BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16, 2014
OWNERSHIP
FCC Launches 2014 Media Ownership Rules Review - public notice
Comcast's Enemy May Be Comcast - op-ed
CONTENT
Privacy, media groups want anti-Muslim video kept online
Why can't anyone make money in hyperlocal news? [links to web]
Fast Home Wireless: A Content Weapon? [links to web]
Univision Debuts Its First English-Language Video Network for Millennials [links to web]
WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
FCC Teeing Up Spectrum Screen Item
Cell carriers clashing over auction rules
Issues Related to Allegations of Warehousing and Vertical Foreclosure in the Satellite Space Segment - press release [links to web]
Aging surveillance drones become flying Wi-Fi hotspots
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Carriers Back Anti-Theft Measures for Smartphones [links to web]
Boomers, Seniors Embrace Mobile for Retail [links to web]
The insanely fast Wi-Fi router you’ll probably never need [links to web]
Google Unveils Project Ara, a 'Modular' Smartphone [links to web]
EDUCATION
Frontier says E-rate funding should not fund middle-mile overbuilds
How Can the Department of Education Increase Innovation, Transparency and Access to Data? - press release [links to web]
New CoSN Report Reveals How Portugal Is Reinventing Learning - press release [links to web]
TELEVISION/RADIO
Here are 3 ways Aereo will tell the Supreme Court that it’s legal - analysis
Clear Channel Says Radio Hosts Are Still Relevant [links to web]
Pay TV subscriptions expected to rise through 2019 [links to web]
PRIVACY/SECURITY
Apple Upgrade Tracks Customers Even When Marketing Apps Are Off
Should Google know your deepest darkest secrets? - op-ed [links to web]
What Heartbleed tells us about software liability - AEI op-ed [links to web]
Conspirators in Two Android Mobile Device App Piracy Groups Plead Guilty - press release [links to web]
ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
Why President Obama's Data Could Be Too Much for Many Dem Candidates
OPEN GOVERNMENT
Public officials in a wired world: How much privacy should they get? - editorial
DIVERSITY
Bridging the Gap: The Correlation between African Americans, Broadband Usage, and the Success of the Telecom Industry - MMTC editorial [links to web]
TELECOM
Tampa grand jury accuses phone company owners of $32 million fraud [links to web]
AGENDA
Consumer first-quarter 2014: analysis and outlook - op-ed
COMPANY NEWS
Zebra Pays $3.5 Billion for Motorola Tracking Technology [links to web]
STORIES FROM ABROAD
UK broadband speeds ramp up
Ofcom to review Sky’s sports dominance in UK [links to web]
New CoSN Report Reveals How Portugal Is Reinventing Learning - press release [links to web]
That China Mobile Deal Is Paying Off for Apple’s App Store [links to web]
OWNERSHIP
2014 QUADRENNIAL REVIEW
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: Public Notice]
The Federal Communications Commission’s ongoing 2010 Quadrennial Review of broadcast ownership rules has generated a high level of interest and participation, creating an extensive record that continues to attract significant and substantive input well after the formal comment periods have expired. Such participation demonstrates that the FCC’s broadcast ownership rules continue to be of importance and interest to market participants, public watchdogs, and consumers alike. The FCC wishes to build on that record to resolve the ongoing 2010 proceeding, and the Commission is cognizant of its statutory obligation to review the broadcast ownership rules every four years. To accomplish both objectives, with this Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“FNPRM”) the FCC is initiating this 2014 Quadrennial Review; incorporating the existing 2010 record into this proceeding; proposing rules that are formulated based on the evaluation of that existing record; and seeking new and additional information and data on market conditions and competitive indicators as they exist today. Ultimately, the rules the FCC adopts in this 2014 proceeding will be based on a comprehensive, refreshed record that reflects the most current evidence regarding the media marketplace. The FCC also considers related issues posed in the 2010 Quadrennial Review proceeding concerning the attribution and disclosure of agreements between broadcast stations, and in the accompanying Report and Order, the FCC determines that certain television joint sales agreements (JSAs) are attributable.
