BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for WEDNESDAY, MAY 30, 2012
Today: Advertising Disclosures in Online and Mobile Media; Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board; Spectrum Management Advisory Committee Meeting; and Broadband and Energy Efficiency http://benton.org/calendar/2012-05-30/
INTERNET/BROADBAND
Four signs America's broadband policy is failing - analysis
Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era
Court Sets Briefing Schedule for Network Neutrality Challenge
CYBERSECURITY
Iran Confirms Attack by Virus That Collects Information
Cyberthreats turn into megabucks for defense companies
SPECTRUM/WIRELESS
How Spectrum Sharing Would Work
Sprint: Nextel network will go offline in 13 months
Take me out to the ballgame, with 4G [links to web]
OWNERSHIP
Tech Suits Endanger Innovation
With Motorola in Google’s Hands, Microsoft Eyes Possibility of Patent Deal [links to web]
Bankrupt wireless firm LightSquared cuts employees, but not lobbyists [links to web]
Facebook faces extended US review of Instagram deal
PRIVACY
Netflix agrees to delete data on ex-customers
Watching Big Brother: Privacy Board Delayed
CONTENT
FTC eyes social-media ads with perks
Andy Carvin on Twitter as a newsroom and being human [links to web]
TELEVISION
NBC O&Os, Nonprofits Make News Deal Work
FCC Seeks Comment on Small Cable EAS Waiver [links to web]
Why Your Cable Bill Is Just Ridiculous - op-ed
ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
Presidential Campaign Tops Public's News Interest - research
Fueled By Outside Money, Ad Blitz Hasn't Stopped For Weary Iowans [links to web]
JOURNALISM
What Print Cuts at Times-Picayune Mean for Papers
New Orleans, newspapers and the beginning of the end - analysis
GOVERNMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS
Top Tech Official Calls for New panel to help Liberate Government Data
UK Official Warns of Limits on Media
EDUCATION
Are enhanced e-books bad for kids’ reading skills?
POLICYMAKERS
Watching Big Brother: Privacy Board Delayed
Commissioner Brisé fills Vacancy on the USAC Board of Directors [links to web]
STORIES FROM ABROAD
UK Official Warns of Limits on Media
Guardian's Amelia Hill Won't Be Prosecuted Over Phone Hacking Reporting [links to web]
New Zealand judge orders US to hand over Megaupload documents
INTERNET/BROADBAND
FAILING BROADBAND POLICY
[SOURCE: ars technica, AUTHOR: Timothy Lee]
[Commentary] Here’s four developments in the telecommunications marketplace that have made Lee reexamine the state of US broadband:
The Berkman broadband report: In 2009, a team led by Yochai Benkler at Harvard's Berkman Center produced a voluminous report on the subject which found that broadband service in the United States was distinctly mediocre.
Verizon Halting FiOS builds: In 2010, Verizon announced that it would stop installing fiber without reaching some of its most important markets, including Baltimore, downtown Boston, and Philadelphia. It now appears that none of the "Baby Bells" have any further plans to run fiber optic cables to peoples' homes. That means only the minority of households with FiOS service (and perhaps some of AT&T's U-Verse customers) have an alternative to their local cable company for faster-than-DSL connectivity.
The Level 3/Comcast dispute: Comcast forced Level 3 to pay it for connectivity in 2010. There's still significant dispute about what happened and whether Comcast did anything unethical or illegal. But the incident is a clear sign of Comcast's growing bargaining power relative to other major networking firms. And that's cause for concern because, while there are plenty of alternatives to Level 3's transit services, only Comcast can deliver traffic to Comcast's 17 million broadband subscribers.
No "third pipe": For a long time there’s speculation about whether anyone will enter the broadband market to compete with incumbent phone and cable companies. At various times, people have touted broadband over power lines, satellite-based broadband, and wireless services like WiMAX as candidates to be a third player in the broadband market. Others have predicted that someone will actually dig up the streets and lay their own fiber. This is happening in a few places. Kansas City is getting Google-installed fiber, and a handful of communities can get broadband service from WOW or Sonic.net. But these examples are the exception that proves the rule.
benton.org/node/124455 | Ars Technica
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WASTING TIME IS NEW DIVIDE IN DIGITAL ERA
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Matt Richtel]
In the 1990s, the term “digital divide” emerged to describe technology’s haves and have-nots. It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families. Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide. But they have created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government now wants to fix. As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show. This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it. The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers. Separately, the commission will help send digital literacy trainers this fall to organizations like the Boys and Girls Club, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some of the financial support for this program, part of a broader initiative called Connect2Compete, comes from private companies like Best Buy and Microsoft. These efforts complement a handful of private and state projects aimed at paying for digital trainers to teach everything from basic keyboard use and word processing to how to apply for jobs online or use filters to block children from seeing online pornography.
