Washington Post

For the first time, advertisers spent more on online ads than broadcast television in the US, according to a new report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Online advertising as a whole brought in a record breaking $42.7 billion in 2013, a 17 percent increase over 2012, compared to the $40.1 billion spent broadcast television.

That's certainly a significant milestone, and it's meant to be the eye-catching part of a press release.

But the details of the report show a much more complicated rivalry between online and broadcast, and tell us more about why tech companies are so eager to get onto television. Television is where the money is. And for good reason: It's where the attention is. According to data from Nielsen published in February, Americans watched 185 hours of television in December of 2013 -- up six hours from December 2012. That was nearly seven times as long as people spent online at their computers, and more than five times as much as they spent using mobile devices like smart phones.

With that sort of consumer interest, it's no wonder big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo are trying increase their presence on most Americans' living room display. Online video has been expanding too -- for instance, Disney recently announced a half billion deal to buy the YouTube-based Maker Studio.

For federal regulators, words really matter. An adjective too bold, a verb misconjugated or a particle dropped can ripple across the business world and send stock markets into chaos. That’s why leaders of government agencies so rarely speak in public -- and generally do so with great care. Not Tom Wheeler, the dauntless and plain-spoken chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who has displayed a rare joy for gab.

“I’m not sitting here sucking eggs,” Chairman Wheeler said at his first public meeting in November, a warning shot of what was to come. “I’m looking seriously at these issues.”

Such candor has defied early assumptions about President Barack Obama’s FCC pick as a lame duck. The 68-year-old has eagerly grasped a national megaphone on the defining -- and the utterly arcane -- telecommunications policy issues of the day.

In coming months, he faces the biggest test of his promise to put consumers first, deciding whether to approve the merger of two of corporate America’s least-popular companies: cable titans Comcast and Time Warner Cable. It will be hard to please all sides with bigger and more controversial decisions ahead:

• He will make the call on Comcast’s $45 billion bid for Time Warner Cable, a deal that would create the first national cable company and a broadband Internet titan with 40 percent of the market share.
• His net neutrality proposal rankled consumer advocates, who say it could allow the richest Web companies to buy better access to users.
• He will launch the biggest sale of television airwaves in years, an auction that could dramatically shrink local broadcasting and determine the dominant providers of mobile services for years to come.

His folksy idioms and direct Midwestern sensibility have won many friends in Congress, the FCC and at the top levels of corporate America. And Chairman Wheeler is unapologetic about the decades he spent leading the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and the CTIA wireless group and then as a venture capitalist with telecom, Internet and broadcast industry investments. Indeed, as he sees it, his lobbying skills are key to his management of the FCC -- a notion that might make others cringe. “This is a job that I’ve been training for my entire professional life,” Chairman Wheeler said.

A major flaw in widely used encryption software has highlighted one of the enduring -- and terrifying -- realities of the Internet: It is inherently chaotic, built by multitudes and continuously tweaked, with nobody in charge of it all.

The Heartbleed bug was a product of the online world’s makeshift nature. While users see the logos of big, multibillion-dollar companies when they shop, bank and communicate over the Internet, nearly all of those companies rely on free software -- often built and maintained by volunteers -- to help make those services secure.

Heartbleed, security experts say, was lodged in a section of code that had been approved two years ago by a developer that helps maintain OpenSSL, a piece of free software created in the mid-1990s and still used by companies and government agencies almost everywhere. While the extent of the damage caused by the bug may never be known, the possibilities for data theft are enormous.

At the very least, many companies and government agencies will have to replace their encryption keys, and millions of users will have to create new passwords on sites where they are accustomed to seeing the small lock icon that symbolizes online encryption.

[Commentary] Comcast Xfinity customers in 14 states and DC are about to get a bump in Internet speeds. The company is more than doubling its mid-tier Xfinity Internet Blast tier to 105 Mbps, and customers using its 105 Mbps tier will be increased to 150 Mbps, at no extra charge.

Comcast's executive vice president David Cohen promises that there's more to come if regulators approve the company's proposed merger with Time Warner Cable. Testifying before the Senate, Cohen vowed to bring "more investments, faster speeds," and expand Comcast's program for low-income broadband subscribers to current Time Warner Cable subscribers.

But pressed by lawmakers about the changes, Cohen also said that many of the benefits would be implemented for Comcast customers either way -- they'd just be accelerated if the merger went through. That introduces a trade-off.

All the other questions about customer service and consumer protection aside, one of the biggest questions to be raised by the Senate hearing is whether lawmakers should use a carrot or a stick to press Comcast to roll out these benefits. The carrot -- allowing the merger with Time Warner Cable -- would allow Comcast to turn on its expanded scale. The big stick: denying the merger Comcast seeks and putting it at greater risk from competitors who would like nothing more than to knock the cable company out of its top position in broadband, video and potentially telephony?

Back9Network, a golf lifestyle cable channel, fears that the merger between Comcast and Time Warner could spell the end of its business.

The remarks by the CEO of the independent programming firm were made during a Senate Judiciary hearing on the proposed $45 billion cable and Internet mega merger.

James Bosworth, chief executive of the Hartford-based network, told lawmakers that for an independent programmer to succeed, it needs its channel to be carried by one of the big four paid television providers: Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Dish or Direct TV.

Ever since Comcast unveiled its plan to take over the nation's second biggest cable company, liberals have been pretty upset about the idea. Among the most vocal is Sen Al Franken (D-MN), who argued recently in blunt messages to federal regulators that "the Internet belongs to the people, not huge corporations." Recently, dozens of left-leaning organizations, such as Moveon.org and SumofUs, sent a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission expressing their displeasure.

