December 2014

INTERNET/BROADBAND

ONE GROUP DOMINATES THE SECOND ROUND OF NETWORK NEUTRALITY COMMENTS
[SOURCE: Sunlight Foundation, AUTHOR: Andrew Pendleton, Bob Lannon]
A letter-writing campaign that appears to have been organized by an organization with ties to the Koch Brothers inundated the Federal Communications Commission with missives opposed to network neutrality, an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation reveals. Some key findings include:
In marked contrast to the first round, anti-net neutrality commenters mobilized in force for this round, and comprised the majority of overall comments submitted, at 60 percent. We attribute this shift almost entirely to the form-letter initiatives of a single organization, American Commitment, who are single-handedly responsible for 56.5 percent of the comments in this round.
In large part because of this campaign, the percentage of comments submitted that we believe to have been form letter submissions was significantly higher for this round than the last one, at 88 percent.
Combined with the first round comments, we characterize 41 percent of the total comments submitted as being anti-net neutrality (with the balance being a mix of pro-NN and comments with no clear opinion), and we estimate that 79 percent of submissions came as part of form letter campaigns.
benton.org/headlines/one-group-dominates-second-round-network-neutrality-comments | Sunlight Foundation | The Hill | Multichannel | ars technica
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THE FOUR THINGS REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS COULD DO TO STYMIE NETWORK NEUTRALITY
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Nancy Scola]
[Commentary] Capitol Hill has largely been ignored in the public debate over network neutrality. The reality, though, is that House and Senate Republican opponents of net neutrality have the ability to make life very difficult for President Barack Obama and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler on the net neutrality front. Here's how:
1) Get rid of the FCC's rules entirely through the Congressional Review Act
2) Swamp the FCC in investigations
3) Cut off the money supply
4) Write their own law
benton.org/headlines/four-things-republicans-congress-could-do-stymie-network-neutrality | Washington Post
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TITLE II AND UTILITY-STYLE REGULATION IS NOT HOW WE SHOULD PROTECT OPEN INTERNET
[SOURCE: Forbes, AUTHOR: Jeff Pulver]
[Commentary] Not only are Title II reclassification advocates wrong to think that utility-style regulation is the only way to ban discrimination, but they also completely fail to understand the collateral damage that would be caused by flipping our current model to Title II rules. Utility-style regulations in Europe, for instance, have led to slower Internet speeds, more anemic competition and deployment of high-speed networks, and less affordability. That’s exactly why EU regulators are scrambling to abandon the public utility approach. We are doing the American public a disservice if we insist that the only path to protect the open Internet is a Title II regulatory approach. If we go down that dead-end road and turn the Internet into a regulated public utility, we will ignore the lessons learned a decade ago in the process that led to the “Pulver Order” and choke off a new wave of innovation and investment that will support the next generation of entrepreneurs.
[Jeff Pulver is the founder of Vonage, Free World Dialup, the VON Coalition, Vivox and Zula]
benton.org/headlines/title-ii-and-utility-style-regulation-not-how-we-should-protect-open-internet | Forbes
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WILL KANSAS MUNICIPAL BROADBAND AND GOOGLE FIBER RENDER AT&T OBSOLETE?
[SOURCE: Motley Fool, AUTHOR: Anders Bylund]
[Commentary] A new wave of serious competition is taking shape in the broadband Internet market, and AT&T's leadership is pulling out all the stops to halt this threat. The small town of Chanute (KS) wants to expand their high-speed fiber network to residential areas for $40/month. You might think that AT&T would shrug its shoulders over new competition in such a laughably small market. But the company sees this as the beginnings of a much larger threat: Allow one high-sped service at incredibly low prices, and other cities will surely follow. Soon enough, this tiny insurgent will have turned into a nationwide trend, putting enormous pressure on AT&T's existing business model.
benton.org/headlines/will-kansas-municipal-broadband-and-google-fiber-render-att-obsolete | Motley Fool
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THE PROBLEM WITH THE PLAN TO GIVE INTERNET ACCESS TO THE WHOLE WORLD
[SOURCE: The Atlantic, AUTHOR: Kentaro Toyama]
[Commentary] Like so much of the public sphere on both the political left and right, Lev Grossman in his lengthy Time magazine story on Mark Zuckerberg's coalition to bring the Internet to the entire world, Internet.org, simply finds himself unable to resist the grand ambitions of Silicon Valley late capitalists. The larger problem is that we, as both American society and as global elites, seem unable to put up any substantial opposition against large corporations and gazillionaires fortifying their skyscrapers of inequality as long as they can make even the flimsiest case that they’re contributing to the public good. Secular, pluralistic, do-as-you-please individualism is exactly the problem. Internet.org is development without representation. Internet.org is just another bid in Silicon Valley's land grab for the world's virgin eyeballs.
[Toyama is the W.K. Kellogg Chair Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information.]
benton.org/headlines/problem-plan-give-internet-access-whole-world | Atlantic, The
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OWNERSHIP