benton.org/node/124491 | New York Times
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NETWORK NEUTRALITY CASE SCHEDULE
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has set a briefing schedule for Verizon and MetroPCS' challenge of the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality rules, and that schedule suggests there won't be a decision until sometime in 2013. According to a copy of the schedule, released May 25, initial briefs are due July 2, with final briefs due Nov. 21. One attorney following the case says that signals oral arguments in the January-February time frame. The parties had agreed on a briefing schedule in April, which they submitted to the court. The court essentially approved that schedule. The court also agreed to let MetroPCS file a separate reply brief. Free Press will also get to file a separate reply brief since it opposes the FCC for entirely different reasons.
benton.org/node/124452 | Multichannel News
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CYBERSECURITY
IRAN CONFIRMS FLAME
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Thomas Erdbrink]
The computers of high-ranking Iranian officials appear to have been penetrated by a data-mining virus called Flame, in what may be the most destructive cyberattack on Iran since the notorious Stuxnet virus, an Iranian cyberdefense organization confirmed. In a message posted on its Web site, Iran’s Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center warned that the virus was dangerous. An expert at the organization said in a telephone interview that it was potentially more harmful than the 2010 Stuxnet virus, which destroyed several centrifuges used for Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. In contrast to Stuxnet, the newly identified virus is designed not to do damage but to collect information secretly from a wide variety of sources. Flame, which experts say could be as much as five years old, was discovered by Iranian computer experts. In a statement about Flame on its Web site, Kaspersky Lab, a Russian producer of antivirus software, said that “the complexity and functionality of the newly discovered malicious program exceed those of all other cyber menaces known to date.”
benton.org/node/124483 | New York Times
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CYBERSECURITY AND DEFENSE COMPANIES
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Tony Romm, Jennifer Martinez]
As Congress boosts spending on cybersecurity and mulls over new data safety requirements on private industry, some companies stand to get rich. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and other defense and tech companies have been lobbying Capitol Hill about the growing cyberthreats to national security and corporate America, but they also make millions of dollars each year selling a variety of cybersecurity programs, tools and solutions to government and business. Some lawmakers say the legislative push has spawned a “cyber-industrial complex.”
benton.org/node/124485 | Politico
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SPECTRUM/WIRELESS
HOW SPECTRUM SHARING WOULD WORK
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Brian Chen]
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recent report alludes to spectrum-sharing technologies that would help address the exploding demand for mobile data spurred by smartphones and tablets. How exactly would this spectrum-sharing technology work? Steven Crowley, a wireless engineer who works as a consultant to carriers, government agencies and others, said that the system should be designed so that federal, nonfederal and commercial entities can share available radio spectrum. In order for something like this to work, the government would need to use a centralized system to scan the radio waves and be aware of the spectrum environment. This system would be able to find which frequencies are available and choose the best one for a mobile device to make a connection. Mobile devices themselves can also be equipped with special sensing circuitry to detect what frequencies other cellphones are using, and to choose a frequency that is less crowded, he said. More advanced antennas would also help with this effort, Crowley said. A conventional radio antenna on a cellphone tower spews energy in all directions, but only a portion of it goes to the right phone. A technology called the smart antenna would direct energy straight at phones, and as a result, current spectrum would be put to more efficient use. The idea of sharing unused spectrum seems fairly obvious, raising the question of why it hasn’t already been done. Crowley said the technologies required for spectrum-sharing had only recently matured.
benton.org/node/124476 | New York Times
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NEXTEL NETWORK TO END IN ‘13
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Kevin Fitchard]
Sprint has officially started the countdown for taking its Nextel iDEN network offline: T-minus 13 months and 2 days. Sprint plans to turn off the Nextel network’s key push-to-talk Direct Connect capabilities as soon as June 30, 2013, effectively shutting down all iDEN services. Sprint said it has already stopped selling some Nextel devices, and in the next few months it will discontinue its iDEN phone portfolio completely. In two days it will send out notices to its core government and business customers warning them of the pending deadline, and it said it will work with all of its Nextel and Boost Mobile iDEN customers to transition them over to its CDMA network, over which it has recreated the walk-talkie-style Direct Connect service.
