June 2014

Subcommittee to Explore Media Ownership in the 21st Century

The Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, chaired by Rep Greg Walden (R-OR), has scheduled a hearing for June 11, 2014. The hearing is entitled “Media Ownership in the 21st Century.”

Witnesses to be announced.

Members will examine the media ownership landscape as it continues to evolve in the digital age. The subcommittee is expected to discuss the Federal Communications Commission’s inaction on the statutorily required 2010 quadrennial review of the media ownership rules as well as the continued relevance of the media ownership regulatory framework in general. Further, members will explore the commission’s decision to forge ahead with new rules on joint sales agreements (JSAs) and other media ownership changes without the completed quadrennial review.

“As the communications and technology sectors continue to innovate, it is imperative that our laws that govern media ownership evolve,” said Rep Walden. “I look forward to a spirited discussion of the media ownership landscape and expect it to inform the work we do on our update of the Communications Act.”

Sen Chambliss: Senate must get cyber bill done this year

The Senate needs to get a cybersecurity bill done, and the Senate Intelligence Committee is “close” to a bipartisan bill, according to Sen Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), the committee’s top Republican.

“We’re down now to just a couple of provisions that we’re still talking about that we’ve got to resolve before we bring it before the committee,” Sen Chambliss said.

Sen Chambliss said he has been working with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) for months and has solved some of the differences between their approaches, including over real-time sharing of information about cyber threats across relevant entities in the public and private sectors.

They’re still working to solve issues of liability protections, he continued, adding that he’s “confident we’ll figure something out.” Sen Chambliss said he is hopeful the bill will come to the Senate floor once the committee considers it. “It’s a bipartisan bill,” he said. “That rings a bell in [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid’s mind as to what ought to come to the floor.”

Dow Jones asks court to unseal long-completed digital surveillance cases

Serving as an outgoing United States magistrate judge, Brian Owsley had decided that one of his final judicial acts would be to unseal more than 100 of his own judicial orders involving digital surveillance that he himself had sealed at the government’s request.

But not long after Judge Owsley's move in 2013, a US district judge vacated Owsley’s order and resealed them all. That order itself was then sealed.

"I don't think it's that normal," Judge Owsley said.

In a rare move, the media company Dow Jones filed a new motion with the US District Court in the Southern District of Texas asking it to unseal all such documents and to make them available publicly online. The motion was filed in conjunction with a new report from The Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones is the newspaper’s parent company) showing that the sealing of such court files is on the rise. Those orders initially had been sealed as they had involved forms of digital surveillance that the government doesn’t want revealed, including the use of pen/trap orders, tower dumps, and stingrays (devices that act as fake cell phone towers).

Consumers tighten embrace of Net and streaming content

We love our Internet in the US, to the tune of more than $113 billion in 2014. And we will spend more in the coming years. Consumers will spend more than $174 billion on Internet access in 2018, estimates PricewaterhouseCoopers in the consulting firm's Entertainment & Media Outlook 2014-2018.

Even as spending on digitally-delivered movies, music and video games rises, the amount spent on Internet access far surpasses any other spending category in the consulting firm's report. That makes sense because "those pipes are what deliver all that digital content," says PwC partner Sean De Winter.

And we don't leave home without it. In 2013, mobile Internet spending accounted for $53 billion of the total $102 billion Net access pie, PwC says. Home broadband accounted for 49 billion, PwC says. Reliance on mobile access is expected to remain vital. By 2018, 86% of the US population will have mobile service compared to 85.6% with home broadband.

FCC Denies Closed Captioning Exemptions

Zomboo's House of Horror Movies, Your Sunday Worship and the Norm Prouty Real Estate Show are just some of the programs that the Federal Communications Commission has given 90 days to closed caption.

The FCC June 2 dismissed 16 petitions by program producers, mostly of religious programming, who had asked to be exempted from requirements that they closed caption their programming. Closed captions are ones that can be turned on and off. The FCC provides an exemption from the rules if the captioning would be "economically burdensome."

Sinclair Plan Shot Down By FCC Fine Print

The Federal Communications Commission has all but slammed the door on a broadcast industry proposal that could have made it easier for TV station groups to introduce a new advanced television standard in the US, broadcast industry sources said.

Under the proposal, originally pitched at the FCC by Sinclair Broadcast Group, TV station groups that agreed to forego federal reimbursement for any stations forced to move to new channels during the agency’s incentive auction repacking process would have received a waiver allowing them to use the existing spectrum for all their stations’ channels for traditional broadcast and other new services.

