-Fi hot spots like books.

The Knight Foundation, a journalism and civic technology philanthropy, has awarded $500,000 to the New York Public Library system and $400,000 to the Chicago Public Library system to accomplish the task. New York and Chicago libraries, which represent two of Knight’s 19 winners, will attempt to bridge their city's Internet access gap with the hot spots in different ways.

Starting in New York, a pilot called “Check Out the Internet” will start in September to offer Wi-Fi hot spots to the public on an annual basis. It’s hoped that 10,000 low-income households will take advantage of the free service, thereby improving New York broadband statistics that report 27 percent of households are without access, according to a Knight release.

In Chicago, the hot spots are to be distributed under the “Internet to Go” project, which, instead of basing distribution primarily on income level, will make hot spots available based on neighborhood Internet usage stats -- areas with low Internet adoption will take precedence.

Researchers Find and Decode the Spy Tools Governments Use to Hijack Phones

Newly uncovered components of a digital surveillance tool used by more than 60 governments worldwide provide a rare glimpse at the extensive ways law enforcement and intelligence agencies use the tool to surreptitiously record and steal data from mobile phones.

The modules, made by the Italian company Hacking Team, were uncovered by researchers working independently of each other at Kaspersky Lab in Russia and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs in Canada, who say the findings provide great insight into the trade craft behind Hacking Team’s tools.

The new components target Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry users and are part of Hacking Team’s larger suite of tools used for targeting desktop computers and laptops. But the iOS and Android modules provide cops and spooks with a robust menu of features to give them complete dominion over targeted phones.

This is the first time that the modules used to spy on mobile phone users have been uncovered in the wild and reverse-engineered. Kaspersky has tracked more than 350 command-and-control servers created for this purpose in more than 40 countries. While Kaspersky found only one or two servers in most of these countries, the researchers found 64 in the United States -- by far the most. Kazakhstan followed with 49, Ecuador with 35 and the United Kingdom with 32.

As Kaspersky notes, it makes little sense for governments to maintain their command servers in foreign countries where they run the risk of losing control over the servers.

New software analyzes hard-to-understand privacy policies

Have you ever tried to read a website's privacy policy only to give up after slogging through paragraphs and paragraphs of dense, lawyerly language? Privacy-focused companies Disconnect and TRUSTe have released a new browser add-on that attempts to translate those policies into easy-to-understand terms.

The companies' Privacy Icons software, released for a pay-what-you-want fee, analyzes websites' privacy policies, breaking them down into nine categories, including location tracking, do-not-track browser request compliance, and data retention policies. The software then displays, as a browser add-on, nine color-coded icons, with green, yellow and red icons signifying the level of concern about the website's privacy policy in each area.

More transparency on privacy policies is needed, said Casey Oppenheim, co-CEO at Disconnect, which also makes software that blocks online tracking requests.

"The end goal is to help individuals regain control of their personal information online," he said. "As a means to that end, we definitely hope that this project will inspire companies to improve their data practices and compete, even more, on the basis of privacy and security."

Google Battles Apple For Your Connected Life

Earlier in June, Apple made its big pitch to developers, describing an integrated, seamless user experience built around its platforms, devices and services. Now it’s Google’s turn to do the same thing.

At its upcoming annual I/O developer conference, Google will tout the latest updates to Android and Chrome, and the growing variety of devices on which they run, as the foundation of a continuous user experience across devices. More so than ever, Google and Apple’s versions of the connected life are colliding.

A fight that broke out in your pockets has spilled over onto the wrist, into the living room and out to the car.

Both companies want to convince app developers that theirs is the best way to reach millions of users around the world. But the two tech giants are coming from very different places.

In the smartphone age, Apple has succeeded by providing a cohesive ecosystem built around the tight integration of hardware and software, with a curated set of applications and services that run on it. Meanwhile, Google has made Android the world’s most popular smartphone operating system by allowing any handset manufacturer to roll out its own version.

Nielsen and comScore Can’t Tell You How Many People Streamed USA’s World Cup Tie With Portugal

It’s becoming clear the World Cup is a hit on US television, judging from huge ratings for Sunday night’s riveting game between the US and Portugal. But if advertisers want an impartial estimate of how many people streamed the game online, they’re out of luck.

That’s because neither comScore nor Nielsen -- the two biggest companies in third party audience research for the Web -- tracked the online audience. While both firms occasionally provide timely data on online viewership for live events (like say President Barack Obama’s inauguration), neither regularly track that sort of thing.

That highlights a reality about the Web: despite how fast online video has grown over the last few years, and all the ad dollars that are pouring into the medium, there’s no third party measure of online video audiences either in real time, or even overnight time.

US Ad Spend Hits $35B In Q1

Winter Olympics ad spending helped push up overall US advertising nearly 6% for the first quarter. US advertising revenue for the first three months of 2014 was $34.9 billion, with the Sochi games responsible for $600 million of incremental ad spend, according to Kantar Media.

Taking out the two-week sporting event, US ad spend climbed 4%. Broadcast network TV was among the biggest gainers in the period -- up 14.5%. Spanish-language TV grew 18%; cable TV increased 6.2%; spot TV gained 7%; and national TV syndication added 3.2%.

Overall, TV grew 9.7% in the first quarter of 2014 versus the first quarter of 2013.

Display Internet business was up 13% -- with financial, retail and insurance marketers aiding their budgets.

Newspapers, magazines, and radio lost ground overall -- giving back 5.0%, 1.6%, and 2.4%, respectively.

Where Are the Women? The Presence of Female Columnists in US Opinion Pages

Empirical and anecdotal evidence shows that the news media are male-dominated.

This study updates the extant literature on women’s representation in the op-ed pages of ten US newspapers.

A content analysis showed that female authors are moving beyond topics traditionally linked to females and are writing columns on topics such as politics and economy. However, they remain a minority, and, thus, women’s voices have yet to gain more visibility in the world of opinion writing in US journalism.

Tribune Publishing targets Aug 4 for spinoff

Tribune Publishing has set Aug 4 as the target date for spinning off from Tribune, according to sources familiar with the situation.

The spinoff date was included in a presentation for lenders conducted by Tribune Publishing June 17 in New York, according to sources.

Tribune Publishing is seeking to raise $350 million in conjunction with its planned spinoff from Tribune Co. In an amendment filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tribune Publishing said it will carry $350 million of debt as a stand-alone company, $25 million higher than previously stated. That figure includes a $275 million cash dividend payable to Tribune Co.

The spinoff date will be included in an upcoming amendment. While the Aug. 4 target date may change, the spinoff is unlikely to occur before then, according to sources.

Benton

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