benton.org/node/124439 | GigaOm
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OWNERSHIP
TECH SUITS ENDANGER INNOVATION
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Eduardo Porter]
Casual observers would find little in common between the smartphones in their pockets and the funky backbeat of the Beastie Boys’ Car Thief. But these two creations will go down together in the annals of creativity as reminders of the flaws in our intellectual property laws. TufAmerica, which manages the rights to the catalog of the go-go band Trouble Funk, sued the Beastie Boys this month, saying they had illegally used samples from Trouble Funk’s classics “Drop the Bomb” and “Say What” in several tracks on their 1980s albums “Licensed to Ill” and “Paul’s Boutique.” To fans of 1980s hip-hop, the suit was a bitter reminder of how copyright law changed the music they loved. Hip-hop may have little to do with high tech. But its experience carries a stark warning for the future of technology. High-tech behemoths in a range of businesses like mobile computing and search and social networking have been suing one another to protect their intellectual property from what they see as the blatant copying and cloning by their rivals. Regardless of the legitimacy of their claims, the aggressive litigation could have a devastating effect on society as a whole, short-circuiting innovation.
benton.org/node/124489 | New York Times
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FACEBOOK-INSTAGRAM REVIEW
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Diane Bartz]
Apparently, Facebook has received notice that the Federal Trade Commission will give its proposed purchase of the popular photo-sharing app maker Instagram a lengthy investigation. Facebook has received a "second request" from the FTC, essentially a request for relatively large amounts of data that the regulators will sift through to ensure that the deal complies with antitrust law. A prolonged review adds another headache to the No. 1 social network. The purchase of the photo-sharing service on the Internet is a crucial part of Facebook's strategy to bolster its mobile offerings at a time when consumers are increasingly accessing the Internet through smartphones.
benton.org/node/124470 | Reuters
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PRIVACY
NETFLIX AND CONSUMER DATA
[SOURCE: paidContent.org, AUTHOR: Daniel Frankel]
U.S. District Court papers filed May 25 revealed greater detail as to how Netflix settled a class-action privacy lawsuit filed against it last year, accusing it of violating the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). In short, Netflix agreed not to hold onto data showing which movies its former customers rented for as long as it has in the past. In February, Netflix announced that it had settled the case for $9 million in restitution and attorney’s fees, but didn’t talk about any changes to its policies. But as a plaintiff’s motion filed May 25 seeking preliminary approval of this settlement shows, Netflix agreed to strip out information about the titles its former customers rent from their basic identification profiles no more than one year after they leave the service. The VPPA was signed into law in 1988 by then-President Ronald Reagan after a newspaper outed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s Blockbuster rental history during his Congressional approval hearings. Asubsection of that law requires video operators to destroy rental-history data “as soon as practicable, but no later than one year from the date the information is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected.” The plaintiffs contend that, “Netflix’s ongoing maintenance of ‘digital dossiers’ on its subscribers — after canceling their subscriptions and beyond the point where Netflix still needs the information — constitutes a failure to ‘destroy as soon as practicable,’ in violation of the VPPA.”
benton.org/node/124486 | paidContent.org
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CONTENT
FTC WORKSHOP
[SOURCE: USAToday, AUTHOR: Jayne O'Donnell]
On May 30, the Federal Trade Commission holds a workshop that will look at how companies should disclose incentives on social-media "platforms that allow only short messages or a simple sign of approval," says FTC advertising practices chief Mary Engle. Incentives for consumers to "like" companies on Facebook fall into a "gray area" that depends on whether the number of likes a company has influences consumers in choosing their products, Engle says. The FTC's advertising endorsement guidelines require compensation to be disclosed, as with Twitter hashtags such as "#paid," she says. The National Consumers League's Sally Greenberg, who is testifying at the FTC workshop, says consumers on social media need the same protections as with traditional advertising. Consumers need to be protected "from false and deceptive advertising" in "new media," says Greenberg.
benton.org/node/124473 | USAToday
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TELEVISION
NBC AND NONPROFITS
[SOURCE: TVNewsCheck, AUTHOR: Diana Marszalek]
Six months into them, the NBC Owned Television Stations' partnerships with four nonprofit news organizations are bearing fruit, resulting in an uptick in investigative reports on local newscasts. WMAQ Chicago produced a piece that questioned whether a well-known community organizer improperly spent millions of dollars in government grants — a subject brought to the TV news team’s attention by the station’s partner, ChicagoReporter. KNBC Los Angeles and its partner, noncommercial KPPC-FM, collaborated on several stories, one of which uncovered that a local teacher arrested for sexually abusing students was paid to retire by the Los Angeles school district — preserving a pension and benefits. In Philadelphia, WCAU has started adding arts and culture reports to its news mix courtesy of its partner, the public TV and radio broadcaster WHYY. And in February, three years after federal stimulus money was distributed, the NBC stations in New York, Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego and Hartford, Conn., all did locally focused stories on where all that money went. Those stories all were based on data provided by ProPublica, the investigative news service that works with WNBC and gives other NBC stations access to stories ideas and research before they go public.