COMCAST TO PAY $50 MILLION IN CLASS-ACTION SUIT
[SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer, AUTHOR: Bob Fernandez]
A federal judge in Philadelphia approved a $50 million settlement that brings a decade-long consumer class-action lawsuit against Comcast closer to closure. The suit, first filed in Philadelphia federal district court in December 2003, claimed that Comcast engaged in anticompetitive behavior by concentrating its cable systems in the broader Philadelphia area and making it difficult for RCN, a competitor, to expand telecommunications services there. By doing so, Comcast could charge higher prices for its cable-TV service, the suit claimed. Judge John R. Padova's preliminary decision entitles about 800,000 current and former Comcast cable-TV subscribers in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties and Philadelphia to $15 in credits, or Comcast services valued at $30 to $43.90, according to court documents.
benton.org/headlines/comcast-pay-50-million-class-action-suit | Philadelphia Inquirer
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FCC SEEKS MORE INFO FROM AT&T ON DIRECTV DEAL
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The Federal Communications Commission has asked AT&T for even more information on its proposed merger with DirecTV, suggesting that some of the earlier information did not quite compute. In a follow-up to a Sept. 9 request for data, the FCC sent a request asking for answers to some supplemental questions by Dec. 22. The FCC also seeks further info on broadband speed calculations, expected data rates, cell sites and other broadband-related questions. There are also follow-up questions about churn rates and pricing.
benton.org/headlines/fcc-seeks-more-info-att-directv-deal | Broadcasting&Cable
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TAKING GOOGLE FIGHT TO STATES
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Nick Wingfield, Eric Lipton]
They have lobbied state attorneys general. They have hired former state attorneys general. They have even helped draft a menacing letter for one state attorney general. And they have given the target -- Google -- a code name: Goliath. Google’s detractors complain about the search giant to everyone they can, from raising concerns about the company’s dominance with regulators in Brussels to antitrust officials in Washington. Now, they are taking the fight into states, often to push Google to censor illegal content and sites from search results. The Motion Picture Association of America and an organization backed by Microsoft, Expedia and Oracle, among others, have aggressively lobbied attorneys general to build cases against Google in recent years, sometimes in complementary ways.
benton.org/headlines/detractors-google-take-fight-states | New York Times
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ACCESSIBILITY

FCC SEEKS MORE INPUT ON RESPONSIBILITY FOR CLOSED CAPTIONING
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The Federal Communications Commission is seeking additional comment on how it should proceed if it decides to extend some of the responsibility for complying with closed captioning beyond broadcasters and TV stations to the programming's producers. On December 15, the FCC issued a second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking asking that, if it does shift some of the burden for compliance to programmers, should the FCC require video programmers to provide contact information for purposes of captioning complaints, as VPD's (video program distributors) and stations must do? And if the FCC requires that, would VPD's still be required to file independent certifications of caption quality.
benton.org/headlines/fcc-seeks-more-input-responsibility-closed-captioning | Multichannel News
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E-BOOK LEGAL RESTRICTIONS ARE SCREWING OVER BLIND PEOPLE
[SOURCE: Wired, AUTHOR: Kyle Wiens]
[Commentary] For the nearly 8 million people in the US with some degree of vision impairment, the advent of e-books and e-readers has been both a blessing and a burden. A blessing, because a digital library -- everything from academic textbooks, to venerated classics, to romance novels -- is never further away than your fingertips. A burden, because the explosion of e-books has served as a reminder of how inaccessible technology really can be. For more than a decade, the visually-impaired have been locked in an excruciatingly slow and circuitous battle against US copyright laws. And it’s left the visually-impaired with few options but to hack their way around digital barriers -- just for the simple pleasure of reading a book. Text-to-Speech (TTS) is an incredible tool for making the collective digital library more accessible, but publishers argued that TTS would negatively impact the audiobook market, and that a computer reading an e-book aloud constituted a violation of copyright. Reading is a basic human right, and no one -- not the Library of Congress and not corporate copyright lobbyists -- should have the power to take that away.
benton.org/headlines/e-book-legal-restrictions-are-screwing-over-blind-people | Wired
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APPLE WINS IPOD ANTITRUST TRIAL
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Daisuke Wakabayashi]
A jury ruled in favor of Apple in a class-action lawsuit that accused the company of violating antitrust laws by suppressing competition for its iPod music players. After deliberating for only about three hours, an eight-person jury in US District Court in Oakland (CA) found that Apple’s iTunes 7.0 was a genuine product improvement, and therefore didn't violate antitrust laws. The decision was unanimous.
benton.org/headlines/apple-wins-ipod-antitrust-trial | Wall Street Journal
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TELEVISION

NAB TO COURT: FCC DECISION ON CONTRACTS IS UNSUSTAINABLE
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The National Association of Broadcasters has told the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that its retransmission consent deals with pay TV are among their "most closely guarded secrets" that should not be shared with third parties. The comments come in support of a challenge by CBS and other programmers to the Federal Communications Commission’s decision in the Comcast/Time Warner Cable and AT&T/DirecTV merger reviews to make contracts and work product from retrans and other programming deals available to hundreds of third parties.
benton.org/headlines/nab-court-fcc-decision-contracts-unsustainable | Broadcasting&Cable
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December 17, 2014 (More Sunlight Research on #NetNeutrality Comments)

Detractors of Google Take Fight to the States

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Dick Rich, Who Helped Redefine TV Advertising, Dies at 84

One group dominates the second round of network neutrality comments

The four things Republicans in Congress could do to stymie network neutrality

Title II And Utility-Style Regulation Is Not How We Should Protect Open Internet

FCC Seeks More Info From AT&T on DirecTV Deal