benton.org/node/180543 | Federal Communications Commission | Chairman Wheeler | Commissioner Clyburn | Commissioner Rosenworcel | Commissioner Pai | Commissioner O’Rielly
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COMCAST VS COMCAST
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Holman Jenkins Jr]
[Commentary] Comcast and Time Warner emerged pretty much unscathed from their encounter with the Senate Judiciary Committee. And why not? Even senators get the basic argument. In their cable TV businesses, their merger wouldn't reduce competition because the duo already don't compete against each other, even as they compete with a growing array of third parties, including satellite everywhere, telephone companies in numerous markets, and Netflix and other "over the top" providers wherever customers have access to decent broadband. In their broadband business, they also don't compete with each other, even if consumers and politicians might wish for more competition generally. The case against the merger (which nobody made) comes from positing some fairly complex and speculative anticompetitive synergies. Because the new company would be such a big player in the cable TV business, dominating the crucial New York and L.A. markets, it might be able to bully programmers into denying over-the-top competitors must-have content, especially sports, needed to deliver a true cable replacement. A superficial plausibility attaches to these fears because they roughly accord with the dreams of Comcast chieftain Brian Roberts, the most ambitious of the cable guys when it comes to remaking the cable entertainment bundle for the digital age and avoiding Steve Jobs's advice for cable operators to embrace a role as mere "dumb pipes" for other people's content. The merger wasn’t savaged by the Judiciary Committee because of Comcast's willingness to concede "behavioral remedies" upfront, delighting regulators by giving them continuing powers they could never get through the courts or Congress. Comcast and Time Warner should be free to merge if their shareholders so desire, given a lack of demonstrable antitrust harms. Whether their vision of a cable-cum-everything conglomerate in an age of digital unbundling makes sense might be a harder question for investors.
benton.org/node/180550 | Wall Street Journal
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CONTENT
PRIVACY, MEDIA GROUPS WANT ANTI-MUSLIM VIDEO KEPT ONLINE
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Julian Hattem]
A host of news outlets and privacy rights groups are urging a federal appeals court to keep the anti-Muslim video “Innocence of Muslims” on the Internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Democracy and Technology and other groups filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals asking it to reverse a decision to take down the contested video, which was partially blamed for the 2012 attack at a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. “Whatever may be said about the merits of ‘Innocence of Muslims,’ it has unquestionably become part of the historical record,” the groups wrote. If the current ruling is left to stand, they added, it “is likely to harm online expression.” The Washington Post, National Public Radio, Los Angeles Times and other news companies filed a similar friend-of-the-court brief, arguing that the decision to take down the disputed video “failed to adequately consider the impact its decision could have on core First Amendment rights” and “could empower putative plaintiffs to bypass well-established constitutional protections against restraints on speech...” The groups are protesting the court’s 2-1 February decision ordering Google, which owns YouTube, to take the video offline. They are looking for a new decision from a slate of 11 judges on the panel, known as an en banc review.
benton.org/node/180515 | Hill, The
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WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
FCC TEEING UP SPECTRUM SCREEN ITEM
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is expected to circulate an order on its proposal to make changes to its local market spectrum aggregation screen, according to sources inside and outside the FCC. The screen is not a cap, but triggers a deeper dive into whether that amount of concentration in a local market is in the public interest. According to FCC sources, the screen is expected to draw a distinction between high- and low-band spectrum, which could affect how much low-band spectrum AT&T and Verizon can bid for in the auction since they already between them have the majority of that spectrum, which has long been considered beachfront Wi-Fi spectrum due to its propagation characteristics. There is expected to be a separate screen for spectrum below 1 GHz .
benton.org/node/180523 | Broadcasting&Cable
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CELL CARRIERS CLASHING OVER AUCTION RULES
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Kate Tummarello]
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plans to auction off valuable low-frequency airwaves while balancing its congressionally mandated goal of raising revenue for the government with the competing business interests of wireless companies. Industry giants AT&T and Verizon say the FCC shouldn’t limit participation in the auction if it hopes to raise the billions of dollars needed to fund a nationwide network for first responders. But small companies, including T-Mobile and regional carriers, want the FCC to limit the bidding powers of their rivals to keep the cost of the airwaves low. The small companies say they need the low-frequency airwaves, which travel farther and through walls, to keep the wireless market competitive. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the agency is prepared to step in to prevent monopolization of the auctions. “All who want to participate in the auction will be able to bid,” Wheeler said, adding that, “a priority of the auction should also be to fill in the blank white spaces on the coverage maps we see on TV commercials with competitors and consumer choice.” Wireless industry officials briefed by the FCC said the agency is considering some limits on AT&T and Verizon once the auction reaches a yet-to-be-determined revenue benchmark.