benton.org/node/124453 | TVNewsCheck
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RIDICULOUS CABLE BILL
[SOURCE: MediaPost, AUTHOR: George Simpson]
[Commentary] In a rare moment of candor, and departure from the usual languid "Try rebooting the box" communication expected from cable companies, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt apparently said at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association annual cable show: “There are too many networks.” “There are a lot of general-interest networks that have lower viewership, and the industry would take cost out of the system if they shut those networks down and offered lower prices to consumers,” he said. “The companies involved would make just as much money as they do now because of the costs.” Most cable subscribers are forced to pay for hundreds of networks, but they routinely watch less than 20. So why not allow consumers to choose cable channels on a channel-by-channel basis (so-called a la carte offerings)? The blame is often laid at the doorstep of the content providers that bundle little-watched channels with more popular networks. Kind of like when the nets say you can only have ad inventory on hit prime-time shows if you also buy some in other, far less popular dayparts. Then there is that dumb-assed argument that bundling supports diversity of programming, providing comfort for the 12 people out of 3.5 million subscribers who want to watch something in Hindi or Urdu. [Simpson is the president of George H. Simpson Communications]
benton.org/node/124444 | MediaPost
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
INTEREST IN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
[SOURCE: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, AUTHOR: ]
Americans focused most closely last week on news about the presidential election, as the race increasingly shifted from the Republican primary contest to the head-to-head fight between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Nearly three-in-ten (28%) say the campaign was their top story, while 16% say they most closely followed news about the economy, according to the latest weekly News Interest Index survey, conducted May 17-20 among 1,004 adult by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Election news topped coverage as well, accounting for 17% of the newshole, according to a separate analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ). General news about the U.S. economy made up 7% of coverage, while related news specifically about the multi-billion dollar losses at banking giant J.P. Morgan Chase accounted for another 7%. In terms of news interest, 7% say they followed news about the troubles at J.P. Morgan most closely last week.
benton.org/node/124435 | Pew Research Center for the People & the Press
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JOURNALISM
WHAT PRINT CUTS MEAN FO PAPERS
[SOURCE: AdAge, AUTHOR: Nat Ives]
The New Orleans Times-Picayune is stopping the presses for good on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays this fall. The risk is that taking four days off the table could further accelerate readers' shift away from print -- even on the days that advertisers still want it. When advertisers buy print, they pay higher ad rates than they would for the web. That's partly why The Times-Picayune collected $64.7 million in print ad revenue last year but only $5.7 million on its website, according to Kantar Media estimates. But print is only as compelling as its audience. So a lot ultimately will ride on how The Times-Picayune -- like its three Advance siblings in Alabama that are also cutting print to three days a week -- deploys its savings. New Orleans' broader interest in capable, robust news coverage is also at stake. Advance Publications disputes the idea that cutting four costly days of print will do anything but help the business and the newsroom. "For people to equate not delivering a print publication seven days a week with somehow lessening our commitment to trusted, credible content is flat-out wrong," said Randy Siegel, president for local digital strategy at Advance Publications. "This is about doing more journalism on more platforms," he added, "not clinging to this rigorous orthodoxy that the only way to serve a community is to print a newspaper seven days a week." Expect others to follow. The Times-Picayune and the Alabama papers are actually only following the lead of papers in Detroit and elsewhere in Michigan. "It's not at all surprising that Detroit and New Orleans are in the vanguard of this, because those markets have had some fairly catastrophic problems," Mr. Mutter said. "You'll see this happen in markets that are economically less robust, where publishers don't want to fight the headwinds of print and want to just get ahead of the migration to digital."
benton.org/node/124448 | AdAge
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NEW ORLEANS AND NEWSPAPERS
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Mathew Ingram]
Newspapers like the New York Times may be piling up revenue from their paywalls, and Warren Buffett may be asserting his undying commitment to the small-town publications he has just acquired, but there continue to be signs that the printing of news on dead trees does not have a great and glorious future — and the latest is the news from Advance Publications that its New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, will no longer be printed daily. As painful as that decision likely is for the paper and many of its staff, not to mention its print readers, the Times-Picayune is grappling with a reality that almost every newspaper will have to face sooner or later, whether they want to or not.
