Bloomberg

The Federal Communications Commission is likely to change course and prioritize lifting newspaper and television station ownership restrictions when it comes under Republican control in 2017, agency watchers said. Industry analysts who track the FCC expect Republicans to relax rules once they assume control of the agency in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration. That would include loosening restrictions on how many broadcast properties one company can own in any given market and lifting the ban on media companies owning newspapers and broadcast TV stations in the same market, a practice known as cross-ownership.

The FCC declined to ease those restrictions in its most recent review of media ownership rules in August. Another restriction — an ownership cap preventing one entity from owning enough stations to reach more than 39 percent of all U.S. households — is up to Congress to change. “A pro-business Republican administration led by Donald Trump is expected to push for more deregulation,” Geetha Ranganathan, a Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst, wrote in a Nov. 10 note. “For broadcasters, this may translate to relaxation of the 39-percent ownership cap and elimination of the broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership ban.”

Behind the Time Warner campus in Atlanta (GA), more than a dozen massive dishes silently stream CNN newscasts, Cartoon Network shows and Turner Sports games to satellites in outer space. They’re a vital link in the media giant’s global news and entertainment business. But they operate under licenses from the Federal Communications Commission, which means they also could be the biggest threat to Time Warner’s aspirations to merge with AT&T.

Time Warner has dozens of FCC licenses. Transferring them to AT&T would trigger a review by the agency, and the company is looking for ways to avoid that, according to a person familiar with the situation. Otherwise, the $85.4 billion deal could be exposed to an agency that’s been a graveyard for mergers. In theory, Time Warner could sell its dishes to an unaffiliated third party and enter into a contract with them for the same services -- but in that case, the buyer would need to ask the FCC for a license to provide services in the same location over the same airwaves, said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. It’s possible the FCC would accept the application without a fuss, Schwartzman said. But, he said, FCC officials also might say, “Wait a minute! We’re not stupid -- you are evading this review.”

Nobody saw it coming. Not the media. Certainly not Hillary Clinton. Not even Donald Trump’s team of data scientists, holed up in their San Antonio (TX) headquarters 1,800 miles from Trump Tower, were predicting this outcome.

But the scientists picked up disturbances—like falling pressure before a hurricane—that others weren’t seeing. It was the beginning of the storm that would deliver Trump to the White House. President-elect Trump’s numbers were different, because his analysts, like Trump himself, were forecasting a fundamentally different electorate than other pollsters and almost all of the media: older, whiter, more rural, more populist. And much angrier at what they perceive to be an overclass of entitled elites. In the next three weeks, Trump channeled this anger on the stump, at times seeming almost unhinged.

China has green-lit a sweeping and controversial law that may grant Beijing unprecedented access to foreign companies’ technology and hamstring their operations in the world’s second-largest economy.

The Cyber Security Law was passed by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, and will take effect in June, government officials said. Among other things, it requires internet operators to cooperate with investigations involving crime and national security, and imposes mandatory testing and certification of computer equipment. Companies must also give government investigators full access to their data if wrong-doing is suspected.

Most of the newspapers currently in operation will ultimately die, because the Internet rewards scale rather than deep local knowledge. They will die whether they stick to their knitting or go all-in on “digital first.” And their deaths will, as deaths tend to, be rather unpleasant. I’m not going to tell them to waste the time they have left on a long-shot chance at life. But I’m not quite willing to tell them they shouldn’t, either.

The telecommunications industry has found a new battleground: slower, narrowband systems.

Vodafone is building a wireless network that’s cheap and robust enough to link items like garbage cans or garden soil sensors to the internet, so refuse companies will know when to send the truck and the roses get just the right amount of water. The system, in Madrid, is the vanguard of what will eventually be a global Vodafone narrowband network for the so-called internet-of-things -- millions, perhaps billions, of connected devices designed to save businesses money and time, and free consumers from mundane tasks. The new grid is cheaper to run than than regular mobile and WiFi networks because it uses less power. It’s designed for gadgets like gas meters or traffic-light signals that check in sporadically, rather than driverless cars or heart monitors, which speak continuously to the net.