benton.org/node/180549 | Hill, The
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AGING SURVEILLANCE DRONES BECOME FLYING WI-FI HOTSPOTS
[SOURCE: ars technica, AUTHOR: Joe Silver]
With all of the talk of Facebook’s efforts to blanket the planet with drones that the company promises will provide global Wi-Fi accessibility, another technology leader, the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has also entered the drone Wi-Fi game. Through DARPA’s new “Mobile Hotspots Program,” the agency has planned to retrofit a fleet of aging RQ-7 shadow drones that were once deployed for various surveillance missions by the US military in Iraq. The repurposed drones will now be used to help the military carry out operations in remote locations that lack Internet connectivity. The hotspot program aims to provide a 1Gbps communications backbone to deployed units. In order to establish a secure connection from ground stations without requiring large antennas, each drone will be equipped with a lightweight, low-power pod, holding low-noise amplifiers, which DARPA claims can boost signals while minimizing background noise. The drones can apparently run for nine-hour shifts to provide continual coverage as needed.
benton.org/node/180530 | Ars Technica
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EDUCATION
FRONTIER SAYS E-RATE FUNDING SHOULD NOT FUND MIDDLE-MILE OVERBUILDS
[SOURCE: Fierce, AUTHOR: Sean Buckley]
Frontier Communications is ready to serve rural school districts with its own last mile services but says the Federal Communications Commission should not extend funding to other competitors to overbuild where they already provide service. In an FCC filing, Frontier said that the regulator should take advantage of the fact that Frontier and other incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) serving "rural areas have already deployed fiber deep into rural America." "The FCC should not waste scarce E-rate funding to overbuild existing middle-mile fiber when companies like Frontier have already invested the intensive capital necessary to provide it," wrote Frontier in an FCC filing. "Instead, the Commission should focus its efforts on determining how the existing fiber facilities that Frontier and other ILECs have in place today can bring the desired services to all schools and libraries, including those in rural areas."
benton.org/node/180518 | Fierce
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TELEVISION/RADIO
HERE ARE 3 WAYS AEREO WILL TELL THE SUPREME COURT THAT IT’S LEGAL
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Jeff Roberts]
[Commentary] To avoid being shut down, Aereo must persuade the Supreme Court that it has a legal home within these technologies and the elaborate regulatory rules that have sprung up around them. One way Aereo will try to do that is by likening its legal position to cases involving the Sony Betamax, which let consumers record analog TV signals onto magnetic tape, and to Cablevision’s remote DVR service. Taken together, those cases, handed down 25 years apart, established that consumers have a “fair use” right to record shows, and that no “public performance” takes place when the consumer plays them back later on. Aereo says its tech does the same thing. As the company will tell the Court, it is Aereo’s subscribers -- not Aereo -- who determine when the recording starts and stops, and when the show will start playing back. History may help Aereo too in rebutting the argument that Aereo, if it were operating legally, it would be paying signal retransmission fees like cable and satellite companies do. As Aereo points out in its brief, the retransmission fees (which now account for about 10 percent of broadcasters’ revenue) don’t flow from the Copyright Act, but from a separate law that Congress passed to promote competition in different sectors of the TV industry. The implication is that, if these fees should be extended further, it’s a job for Congress and not the Supreme Court. Finally, Aereo will try to tell the court that the local over-the-air TV signals that its antennas detect are free, and always have been. In the history of TV, Aereo says, these local signals stand apart and are part of an historical bargain in the TV industry under which the big broadcasters get access to public spectrum in return for beaming information to the public.
benton.org/node/180522 | GigaOm
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PRIVACY/SECURITY
APPLE UPGRADE TRACKS CUSTOMERS EVEN WHEN MARKETING APPS ARE OFF
[SOURCE: National Public Radio, AUTHOR: Martin Kaste]
The people who design marketing apps are celebrating a change in the way iBeacon works on iPhones. iBeacon has been around for a while, and marketers liked the concept in principle. But there was a big practical problem: It only worked when a customer's phone was running the marketer's app. Once you closed the app, the tracking stopped. That problem has now been fixed. When Apple updated the iPhone's operating system in February 2014, it changed it to allow marketing apps to keep tabs on your location even when they're off. When you close an app, it "deputizes" the phone's operating system to keep listening for iBeacon signals on its behalf. Of course, the change has others spooked. "As a privacy researcher, I always get nervous when marketers are celebratory about something," says Garrett Cobarr, a technologist and writer based in Seattle. He says Apple seems to ignore certain assumptions that people make about what's happening on a device.