Some broadcasters, led by Sinclair, want to be able to use at least part of their existing spectrum capacity to introduce an advanced TV standard that would make it easier for them to broadcast a variety of services to consumer mobile devices. But in the fine print of the 484-page text of the incentive auction rules the agency released June 2, the FCC rejected the request for a blanket waiver that would have applied to all of a group broadcaster’s stations.

TWC Biz Unit Opens Up Wi-Fi

Time Warner Cable Business Class said it will offer its TWC WiFi Hotspot solution at no additional charge to commercial Internet customers across the multiple service operator’s footprint.

The feature, which includes a free Wi-fi point installed and managed by the operator and a self-service management portal that lets business owners configure the service, will enable those customers to offer their customers Wi-fi access on devices such as smart phones, tablets and laptops.

The configuration portal allows business customers to provide free access to customers and visitors or set daily time allotments for free access, ranging from 15 minutes to 60 minutes. Those same access points are also accessible to credentialed TWC broadband subscribers.

Google will now name and shame e-mail providers that don’t support encryption

Security obsessives will know that although Google has begun encrypting the links between its own servers -- so the National Security Agency can't hack our e-mails as they're traveling across the company's systems -- we risk losing those protections as soon as our messages leave Google's walled garden.

The trouble is that encryption only works if both your e-mail program and your recipient's support it. So if, for example, you're on Gmail, but your friend uses a Comcast.net e-mail address, chances are your messages will show up unencrypted at the other end, because Comcast doesn't have encryption enabled.

Google estimates that up to half of the e-mail sent between Gmail and other sites are not encrypted -- a situation that could be easily fixed with the right investments, according to a Google employee who declined to be named because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.

"As my engineer colleague said, it's not rocket science — it's elbow grease," the employee said. To draw more attention to the issue, Google intends to start publicly identifying which other companies support e-mail encryption, and which don't, as part of its periodic transparency reports.

The company said that it's creating a new section in the report that explains which domains support Transport Layer Security (TLS) -- the encryption protocol that automatically shields e-mail from prying eyes if both the sender's and the receiver's providers have it switched on. Since December, the share of encrypted e-mails sent from Google to other providers has risen from 30 percent to 65 percent, according to the company.

Wrap Up: A Hackathon Here at the White House

Here at the White House, we've been busy working to develop a Write API for We the People, our online petitions platform.

The API (which stands for Application Programming Interface) is a set of methods that will eventually allow people to sign White House petitions using new technologies, and on sites other than WhiteHouse.gov.

While We the People already has more than 14 million users, we want to open up the platform -- and make it even easier to petition the White House.

AM Broadcasters Must Fight for Survival or Be Forced Over the 'Buffalo Jump'

[Commentary] In the days before guns and horses, Native Americans used a "buffalo jump" to harvest Bison in mass quantities. They would stampede the animals over cliffs and spear them to death when they fell upon the rocks below. Figuratively speaking, AM radio faces a similar fate.

Like the Bison, a certain number of AM stations are driven over the cliff each year but unlike the Native Americans, the Federal Communications Commission doesn't care enough to sustain the remaining herd.

We must come to grips with reality. The FCC has waited too long to act on the problems facing the AM band, and the agency has made so many wrong and irreversible decisions that the AM band can't be sustained in the long term.

Those of us who face this dismal future must insist in the strongest possible way that the FCC use its regulatory authority to save the diversity of programming produced and broadcast by AM stations, for it's too late to save the AM radio band.

As licensee of KCAA Radio, a standalone AM station, I can clearly see the buffalo jump ahead and I refuse to be stampeded over it. I will not sit quietly and meekly and accept the slow and certain demise of AM radio while the FCC does nothing with dozens of FM frequencies below 87.5 FM that should provide AM stations with a new home.

It's time for the Congress and the FCC to pause it's love affair with inefficient point to point communication and realize that the most efficient form of mass communication and spectrum utilization continues to be point to multipoint terrestrial radio, and unless the AM band is migrated to FM very soon, the opportunity to expand the band will be gone forever. In my opinion, this will require Congressional action. There is only one logical way to "cure" the problems of AM radio and that's to migrate all AM stations to FM frequencies below 87.5 FM. I am stupified that this has not happened.

[Lundgren is Founder and CEO, KCAA Radio, the first affiliate of Air America]

Benton

Search