November 2014

The one Obama nominee that Republicans can get behind

With the Senate now belonging to Republicans, the GOP will have more power than ever to block President Obama's political appointees in the next Congress. Conservatives have already shown themselves eager to delay judicial appointments and other nominees to try to force concessions from the White House on legislation. Now that problem is poised to become even worse. But here's one nominee who will probably escape that fate: Michelle Lee, Obama's pick to head up the US Patent and Trademark Office. "Who cares about the patent office?" you ask. Well, a lot of people -- from Google to Tesla to pharma to trial lawyers. And, by the way, Republicans and Democrats, too. It's clear there's bipartisan appetite for changing the country's patent system.

Why it’s still too soon to declare Aereo dead

Aereo, the embattled streaming TV company that got smacked down by the Supreme Court, is laying off around 60 people across its New York and Boston offices. It's a pretty drastic cutback.

Roughly a third of the layoffs are hitting the New York office, where the company has engineers, customer care and marketing staff. But analysts predict Aereo will survive, even if it means having to fire everyone except for a few people huddled in a Boston bunker, because although the company has gone into hibernation mode, its backers have plenty of money to keep it on life support. Here's another sign the company could continue on: Aereo's litigation is still ongoing, and the company also weighed in on an Federal Communications Commission proposal to regulate streaming video services in the same way as cable companies. More importantly, just this past October, Aereo spokeswoman Virginia Lam became a registered lobbyist for the company. You don't tend to do that unless you plan on sticking around.

The Federal Communications Congress?

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission is considering administratively bypassing Congress and unilaterally reversing longstanding US Internet policy in law with an administrative maneuver that could have sweeping and unintended negative consequences for US trade and foreign policy.

To implement the FCC’s most recent redefinition of net neutrality, the FCC is seriously considering its net neutrality “nuclear option.” That would reverse administratively the legal status of the Internet from a lightly regulated “information service” to a utility price-regulated “Title II telecommunications” service. Rather than asking Congress for Internet authority that the FCC knows that it does not have, it apparently is scheming to creatively combine existing legal authorities, in ways in which they were never intended, in order to ban a two-sided free market for the Internet from developing.

[Cleland is President of Precursor LLC, a research consultancy for Fortune 500 companies, and Chairman of NetCompetition, a pro-competition e-forum supported by broadband interests]

White House background briefings: Good journalism or anonymous government spin?

Every so often, a group of handpicked journalists gets the equivalent of a tap on the shoulder from a White House functionary. They’re invited to a background briefing, one of Washington’s most common, and little examined, rituals for the transmission of official spin, talking points and, occasionally, actual news.

For an hour or more, the assembled reporters will listen to and question White House advisers and aides -- “senior administration officials” in the inevitable stories that follow -- on topics of the officials’ choosing. All of it will be hush-hush. No TV cameras will roll. No names will be revealed. There will be no direct quotes (hence, the ubiquitous “senior administration officials”) and sometimes no quotes at all. Readers and viewers will never learn exactly who said what. Take our word, or theirs, for it. Is this any way to report the news?

Protestors descend on the White House over the future of the Internet

Nearly 100 protesters rallied at Lafayette Park in Washington (DC) against what the Federal Communications Commission (located a mile and a half southeast) might do to could change the way people interact with the Internet. The rally was one of several organized by the umbrella group Battle for the Net in three dozen cities across the United States.

The latest protests were triggered by a report suggesting that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler just might be settling on a plan that would give regulators more power over the way the Internet flows between content providers like Netflix and Internet service providers like Comcast by reclassifying those portions under what's known as Title II of telecommunications law. Instead of treating the Internet as a single ecosystem, a so-called hybrid approach could divide regulation between retail consumers and wholesale customers. How serious the FCC is about that approach and how it might work remains unclear, but so far, it hasn't made many people happy.

Advocacy groups blast ‘hybrid’ Web rules

Dozens of left-leaning, civil liberties and public interest groups are forcefully opposing what they see as a flawed Federal Communications Commission attempt to write new rules for the Internet. Supporters of strong network neutrality regulations -- which seek to ensure that all Internet traffic is treated equally -- sent a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler warning against a “hybrid” plan reportedly under consideration.

The proposal is a “convoluted proposal for new rules that jeopardizes the agency’s ability to protect all Internet users,” wrote more than 60 groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress and MoveOn.org. “This is not what the public wants or what President Obama promised the American public.” The groups warned that the plan is “unlikely to survive litigation.”

Up-vote all you want, but the Internet isn’t a democracy

Reddit -- one of the most powerful determinants of Web news and trends -- has long billed itself as a wholly crowd-powered enterprise, subject only to the will of its unpredictable masses. But the software engineer Todd Schneider published a surprising discovery: The articles that “chart” on Reddit’s front page don’t do so on merit, alone.

Instead, Reddit employs a kind of algorithmic quota system that moderates which content reaches the masses. “I had always thought that Reddit’s front pages operated as some kind of direct democracy,” Schneider wrote. “I was surprised to learn that’s not actually the case.” It’s not, Reddit admin Chad Birch confirmed on the site itself. Far from relying on raw user votes, the site actually uses a multipart normalization algorithm to get a good mix of content on the front page. As a consequence, of course, a great deal of content that’s very popular with the community never makes it to the front page, at all.

Twitter teams with women's advocacy group to target online harassment

Twitter is teaming up with a women's advocacy group to fight female harassment on the popular social media platform. The group, Women, Action and the Media, created a form for users to report instances of "gendered harassment." If the reports seem valid, WAM will use its clout as an "authorized reporter" to flag the requests, forwarding them to Twitter. Users will be able to report the specific types of abuse they are experiencing, including "whether someone has made an impostor account, is sending them violent threats, is using Twitter to encourage people to harass the person offline, or any of other several defined categories."

Facebook, Google say diverse workforce key to survival

Silicon Valley isn't home to unrepentant bigots who want to keep minorities out of tech as much as it is a place with a word of mouth culture where hiring has bred a largely white male workforce.

That was one of the many themes at USA TODAY's panel on diversity in tech organized in association with Stanford University's Rock Center for Corporate Governance, featuring representatives from Google and Facebook as well as the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "Most of the problems will be resolved by trying to get hiring managers to see diversity as a positive goal, but in many ways that's a harder problem to solve than one of unrepentant bigots," said Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford law professor and author of The Race Card. Ford said that universities contribute to the problem when computer science classrooms feel like alien places for many minorities.

Snowden: Congress needs to encrypt e-mails

The communications of lawmakers and staffers on Capitol Hill are not beyond the reach of spies and hackers, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden warned. Without proper protections, he warned that sensitive details about upcoming bills and international deals could be unnervingly insecure.

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