June 2015

TV Ignores Women's Sports Now More Than It Did 25 Years Ago

Women's sports have come a long way in the last couple of decades. But the media is stuck in the past. In 1989, University of Southern California first analyzed broadcasts from Los Angeles network affiliates KCBS, KNBC and KABC, as well as ESPN's "SportsCenter" to determine how frequently the outlets covered female athletes. They have recreated the study every five years. The latest update, published in June in the journal Communication & Sport, shows that women's athletics are virtually missing from TV.

Even though there has been a huge increase in the number of women who play sports and women's sporting events have grown more popular, media coverage of female athletes hasn't kept up. In fact, nearly three decades after the researchers started the study, they note that the presence of female athletes on TV is "dismally low" -- even lower than it was when they first took on the project. The three local LA network affiliates dedicated about 5 percent of their coverage to women's sports in 1989. In 2014, that number was down to 3.2 percent. For almost every network examined, coverage of women's sports was higher 10, 15, 20 and 25 years ago than it is today.

The privacy paradox: The privacy benefits of privacy threats

[Commentary] The domestic and international debate around privacy issues often overstates the negative impacts of new technologies relative to their privacy benefits, argue Benjamin Wittes and Jodie Liu in a new paper. Many new technologies -- whose privacy impacts we frequently fear as a society -- actually bring great privacy boons to users.

Wittes and Liu assert that society tends to reap the benefits of privacy without much thought while also tallying and wringing its hands about the costs. People have privacy today with respect to so many types of content, they observe, for instance in the areas of medical information, politically sensitive publications and purchases, erotic materials, and secret communications. And such privacy is the result of, paradoxically, a series of technologies, which are the subject of endless anxiety among commentators, scholars, journalists, and activists concerned about -- ironically enough -- protecting privacy in the digital age.

[Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. Jodie Liu is a JD Candidate at Harvard Law School]

Why Did China Hack Federal Employees' Data?

There’s still a great deal that hasn’t been explained about why and how the federal employee hack happened, and whose data was compromised. There are, however, some emerging answers to three key questions: Who did it, why, and how it happened.

Early on, the government fingered Chinese hackers in the leak. How did they do it, though? The government has a large, costly, sophisticated, and mostly secret system for protecting its data. But that system is, even according to the government, obsolete. It follows an old protocol of attempting to keep hackers outside, like a fence. Newer systems assume hackers will get through the outside defense and try to stop them once they’re inside. The US had been warned that it wasn’t ready in an inspector general’s report late in 2014. By the time the report landed, it was apparently too late, but many of the steps it recommended still haven’t been taken. Critics have also wryly noted that a huge incursion into sensitive employee information tends to undermine the government’s claims that its intelligence apparatus can protect huge amounts of personal information swept up in surveillance dragnets. As one former senior official said, “The mystery here is not how they got cleaned out by the Chinese. The mystery is what took the Chinese so long.”

We need an international law of cyberspace

[Commentary] The current zeitgeist seems to be the normalization of cyber insecurity. As someone who believes international law has an (imperfect) role to play in preserving international peace and stability, I find the current scenario increasingly worrisome. The level and breadth of cyber exploitations suggests a world in which actors are engaged in a race to the bottom of every data well they think might be useful for their own purposes, on the theory that their adversaries (and their allies) are all doing the same. In such a world, law seems to be playing a diminishing role. The conventional wisdom suggests intelligence agencies will be intelligence agencies and we should let this play out via diplomacy or power politics. International law has long failed to prohibit espionage and, the thinking goes, by analogy it should also leave cyber espionage alone. If that’s true, international law has little to say about China taking whatever data it can on employees of the US federal government. From a national security perspective, there are important interests that militate against regulating or constraining data collection from abroad.

Yet, I worry that we’re reaching a tipping point: if we concede that international law can do little for the problem of cyber exploitations, we are effectively conceding the rule of law in cyberspace. All of this leads me to ask: is it time to revisit the question of how international law deals with data breaches? I recognize some may say “no” or that after long and careful thought, the answer may remain the same. But, the rising importance and success rates of data breaches across the globe suggests it’s high time for international law to at least engage these questions more closely.

[Duncan Hollis is a law professor at Temple University]

Lessons From the Net Vitality Index

[Commentary] What makes the five top-tier global broadband Internet ecosystem leaders -- the United States, South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom and France -- so outstanding? The broadband leaders of the Net Vitality Index (a composite of 52 indices covering applications, content, devices and networks, along with relevant macroeconomic factors) have a powerful common driving force -- innovation.

Innovation is the result of unusual effort. “Once a company achieves competitive advantage through innovation, it can sustain it only through relentless improvement,” according to Harvard University professor Michael Porter. This powerful lesson of the centrality of innovation is directly applicable to the desired goal of promoting continuous net vitality.