To carriers like Vodafone, the networks represent a way to replace income from voice and data bundles that are becoming commoditized. Champions of the narrowband IoT envision homes and neighborhoods teeming with devices, blipping away for a few cents a day on batteries that last for years.

Yahoo demanded more transparency from the federal government after reports surfaced saying the company had built a software program to scan customers’ incoming e-mails for US intelligence agencies.

Yahoo, in a letter to ­James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, “is formally urging that the U.S. government provide its citizens with clarification around national security orders they issue to internet companies to obtain user data,” the company said. “While the letter makes specific reference to recent allegations against Yahoo, it is intended to set a stronger precedent of transparency for our users and all citizens who could be affected by government requests for user data.”

A political weather map of America would show Wall Street under a cloud, and Silicon Valley bathed in sunshine. Over the Obama administration’s eight years, the technology industry has embedded itself in Washington. The president hung out with Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg and hired the government’s first chief tech officer. At least at the lower levels of officialdom, the revolving door with companies such as Google is spinning ever faster -- as it once did with Wall Street. Politicians have played down their connections to finance since the taxpayer bailout of 2008. No such stigma attaches to tech, for now. But as the Valley steps up its lobbying efforts, with a wish-list that ranges from immigration to rules for driverless cars, some critics warn that similar traps lie in wait: It’s not easy for the government to police an industry from which it poaches talent and solicits help with writing laws.

The five biggest U.S. tech companies are now the five biggest companies, period -- at least as measured by market value. And they’re flexing that financial muscle. The tech firms spent $49 million on Washington lobbyists in 2015, while the five largest banks shelled out $19.7 million, data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics shows.

On the personnel front, the Campaign for Accountability, a non-profit group, studied the to-and-fro between government and Google. It found that 183 people who worked under President Barack Obama through 2015 were hired by Google, while 58 headed the other way.

AT&T has gone from a regional phone company to a national telecommunications powerhouse over the last decade. Its next big expansion will see it buying businesses to transform into a media and entertainment giant, apparently.

Over the next three to five years, AT&T will seek deals to become a producer of programming, shifting its business model so that it owns some of the content it distributes, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the company’s strategy. The company’s targets include companies worth $2 billion to $50 billion, apparently. Phone companies are trying to figure out their next steps for expansion as wireless growth flattens out and competition with cable providers remains intense. While its main rival Verizon has bet big on mobile advertising, AT&T is more focused on becoming a powerhouse in video programming. Having become the largest US pay-TV provider through the DirecTV deal, AT&T now faces a new set of challenges -- holding on to TV subscribers in an era of cord-cutting as well as fighting cable networks’ attempts to raise prices for their channels. Adding media properties to AT&T’s distribution business would give the phone carrier valuable insight for marketers into the viewing habits of its users, just as TV rival Comcast got in the acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011. “The landscape has changed so much in the past 10 years. Strategically, going into media makes a lot of sense,” said Amy Yong, an analyst with Macquarie Capital USA Inc. “Owning content has become very important, not only for cost benefits but getting a stronger foothold among consumers.”

Google attacked a European Union overhaul designed to ensure copyright owners get a fairer share of income, saying the measures would force it to vet text, video and images before they can be shared on its YouTube service.

"This would effectively turn the internet into a place where everything uploaded to the web must be cleared by lawyers before it can find an audience," the search-engine giant said after the European Commission unveiled draft rules that would also allow newspapers to demand payment when services such as Google News run their articles. Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., is already fighting three EU antitrust probes into search, phone software and advertising. If Sept 14's proposals become law, the company may have a weaker hand when dealing with copyright holders, boosted by more powers to withdraw content or demand compensation. EU regulators said they want to protect publishers and creators when their work is made available on the internet, often without remuneration.