Sam Thielman

The Trump Administration’s decision to allow internet service providers (ISPs) to sign away their customers’ privacy and sell the browsing habits of their customers is “disgusting” and “appalling”, according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web. Speaking in an interview, as he was declared recipient of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery’s AM Turing award, Berners-Lee expressed mounting concerns about the direction of the internet he did so much to promote.

Berners-Lee expressed particular concern for the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to scrap an Obama-era rule that would have prevented ISPs from harvesting their customers web logs. “That bill was a disgusting bill, because when we use the web, we are so vulnerable,” he said. Berners-Lee also discussed Republican politicians’ plans to roll back the so-called net neutrality protections that are the backbone of an open internet, how his own legacy intersects with the great Alan Turing’s, and the astonishing progress of the web since he launched the very first website on 1 August 1991.

Acting Federal Trade Commission Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen said that the agency is “not primarily a regulator” and called for wait-and-see approach to enforcement.

She also defended the use of big data to offer consumers different prices for the same good and said she wanted manufacturers of internet-connected household devices to decide best practices among themselves. “We’re saying not ‘Let’s speculate about harm five years out,’ but ‘Is there something happening that harms consumers right now or is likely to cause harm to consumers,’” said Chairman Ohlhausen. If there is potential harm to consumers in a new technology, the FTC should not act until that harm manifests, she said: “We don’t know if that risk will materialize. It may well materialize, but a solution may materialize at the same time.”

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler came to the position after leading two separate lobbying instruments for the cable industry: the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA), where he was president and CEO, respectively. Both groups, representing AT&T, Comcast, and dozens of other telecommunication companies, sued the FCC over net neutrality during Chairman Wheeler’s leadership. The regulator passed broad rules reclassifying internet service under the same category as telephone service, preventing web providers from forcing subscribers into “slow lanes” unless they paid more. The industry groups lost the lawsuit in June.

A consortium of activist groups has sent an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to implement an “anti-censorship policy” at Facebook in its dealings with law enforcement officials in the wake of the death of Baltimore woman Korryn Gaines. Gaines, killed just after her Facebook Live video stream of her confrontation with police officers was turned off, was being served an arrest warrant after failing to appear in court for a traffic violation.

She was shot dead by police and her five-year-old son, whom she was holding at the time, was wounded. The archived video from the stream was briefly unavailable as well, in what Facebook called “a technical glitch”. Police officers said they had asked Facebook to turn off Gaines’s video stream. The signatories of the letter say they don’t buy the “glitch” story. “If your company agrees to censor people’s accounts at the request of police – thereby allowing the police to control what the public sees on Facebook – then it is part of the problem,” they wrote.

Among the organizations represented in the letter are Color of Change, a political advocacy group that focuses on the rights of African Americans, Demand Progress, MoveOn.org, and Free Press.

A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The FOIA law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”.

In an effort to demonstrate that the DoJ does not comply with this provision, Shapiro requested records of his own requests and ran up against the same roadblocks that stymied his progress in previous inquiries. A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner “fundamentally at odds with the statute”. Now, armed with that ruling, Shapiro hopes to change policy across the entire department. Shapiro filed his suit on the 50th anniversary of Foia’s passage in July. FOIA requests to the FBI are processed by searching the Automated Case Support system (ACS), a software program that celebrates its 21st birthday this year. Not only are the records indexed by ACS allegedly inadequate, Shapiro said, but the FBI refuses to search the full text of those records as a matter of policy. When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI effectively responds “sorry, we tried” without making use of the much more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors.

It’s obvious by now that something has gone wrong in the television advertising world -- upfront dollar volume fell by 6.1 percent to $18.125 billion, including a 4.7 percent hit for cable, which dipped for the first time in four years to $9.675 billion. So, where are those dollars going?

More than one source has suggested that we're finally seeing the advent of digital advertising: With so much inventory on the market, it just makes sense that some TV dollars are shifting to digital video, where it's easy to buy cheaply and in bulk for an ad to run soon.

But even digital video sellers caution against making such a blanket assertion.

Jason Krebs, head of sales at Maker Studios, has seen a "noticiable uptick" in marketer spending but isn't entirely sure where the dollars are coming from. Krebs suggested that the shift may not be from a TV budget to a digital budget, but rather toward an overall video spend that includes everything on the market, given that many of the ads are the same on TV as online.

