December 2014

How cord-cutting is changing the kinds of TVs we buy

Shoppers' decisions to purchase larger TVs over Thanksgiving week reflects a cultural change in how we're watching television programs and movies.

Increasingly, shoppers are primarily looking to buy a TV for communal viewing experiences like family movie night or a live event such as the Academy Awards. But solitary TV viewing is often happening on PCs and tablets now, meaning that the need for a small TV in the bedroom or the playroom might be fading.

You are what you Google search

[Commentary] Taken together, the sum total of your Google search history tells an intimate story not only about who you are, but what you want and what you fear. That’s what makes Google’s annual year in search so incredibly interesting. On one hand, the report recaps -- as it always does -- the year in global news: millions of searches for ISIS, Ebola, Robin Williams, the World Cup. But more interesting than these searches, I think, are the quieter glimpses of our collective, unseen id. Things like “how to get rid of stretch marks,” “how to travel alone,” and “what to wear on a first date” -- all of which ranked among Google’s most popular search terms for 2014. “Someone once said that what you look for is way more telling than information about yourself,” the philosopher Luciano Floridi said. “This is something Google and other search engines understood a long time ago."

NSA to defend Internet collection in court

Digital rights advocate the Electronic Frontier Foundation is taking the National Security Agency to court over the agency’s Internet data collection program. EFF said it’s the first public court challenge of the NSA spying tool that collects Internet data from the major cables and nodes connecting computer networks around the world, known as “upstream” collection. EFF will argue such indiscriminate collection and any resulting warrantless searches violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.

FCC: 84 MHz is Reserve, Not Projection

Federal Communications Commission officials clarified that the 84 MHz spectrum/1.25 per pop clearing target in the just-issued public notice on the incentive auction rules is a proposed minimum reserve for a successful auction, not a projection of how much spectrum the FCC expects to clear in the auction.

According to officials speaking on background, suggestions that those targets were a change from the Greenhill report's $1.50 per pop and 126 MHz numbers was not correct. The Greenhill numbers -- which were provided to broadcasters as a best-case payout scenario -- were meant to be a high-end business case for broadcasters to consider, they said, while the 84 Mhz/$1.25 per pop numbers were meant to be a "stick in the ground" minimum for the auction to close and return "fair value for the taxpayer," not a prediction of where the auction was going to end up.

The Problem With the Plan to Give Internet Access to the Whole World

[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.]

Will Kansas Municipal Broadband and Google Fiber Render AT&T Obsolete?

[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.

Comcast to pay $50 million in class-action suit

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.

Libraries without physical books find a niche in San Antonio

In Summer 2015, Bexar County (TX) will open a library in a housing project on the West side of San Antonio. There will be iMacs, iPads, laptops and hundreds of e-readers, but no physical books.

This is the second library to be exclusively digital in San Antonio. Visitors can check out an e-reader for two weeks and pick from a selection of 25,000 books, or surf the Web on one of the library’s computers. Bexar County will rent a building in a low-income housing project for $1 a year from the San Antonio Housing Authority. Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff wants to open the digital-only libraries in poorer areas to expose low-income residents to technologies that they might otherwise not have access to.

From Lycos to Ask Jeeves to Facebook: Tracking the 20 most popular web sites every year since 1996

[Commentary] We like to think of sites like Google, Facebook and Amazon as immutable -- parts of the web as it exists now and has always existed. This is not the case, however. Sixteen years ago, only Amazon among those sites was a popular site; it was the 16th most popular site on the web according to Media Metrix (which later was absorbed into comScore). Infoseek and Hotbot were more popular than Google. What’s interesting about this data is that, it’s pretty static.

[Bump writes about politics for The Fix]

Just say no to digital hoarding

[Commentary] We have become a nation of digital hoarders. And, in developing these digital hoarding instincts, the big technology companies are more than a little complicit. We should rethink how innovation is helping us to deal with our propensity to become digital hoarders. Innovation should be about helping us transform data into information. The next big innovation may be “big data,” which claims that it can make sense of all the new data we’re creating. This may be either brilliant -- helping us find the proverbial needle in the digital haystack -- or disastrous -- encouraging us to build bigger and bigger haystacks in the hope that there’s a needle in there somewhere.

Benton

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