benton.org/node/124447 | GigaOm
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GOVERNMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS
TOP TECH OFFICIAL CALLS FOR NEW PANEL TO HELP LIBERATE GOVERNMENT DATA
[SOURCE: nextgov, AUTHOR: Joseph Marks]
Federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park called on the White House’s team of science and technology advisers to create a special subcommittee to advise his office on projects to disseminate government data to private sector developers and entrepreneurs. Park envisions the subcommittee of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology operating similar to a corporate board, he told PCAST, with members from inside and outside the council offering insights from their fields. PCAST co-chairman Eric Lander endorsed the subcommittee idea. Lander is director of the Broad Institute, a joint initiative of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aimed at using genetic and biological research to transform medical practices. Park’s office is leading numerous projects such as code-a-thons, aimed at turning government-gathered data into new products and services, and “data paloozas,” focused on showcasing those new products.
benton.org/node/124442 | nextgov
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EDUCATION
E-BOOKS AND KIDS
[SOURCE: paidContent.org, AUTHOR: Laura Hazard Owen]
New research from the Sesame Workshop’s Joan Ganz Cooney Center suggests that enhanced e-books’ special features can be distracting both to young kids and to their parents reading the books with them. The Cooney Center studied 32 child-parent pairs. The kids were all between 3 and 6 years old. Half the pairs read a print book and a regular e-book and the other half read a print book and an enhanced e-book (defined as an e-book with “enhanced multimedia experiences” like games and other interactive features, and the focus of reading apps like Scholastic’s Storia and Ruckus Reader). Kids who read enhanced e-books remembered “significantly fewer narrative details than children who read the print version of the same story.” And “both types of e-books, but especially the enhanced e-book, prompted more non-content related actions (e.g., behavior or device focused talk, pushing hands away) from children and parents than the print books.”
benton.org/node/124441 | paidContent.org
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POLICYMAKERS
PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES OVERSIGHT BOARD
[SOURCE: National Public Radio, AUTHOR: Martin Kaste]
The Obama Administration waited three years, until last December, to nominate a full slate of members to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The nominees are now awaiting Senate confirmation, but there are ominous signs that Senate Republicans will block them, even though the nominees come from both parties. Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican member of Congress who served on the first incarnation of the board, says he hopes that won't happen. "Well, it shouldn't be a partisan issue at all. It's a balanced board that's being created, and it's just important for them to start the work after a five-year delay," Hutchinson says. If the board had been operational in those years, could it have calmed some of the worries about government surveillance? It's hard to say, but Franklin, of the Constitution Project, says a functioning board might calm current privacy controversies — like the one over the cybersecurity bill. "If it can review classified information that the public is not privy to and assure us that that kind of oversight is going on, that would certainly give me greater confidence, absolutely," she says. To this, Hutchinson adds that the failure to staff the civil liberties board represents "an extraordinary disappointment in government."
benton.org/node/124464 | National Public Radio
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STORIES FROM ABROAD
UK OFFICIAL WARNS OF LIMITS ON MEDIA
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Lisa Vickery]
United Kingdom Education Secretary Michael Gove, a former journalist, appeared before the long-running Leveson inquiry into British press standards, warning against media regulations that could restrict free speech. While he conceded that there have been cases where journalists behaved in ways that were "deplorable," he said that in terms of regulation, the question is: "Might the cure, in certain circumstances, be worse than the disease?" Gove expressed concerns about the cost to "liberty and the culture of freedom" if regulation went too far. The Leveson inquiry is examining British media practices and preparing proposals for the U.K. government on possible press regulation. Established by the U.K. government last summer in the wake of a phone-hacking scandal at News Corp.'s now-closed News of the World tabloid, the inquiry has been scrutinizing reporting tactics and the relationship between British politicians and the media, which have been criticized as overly cozy.
benton.org/node/124482 | Wall Street Journal
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NEW ZEALAND DEMAND MEGAUPLOAD DOCS
[SOURCE: ars technica, AUTHOR: Timothy Lee]
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants scored a significant victory on May 29 when a New Zealand judge ordered the United States government to hand over evidence the defense will need to prepare for an upcoming extradition hearing. He rejected the government's argument that the defendants should make do with the information about its case the government itself chose to introduce in court. The judge's comments in the 81-page decision, which was provided to Ars Technica by Dotcom attorney Ira Rothken, suggest that he is conscious of Dotcom's trying circumstances and the unusual nature of the case against him. "Actions by and on behalf of the requesting State have deprived Mr. Dotcom and his associates of access to records and information," wrote Judge David Harvey, alluding to the fact that dozens of hard drives were taken from the Dotcom mansion during the January raid and have not been returned. Dotcom, Judge Harvey wrote, "does not have access to information which may assist him in preparation for trial."
benton.org/node/124468 | Ars Technica | CNet
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