February 2016

[Commentary] It is Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook’s hard-line stance on privacy that could define his legacy at Apple and set the tone for the way big corporations deal with big government at a time when so much of our lives unfold on the devices we use every day.

How far Cook is willing to take the fight is being tested on a national level now. Challenging a court order pits the world's most formidable tech giant against its most powerful government and puts Cook in the hot seat as the voice of Silicon Valley on a long-contentious issue. "This is an American company fighting an order from an American court," said Chenxi Wang, chief strategy officer at Twistlock, a computer and network security firm. "This will absolutely have a ripple effect. Apple is now viewed as the flag bearer for protecting citizen data, and if they succeed, there will be a flood of other companies following suit." But Cook has chosen a difficult case on which to stake his position.

[Commentary] The so-called AllVid rule goes much further than facilitating another set-top box. It would give Big Tech companies like Google the right to disregard program licensing arrangements that creators rely on for exposure and success. That’s why a majority of the Congressional Black Caucus and scores more have skewered this proposal as an outrageous giveaway to wealthy tech companies at the expense of small and independent programmers. These new AllVid boxes would be exempt from privacy rules limiting the sale of individual viewing profiles and limits on advertising to children. And it would actually increase consumer bills because of huge re-engineering costs and new in-home boxes and adapters required to make the system work. Big Tech doesn’t need a government handout to deliver programming. It can negotiate for rights the way other services do today.

[Powell is President and Chief Executive of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association]

William H. Tankersley, who defined broadcast standards for CBS during a volatile period of change in mores on television and in American society, doing celebrated battle with envelope pushers like Norman Lear and the Smothers Brothers, died on Feb. 5 in Scottsdale (AZ). He was 98.

From the mid-1950s until 1972, when he left CBS to become head of the national Council of Better Business Bureaus, Tankersley served as the firewall between the viewers of the network’s programs and those writers, producers and advertisers who might willfully or inadvertently offend their sensibilities. He was, in effect, the network’s chief censor, though he would not have labeled his role that way. His job was not to protect the public, he said, so much as it was to guard the business and reputation of the company he worked for: “Mainly it was to make whatever came out of that tube on a CBS station be something you could be proud of,” he said. Under the Code of Practices, a set of ethical standards established in the early 1950s and voluntarily agreed to by broadcasters, things like profanity, sexual references, disparagement of religion and the depiction of drug use and drunkenness were closely monitored on all three networks. However, the standards at CBS, which was known, both admiringly and mockingly, as the Tiffany network, were considered stricter than the norm.