Amazon said its dispute with Hachette Book Group is part of an initiative to lower digital-book prices and boost income for authors. Sales of titles go up when prices are lower, Amazon said. The company proposed that revenue from an e-book should be split 35 percent to the author, 35 percent to the publisher and 30 percent to Amazon.
A Q&A with Liberty Global’s John Malone and Mike Fries.
Liberty has spent tens of billions of dollars in recent years buying cable operators including Virgin Media of the UK and, if regulators agree, the Netherlands' Ziggo. Its assets are mostly in Europe. Amid a global race to keep up with Google and other technology companies, Liberty Global needs media assets to complement its cable empire and keep subscribers paying their monthly bills.
[Commentary] Maximizing the benefit of each dollar spent on telecommunications services for schools and libraries and minimizing the contribution burden on consumers and businesses is a major goal adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in its July 2014 E-rate order. The FCC is aiming to drive down costs for the services and equipment needed to deliver high-speed broadband connectivity to and within schools and libraries. The FCC changed E-rate rules to increase pricing transparency, encourage consortium purchasing and amend its lowest corresponding price (LCP) rule to clarify that potential service providers must offer eligible schools, libraries and consortia the LCP.
[Commentary] In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt launched the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Rural Electrification Administration, among a number of other offices meant to provide power to those who'd been passed over by the privately owned utilities because those areas weren't as profitable.
TVA in particular worked with cities like Chattanooga to provide affordable energy. To supporters of publicly owned broadband networks, the TVA's circumvention of commercially owned electric utilities to support public utility projects helps justify the rise of municipal Internet today -- despite the protests of incumbents both then and now.
AT&T has become the latest company to sign a deal with Netflix to ensure that the company's streaming videos get to consumers without lagging or delay.
Netflix said that the two companies had reached an agreement on interconnection in May. "We're now beginning to turn up the connections, a process that should be complete in the coming days," the company said.
The USA Freedom Act of 2014 was getting a round of applause from stakeholders following its introduction.
"By establishing a panel of advocates to argue before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and requiring it to issue statements about its decisions, the Senate bill strengthens our privacy rights and civil liberties," said Microsoft general counsel and executive VP Brad Smith.
Free Press Action Fund policy director Matt Wood said: “Sen Leahy has taken the important step of crafting a bill that corrects many mistakes in the weakened House measure.”
The Computer & Communications Industry Association agrees the House bill was weak and says the Senate bill would make metadata collection more effective and improve the "checks and balances."
The American Civil Liberties Union says the bill still isn't quite right, but it's getting there.
Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA) is pushing the Federal Communications Commission to consider “data caps” as it rewrites its controversial network neutrality rules.
In a letter to the FCC, Rep Eshoo, the top Democrat on the House Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, shared the preliminary findings of a Government Accountability Office study about data caps, which she described as “a new threat to the free and open Internet.”
According to Rep Eshoo, the FCC should consider these data cap practices as it rewrites its net neutrality rules, which kept Internet providers from slowing or blocking access to certain websites before they were struck down by a federal court earlier in 2014.
On July 29, the Federal Communications Commissioners agreed that the FCC needs to look at revamping its designated entity rules. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said that, no matter what the pressure to do otherwise, she would not support the notion that entrepreneurship opportunities are reserved for a particular class.
She vowed that the commission would do all it can, in a legally sustained way, to promote meaningful participation for small and diverse businesses.
Commissioner Ajit Pai said that the key to incentive auction participation, and that one way that he has proposed it allowing people to bid on smaller economic areas, which he said would allow more small designated entities to bid in the upcoming AWS-3 and broadcast incentive auctions.
Commissioner Michael O'Rielly said he was optimistic the incentive auction would be "very successful."
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler told Time Warner Cable CEO Rob Marcus in no uncertain terms that he has "strong concern" that TWC’s actions "have created the inability of consumers in the Los Angeles area to watch televised games of the Los Angeles Dodgers."
Chairman Wheeler vowed that the FCC would "intervene as appropriate" to bring "necessary relief to consumers." He has given TWC 10 days to provide some relevant documents, including copies of documents, and an explanation of the impasse.
This is the story of the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act. It is now on its way to the President’s desk to be signed. So, for the first time in history, the US Congress has overturned a ruling of the Library of Congress in regards to granting exemptions to copyright law.
This complicated process took over a year and a half, but is one of the few bills of substance that has made it to the President’s desk in these starkly divided times.
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