Everyone in advertising is buying exhaustive records of your purchases -- all your purchases -- and comparing them to your viewing habits so that they know which ads you saw and whether or not they changed your behavior. All of your financial information is for sale.

Here's how it's collected:

• When you shop frequently at a store, you get a points card so that you can get a discount or coupons. Stores give these away like they're going out of style, ostensibly to reward loyalty -- Kmart, Walmart, Target, Walgreens and CVS all do this.
• Two main companies, Acxiom and Experian, collect this data, among other data sets.
• The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 in particular is why companies like Acxiom, Experian, and other data brokers (and the companies that use data brokers) are skittish about publicity -- the clauses that allow the use of this data are designed to expressly forbid the direct identification of anybody involved.
• So data brokers tip-toe right up to the edge of that line—they whitelist everything they have, meaning that they strip out names and addresses except for the ZIP +4 code (you know, 55555-5555, instead of just 55555.
• Well, you probably bought all that stuff with a credit card, and there's a company called Argus that one data company executive said provides "the majority of credit card transactions" to them for the same purposes.

A new report from the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau says that millennials, women 18-24 in particular, are not cutting the cord as quickly as previously thought.

In fact, TV's share of viewing hours grew from 84 to 88 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013 (data in the study was sourced from the Nielsen Cross-Platform Report), from 129 total hours out of 133 overall to 111 hours out of 113 overall.

Yes, that's still shrinkage in terms of absolute time spent (and the cable-free rate for men is higher), but it is notably less time watching digital video.

Further, the study found that young women spend nearly four times as much of their time watching cable as they do broadcast -- more than 16 hours surfing cable vs. 4.5 with the broadcast networks. Much of that may simply be that the women in this survey are predominately college students, but the CAB sees it as a hopeful sign.

Magna Global issued a report predicting a major upswing of 8.3 percent for US television advertising revenue in 2014, after a dismal 2013 in which revenues were down 0.6 percent.

The World Cup, local political advertising, and the Olympics are among the factors contributing to the uptick, said Vincent Letang, Magna's EVP, director of global forecasting. Letang also predicted serious movement in the global mobile markets, among other trends, and one significant change: national TV advertising is now smaller than digital media.

"National TV benefited from the Olympics in the first quarter. Local TV will gain from political and health-related campaigns throughout the year. Hispanic TV will be boosted by the soccer World Cup," noted the report. Letang added that "there is really a two-year cycle to television."

"Elections make a huge difference for US television," he said. "Television is resilient to digital media and [is] still stealing market share from other traditional categories. People are moving money out of print and putting it in digital but still some in television."

Indeed, said Letang, digital media is projected to increase by 15.9 percent globally in 2014 -- but only because a comparatively weak increase in nonmobile viewing (where the majority of the money currently is) of 8 percent drags down an incredible 61 percent jump in global mobile ads.

Regarding the World Cup, Letang said the contest is "bigger than it's ever been because it's Brazil, so it's raising the interest of even casual viewers who wouldn't necessarily be soccer fans," Letang said. "It's not only about TV these days; it's about social and online video replays. It's about multiple viewings."

Even with Kevin Reilly out at the News Corp broadcaster and ratings declines from an aging American Idol, Fox has managed to score a serious deal: GroupM, arguably the biggest media agency network, is buying C7 advertising rating system guarantees.

One of the networks is said to be dangling a 3 percent pricing discount in front of agencies that will agree to C7 guarantees. It hasn't even been that long since the networks started selling C3 -- the shift to C7 is something buyers have long resisted, given the length of time it takes to process the data and the need for immediate returns on ads such as movie trailers.

With C7 guarantees, you may see that your ad was delivered, but if your ad was delivered on unskippable video-on-demand on Tuesday and your movie opened on Friday, it's probably not a great feeling to shell out cash for that delivery.

So let the message go forth: the economics are acceptable at the moment. That may mean that Fox is selling the C7 impressions for a low enough rate to interest the network, of course -- but it also means that a major border has been crossed in the technical progress of the advertising negotiations. One reason the market has been slow to start, industry sources told Adweek, is the preponderance of proprietary tech among research teams at the networks selling the inventory.