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August 5, 2008 (FCC Agenda)
BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for TUESDAY AUGUST 5, 2008
For upcoming media policy events, see http://benton.org/calendar
NEWS FROM THE FCC
Martin Sets August Agenda for FCC
Plugging America's Broadband Gap
INTERNET/BROADBAND
Was The FCC Comcast Investigation A Farce?
What's a reasonable approach for managing broadband networks?
AOL Is Moving Closer To Jettisoning Dial-Up
ELECTIONS & MEDIA
McCain and Obama Split News Coverage
Could Celebrity status hurt Obama?
BROADCASTING
Saving Red Lion
Another TV duopoly is a bad idea in Miami
DIGITAL CONTENT
Court OKs Cablevision's Network DVR
Watchdogs File Brief In MySpace Case
QUICKLY -- PTC Responds to Networks' Supreme Court Filings; FCC Receives Comments on WiMax; CPB Announces Second Round of Local Service Initiative Grants; Internet companies agree on China code of conduct; Ad spending forecast to shift more to direct marketing; Violent films viewed by millions of children, study finds
NEWS FROM THE FCC
MARTIN SETS AUGUST AGENDA FOR FCC
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: Ted Hearn]
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin wants the agency to adopt rules on August 22 that would exempt small cable operators from certain obligations to carry local TV stations in both analog and digital formats. The relief is expected to cover cable systems with up to 2,500 subscribers that are owned by cable companies that serve no more than 10% of pay-TV subscribers nationally -- a test that theoretically includes just about every cable company except Comcast and Time Warner Cable. The FCC tentative agenda also includes consideration of the following issues: cellphone roaming; a freeze on new wireless-microphone licenses in the 700-megahertz band; dialing 911; and universal service administration. Chairman Martin also said the text of the order approving the XM Satellite Radio-Sirius Satellite Radio merger could be out as early as Tuesday.
http://benton.org/node/15844
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PLUGGING AMERICA'S BROADBAND GAP
[SOURCE: BusinessWeek, AUTHOR: Roger Crockett]
Should speedy Internet service be free? Kevin Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, wants the agency to vote on a plan in August that would let any household in the country cruise the Net at broadband speeds, at absolutely no cost. But his idea faces heated opposition from companies such as AT&T that worry their profits will be threatened by a free alternative. Chairman Martin is concerned about a US broadband gap. Only 60% of American households have speedy Net access. That puts the country in 15th place among developed nations, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. It's a mighty fall from 2001, when the U.S. ranked fourth. There are three basic options for catching up. The government can take the lead, making its own investments in broadband. Second, the government can mandate that existing providers make the service available more widely. Most realistically perhaps, the government can create incentives for private companies to roll out more broadband. That's what Martin is trying to do. He wants to auction off wireless spectrum and require the winning bidder to provide free broadband throughout the country. The company could make money by selling advertising and advanced services.
http://benton.org/node/15850
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INTERNET/BROADBAND
WAS THE FCC COMCAST INVESTIGATION A FARCE?
[SOURCE: dslreports.com, AUTHOR: Karl Bode]
[Commentary] When did Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin turn into a consumer advocate? Bode note's Martin's political ambitions and wonders if he's trying to hold onto his past the time his political rabbi -- George Bush -- leaves office. "But I can't stop wondering if Martin's new found obsession with ISP "transparency" doesn't have a larger motive than just politics," Bode writes. While consumer advocates are cheering the FCC decision as a network neutrality victory, and pro-free-market types are lamenting Martin as the worst sort of socialist evil-doer, Comcast really won't see more than a wrist slap. Note the only real change is that Comcast may impose a 250GB monthly cap, and start charging users $15 for each 10 GB over the cap they travel. I'll repeat: the only real result of the investigation is bad press for Comcast and an industry push toward caps and metered usage. Who benefits? The best case scenario is that Martin is just pretending to champion network neutrality in order to further his political future. The worst case scenario is that Martin and AT&T are using the throttling investigation to begin warming consumers to an immensely unpopular pricing model. If the latter, expect the hard sell for metered pricing to drop this fall, with a heavy push coming from AT&T and their various policy mouthpieces.
http://benton.org/node/15843
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WHAT'S A REASONABLE APPROACH FOR MANAGING BROADBAND NETWORKS?