Conservatives, by contrast, have mostly kept mum or praised the looming merger. But that may be starting to change as Republicans detect a political opportunity in the proposal -- not to mention some burgeoning problems with the merger itself.

The result is bipartisan objection to a buyout that critics say would be harmful to competition. Republican and conservative groups see the merger as a chance to score points against the Obama Administration, which has close ties with top Comcast executives Brian Roberts and David Cohen. The right-leaning Washington Free Beacon published a 1,200-word column excoriating Comcast's political contributions to Democratic politicians. That was soon followed by columns on Breitbart.com and a number of other outlets.

Comcast says it has loads of competition -- everyone from Facebook to Apple, which Comcast says is contemplating a television set-top box to compete with cable service.

Plus, Netflix and Amazon are already giants in online video, which also keeps the company on its toes, Comcast said in a regulatory filing for its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable.

"The difference between all those competitors and us is they have global and national scale,” said Comcast executive vice president David Cohen. That scale allows companies like Netflix and Apple to sell their products globally and invest in research, development and new technology. Comcast needs the merger with Time Warner to reach that level, he argued. But defining its competition in the broadband Internet industry may be harder for Comcast to do, some public interest groups and technology experts say.

And those definitions may be the crux of federal reviews into the company's $45 billion bid to become a national broadband business.

When Comcast sneezes, will too much of the technology industry catch a cold? That may be the central question facing regulators reviewing the company's $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable, a deal that again expands it cable television and, perhaps more importantly, its broadband Internet businesses.

The deal will be scrutinized in a Senate judiciary hearing and by regulators who will study Comcast’s arguments filed to the Federal Communications Commission and to the Justice Department. The merger on its face may not appear anticompetitive because Time Warner Cable and Comcast don’t compete in the same territories, analysts say. And that’s what Comcast stressed in its government filings, adding that it would commit to a string of conditions to assure it won’t squeeze out competition as the first-ever nationwide cable service provider.

But the problem isn’t only about getting bigger, public interest groups and smaller competitors say. It’s about the outsized power Comcast could have over an ecosystem of media, telecommunications and tech companies. After the merger, Comcast would have more than 40 percent of the home broadband market and 30 percent of cable subscribers.

Comcast refutes criticism that the deal is anticompetitive. It points to a thriving entertainment market where Netflix and Amazon compete with Comcast’s bundled cable television services. In the broadband market, Comcast points to competition from satellite firms, telecom companies such as Verizon with its FiOs service, and Google’s plans to expand its ultra-fast fiber service to dozens of cities.

But critics say satellite and wireless aren’t true broadband competitors because they're unable to deliver comparable fast downloads of videos and other large files. FiOs is in limited markets, and Google’s plans are years off in the future, they note.

But Comcast said it will commit to conditions to placate concerns. It will divest subscribers to keep its reach at 30 percent of the cable market, a benchmark that regulators say ensures competition between cable and satellite operators with programmers. It will extend network neutrality conditions that it committed to with the NBC merger. And it will continue to offer a low-income broadband service.

[Commentary] We’ve all heard how social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube help to spread democracy around the world by mobilizing the masses and making it easier to topple dictators. Now, we’re now seeing a darker side to them.

In some cases, they’re being co-opted by governments as disinformation tools, used by authoritarian regimes to crack down on Internet dissenters, and even being used as part of digital Black Ops by the United States in places like Cuba. The story of “fake Cuban Twitter” is especially disconcerting -- we’re talking about a digital Bay of Pigs, in which the US State Department, working through US Agency for International Development (USAID), actively worked to create a Twitter-like social network (ZunZuneo) to engage the local Cuban population in order to topple the Castro regime. In other cases, social networks are being used as part and parcel of government disinformation campaigns to co-opt opposition movements -- sometimes by the US government and its allies.

In countries such as Egypt and Turkey, data from social networks is being used to find exact locations of protesters based on GPS locations or to track down the IP addresses of Internet users the government wants to discipline. The question now is to what degree Western know-how is being used to facilitate these actions.

This emerging dark side of social networks has enormous implications for how America conducts its diplomatic business abroad. Terms like “digital statecraft” and “e-diplomacy” are commonplace these days -- not just for America, but also for nations that would like to emulate America’s ability to project power around the world. At little or no cost, social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube made it possible to spread the message that America was the land of baseball, apple pie and democracy for all.

But the more that social networks are seen to be doing the bidding of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency (and proxy organizations such as USAID) in terms of gathering and mobilizing the masses against governments, the less effective they are in sharing American values abroad.

[Commentary] There is more than one way to demolish a wall, physical or legal. When it comes to undermining the structure of modern campaign finance law, Chief Justice John Roberts has done it both ways.

The risk posed by the ruling, in which the chief justice wrote the plurality opinion, is not as much its immediate impact but the implications of its reasoning in demolishing an already rickety campaign finance structure. McCutcheon’s critics wail that it clears the way for wealthy individuals to plow millions into political campaigns. Um, but where have they been? The opportunities to write seven- and eight-figure checks were plentiful before the ruling.

The difference that McCutcheon makes is that mega-donors have previously had to conduct their political spending indirectly, through super PACs or other entities that do not write checks straight to candidates or parties. The real risk lies in the conservative justices’ seemingly deliberate obtuseness to the real world of campaign contributions -- in particular, their cramped understanding of what constitutes the kind of corruption or risk thereof to justify campaign finance legislation.