Ownership

This is the year, friends.  The year when the battle for an Open Internet pits the three self-proclaimed wise men of the Federal Communications Commission against an overwhelming majority of the American people.  Every index I have seen—be it popular poll, volume of pleas to Congress, or expressions of anger toward the FCC—makes it crystal clear that we the people want an open internet and an end to ever-increasing monopoly control of our telecom and media markets.  Most Americans would agree with the great Justice Louis Brandeis: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated i

The engineer who was fired by Google after he criticized its diversity policies is suing the internet giant, alleging that he and others at Google were harassed over their conservative political views. 

[Commentary] Platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas. It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic...I realized that the problems I had been seeing couldn’t be solved simply by, say, Facebook hiring staff to monitor the content on the site. The problems were inherent in the attention-based, algorithm-driven business model. And what I suspected was Russia’s meddling in 2016 was only a prelude to what we’d see in 2018 and beyond.

Technology companies with unprecedented power to sway consumers and move markets have done the unthinkable: They’ve made trust-busting sound like a good idea again. The concentration of wealth and influence among tech giants has been building for years—90 percent of new online-ad dollars went to either Google or Facebook in 2016; Amazon is by far the largest online retailer, the third-largest streaming media company, and largest cloud-computing provider.

Apparently, Comcast fired about 500 salespeople shortly before Christmas, despite claiming that the company would create thousands of new jobs in exchange for a big tax cut. Comcast apparently tried to keep the firings secret while it lobbied for the tax cut that was eventually passed into law by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in late December. The Philadelphia Inquirer revealed the Comcast firings this week in an article based on information from an anonymous former employee, Comcast documents, and other sources in the company.

While some might think that the business of deregulation is easy, that usually is not the case, as comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s proposals to modify the public notice requirements for broadcast applications make clear. In a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, as part of its initiative on the Modernization of Media Regulation, the FCC looked to modify the rules governing public notice that broadcasters must give when they file certain types of broadcast applications – particularly license renewals and applications for the assignment or transfer of broadcast stations.

Despite tying a projected five-year capital expenditure figure of $50 billion to the Federal Communications Commission’s recent decision to roll back its net neutrality mandates, an analysis of Comcast’s capital expenditures (capex) reveals that the top US cable operator was on track to spend about that much even before the agency voted to deregulate. 

AT&T was sued by a workers' union that is trying to stop the company from instituting what it calls a "massive layoff." Thousands of employees are reportedly being laid off by the company, which reported $39.7 billion in revenue and $6.4 billion in operating income last quarter.

[Commentary] My research suggests that managers of local television, the most popular news source in the US, recognize the competitive value of investigative reports (I measured competition as the degree of similarity between stations in Nielsen market “shares”).

What does this megadeal tell us about the future of TV?

1. Broadband Video Is The Future
2. The Future of TV is Global
3. The Future of Video is Full Stack & D2C

The future of the TV business will be a grand, global game played out over broadband and delivered via apps. The prize is direct access to the hearts, minds, and wallets of middle-class urbanites around the world. Prior to this announcement, Netflix was leaving the competition in its dust. No more. Netflix needs to take a serious look in the rear view mirror.