[Stuart Brotman is a faulty member at Harvard Law School and a nonresident senior fellow at The Brooking Institute]

Charter CEO: Title II Does Not Alter Investment Strategy

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said the Federal Communications Commission's new Title II-based network neutrality rules have not affected Charter's commitment to investing in its network. That came in a meeting with FCC chairman Tom Wheeler to pitch the Time Warner Cable deal. "Mr. Rutledge agreed that the Commission’s decision to reclassify broadband Internet access under Title II has not altered Charter’s approach of investing significantly in its network to deliver cutting-edge services including faster speeds, not usage caps, and better online video at "competitive" prices." That is according to an ex parte disclosure published in the net neutrality docket. The FCC has not yet officially opened a docket on the Charter/TWC deal.

Data Reinvents Libraries for the 21st Century

Today libraries are proving they’re more than mausoleums of old knowledge. They’re in a state of progressive reform, rethinking services and restructuring with data. It’s a national trend as libraries modernize, strategize and recast themselves as digital platforms. They’ve taken on the role of data curator for information coming in and citizen-generated data going out. They host civic hacker hubs. They serve as booming e-book distributors. They provide digital clinics for aspiring technophiles. It could be called a refresh to a retro institution, a data movement that’s growing organically in spurts. And data is a common thread running through all of these services.

Nate Hill is among this band of progressives. As a data zealot who believes in data’s inclination for innovation, the former deputy director for Tennessee’s Chattanooga Public Library, led a charge to transform the library into a data centric community hub. For libraries, Hill sees this as an opportunity and asks what institution can better pioneer the new frontier of information exchange.

The Tragedy of the Digital Commons

Workers on Mechanical Turk navigate a precariously free market with Turkopticon, a DIY technology for rating employers created in 2008. To use it, workers install a browser plugin that extends Amazon's website with special rating features. Before accepting a new task, workers check how others have rated the employer. After finishing, they can also leave their own rating of how well they were treated. Collective rating on Turkopticon is an act of citizenship in the digital world. This digital citizenship acknowledges that online experiences are as much a part of our common life as our schools, sidewalks, and rivers—requiring as much stewardship, vigilance, and improvement as anything else we share. “How do you fix a broken system that isn't yours to repair?” That’s the question that motivated the researchers Lily Irani and Six Silberman to create Turkopticon, and it’s one that comes up frequently in digital environments dominated by large platforms with hands-off policies.

[J. Nathan Matias researches technology for cooperation and civic life at the MIT Media Lab and Center for Civic Media.]

Atlantic Broadband/ MetroCast $200 Million Deal Highlights Ongoing Cable Consolidation

Consolidation in the pay-TV market isn’t limited to tier 1 companies, as an announcement from tier 2 cable operators Atlantic Broadband and MetroCast Communications illustrates. Atlantic Broadband, owned by Canada’s Cogeco Cable, said it has reached an agreement to acquire “substantially all of the assets” of MetroCast’s Connecticut operations for $200 million. According to its website, MetroCast also operates in New Hampshire, Maine, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia. Atlantic Broadband plans to launch new residential services such as TiVo as well as business services such as Metro Ethernet in MetroCast’s serving area. Atlantic Broadband is the 13th largest cable operator in the US, serving 224,000 television service customers in four operating regions: Western Pennsylvania, Miami Beach, Maryland/Delaware and Aiken (SC). MetroCast Connecticut’s network passes close to 70,000 homes and businesses, according to Atlantic Broadband’s press release. The Connecticut operations serve approximately 23,000 TV, 22,000 Internet and 8,000 phone customers.

The mobile Web is turning big industries into even bigger rivals

[Commentary] The way we've thought about cellphone service has always been a little, well, different. Unlike cable TV and telephone service, which you'll often find bundled together, most Americans have never known anything but a world in which wireless service was sold separately. Insulated from other industries by the unique physics of wireless engineering, the cellular industry has long operated in its own little fiefdom. Not anymore. Now we're standing on the cusp of a revolution in technology use, one that has the nation's biggest media and telecommunication firms looking to claim a slice of the wireless pie.

Mobile data is powering more of our voice and video consumption than ever. And that's forcing many companies to focus on the wireless sector in a way they didn't before. In short, the mobile Internet is where some of the industry's biggest battles of the near future will play out. Things are only going to get more competitive as entirely new services start relying on the mobile Web and using up wireless spectrum, the radio waves that carry voice and data over the air to their destination. The upcoming auction is just one example of what has become a high-stakes chess game in technology. Yes, the story of the Internet in 2015 is about the convergence of all media onto the Web, and the unprecedented clashes that causes. But more specifically, it's a story about the fate of our wireless future.

Benton

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