benton.org/node/180517 | National Public Radio
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
WHY PRESIDENT OBAMA'S DATA COULD BE TOO MUCH FOR MANY DEM CANDIDATES
[SOURCE: AdAge, AUTHOR: Kate Kaye]
If political races have become data wars, conventional wisdom has it, the Democrats clearly have the advantage in 2014 and 2016. After all, the stockpiles of data from President Barack Obama's two campaigns have been deposited in the party's armory alongside the software to put it to good use. But while the party as a whole navigates a newly treacherous political landscape -- none other than Nate Silver predicted the Democrats could actually lose control of the Senate -- individual campaigns across the country may struggle to use something as big and complex as President Obama's data trove, which was built for a nationwide campaign. Despite the party's mission to provide unified, fresh data and underlying standardized technology platforms for all, there's a limited pool of practitioners who know how to put all this stuff to use for the more than 6,000 races in 2014. Over 1,000 state party staff and activists were trained to use the database platform by the Democratic National Congress in 2013, both in person and through webinars, learning how to do things like run queries using SQL, a database-management-programming language. But even if a small campaign has the money and wherewithal to hire a voter-file manager, most will have limited analytical resources.
benton.org/node/180525 | AdAge
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OPEN GOVERNMENT
PUBLIC RECORDS
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Editorial staff]
[Commentary] New technology often challenges society's long-standing assumptions and standards, but sometimes courts -- and others -- lose sight of common sense as they grapple with the changes. That's the case in a recent decision of California's 6th Appellate District, which found that text messages and emails between public officials are beyond the reach of the Public Records Act if they are sent on private devices rather than ones owned by public agencies. The three-judge panel said that electronic communications between council members and the mayor of San Jose, even those regarding city business, should not be considered "public" records if they are not "used" or "retained" by the city government (the language cited comes from California's Public Records Act, written long before smartphones existed). Accordingly, the 6th Circuit overturned the decision of the trial court judge and ruled that the city need not turn over the communications to interested members of the public, even though both sides conceded that they involved official business. That decision hews to the narrow language of the act, but it distorts the act's larger purpose, which is to ensure that the public can scrutinize the actions of its employees when they are doing public work.
benton.org/node/180547 | Los Angeles Times
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AGENDA
CONSUMER FIRST-QUARTER 2014: ANALYSIS AND OUTLOOK
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Paul Sweeting]
The first quarter of 2014 was marked by controversies that dragged key elements of the connected-consumer space into the public policy arena -- dangerous and unpredictable territory for any industry. Among the key developments:
Comcast announced plans to acquire Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, combining the two largest cable MSOs in the country and touching off fierce debate over media ownership, net neutrality, broadband access and antitrust issues just as the MVPD business is poised for further consolidation.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler announced plans to re-impose network neutrality rules after a federal appeals court rejected the agencies previous rules
A keenly watched court showdown between Pandora and ASCAP ended inconclusively, which is likely to pitch the ongoing debate over music performance rights back to Congress.
Broadcasters will have their own courtroom showdown over performance licensing with Aereo, but even a win there won’t fully resolve the issue.
Netflix’s transit and interconnection deal with Comcast thrust Internet peering into the policy spotlight in the first quarter but for now the FCC is keeping its powder dry on the issue.
benton.org/node/180540 | GigaOm
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STORIES FROM ABROAD
UK BROADBAND SPEEDS
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Daniel Thomas]
The average residential broadband speed in the UK has reached almost 18 Mbps, five times faster in just five years, as competition between Internet providers intensifies. But while the overall average has increased rapidly, helping to meet the government’s aim to have the fastest broadband in Europe, there are large discrepancies across the UK. The average download speed in urban areas of 31.9 Mbps falls to 21.8 Mbps in suburban areas and 11.3 Mbps in the countryside, a situation campaigners described as “digital apartheid.” The differences will add pressure on the government, which is trying to provide rural areas with better broadband. This has been hampered by a delayed and costly process designed to distribute more than £1bn of state funds, but which was given entirely to BT. The government aims to extend superfast coverage to 95 percent of premises by 2017.
benton.org/node/180546 | Financial Times
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