[SOURCE: Google Public Policy blog, AUTHOR: Vint Cerf]
[Commentary] The recent attention to the Comcast-BitTorrent dispute and on Time Warner's recently launched trial of "consumption-based billing" raises the question: what is a reasonable approach for broadband networks to manage their Internet traffic? In Cerf's view, Internet traffic should be managed with an eye towards applications and protocols. For example, a broadband provider should be able to prioritize packets that call for low latency (the period of time it takes for a packet to travel from Point A to Point B), but such prioritization should be applied across the board to all low latency traffic, not just particular application providers. Broadband carriers should not be in the business of picking winners and losers in the market under the rubric of network management. Network management also should be narrowly tailored, with bandwidth constraints aimed essentially at times of actual congestion.
http://benton.org/node/15842
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AOL IS MOVING CLOSER TO JETTISONING DIAL-UP
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Zachary Goldfarb, Frank Ahrens]
In April, Time Warner promised to make clear its plans for AOL's future by its second-quarter earnings call, scheduled for tomorrow. Apparently AOL will shed the dial-up Internet access business that once offered tens of millions of people their first glance at the Internet and turned AOL into the nation's leading Internet company in the 1990s. The separation would make it easier to sell the dial-up business outright or sell a piece of it to a partner while retaining access to the monthly cash generated by subscribers.
http://benton.org/node/15848
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ELECTIONS & MEDIA
MCCAIN AND OBAMA SPLIT NEWS COVERAGE
[SOURCE: Project for Excellence in Journalism, AUTHOR: Mark Jurkowitz]
For the first time since this general election campaign began in early June, Republican John McCain attracted virtually as much media attention as his Democratic rival last week. Barack Obama was a significant or dominant factor in 81% of the campaign stories compared with 78% for McCain, according to PEJ's Campaign Coverage Index for July 28-Aug. 3. Not only was that a high water for McCain in the general election season (his previous best was 62% from June 30-July 6). The virtual dead heat in the race for exposure between the two candidates also marked the first time his weekly coverage had even been within 10 percentage points of Obama's total.
http://benton.org/node/15841
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COULD CELEBRITY STATUS HURT OBAMA
[SOURCE: Miami Herald, AUTHOR: Edward Wasserman]
[Commentary] The emergence of Barack Obama as a marketable celebrity brings a new dimension to the perennial discussion of media political bias. One dimension of media behavior that doesn't get enough attention is the self-serving one: Media like what helps them prosper. If Obama draws bigger crowds, let's have more Obama coverage. But is celebrity-like coverage for a politician helpful? Probably not.
http://benton.org/node/15840
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BROADCASTING
SAVING RED LION
[SOURCE: Benton Foundation, AUTHOR: Charles Benton]
[Commentary] Last week, television broadcasters told the Supreme Court that the FCC's efforts to enforce US broadcast indecency law are invalid because today's families subscribe to cable and satellite television services and surf the Internet. To make the point clearer: in order to reserve the right to broadcast "dirty" words and the occasional image of a naked female breast when children might be in the audience, broadcasters are challenging the right of the public to demand public interest programming -- educational programming for children, local civic and election affairs, and public safety information. Without public interest obligations, our country's most time-honored broadcast values of competition, diversity, localism and democracy might all be toast.
http://benton.org/node/15845
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ANOTHER TV DUOPOLY IS A BAD IDEA IN MIAMI
[SOURCE: Miami Herald, AUTHOR: Fred Grimm]
[Commentary] Will it be in the public interest if two Miami television stations that have for decades competing in local news are owned by the same company? The Federal Communications Commission has been approving TV duopolies willy-nilly (South Florida has three) over the last decade, mostly of the big-fish-eat-little-fish variety. And the FCC seems likely to approve the latest proposal from Post-Newsweek. The FCC buys into the argument, pushed hard by the National Association of Broadcasters, that consolidation enables local stations to create super-duper news operations. "We think it's a terrible idea," said Marvin Ammori of Free Press, a public interest watchdog. Ammori said "the weight of the evidence" shows that the 80 or so TV duopolies blessed by the FCC usually resulted in a net loss in local news coverage. Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America, said, "Our concern is that they tend to save money by cutting back on reporters. You get fewer reporters on certain beats. You lose competition. You lose diversity in news coverage. Discourse is diminished. We're convinced it hurts the public interest." "We're unhappy with consolidation, in general, but the prospect of two network affiliates owned by one company in a major market is especially unsettling," said Andrew Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project, yet another advocacy group worried that the FCC is putting industry wants ahead of the public interest. Schwartzman said, "Our experience is that duopolies have produced few if any palpable benefits for the public." But he predicted the FCC would again say yes.
http://benton.org/node/15839
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DIGITAL CONTENT
COURT OKs CABLEVISION NETWORK DVR
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: Ted Hearn]
The U.S. Court of Appeals the 2nd Circuit, reversing a lower court, said Cablevision's remote digital video recorder (DVR) service did not directly infringe on the copyright interests of the Cartoon Network, Cable News Network and various Hollywood studios that sued the Long Island-based cable operator. The ruling will Cablevision to roll out its network-based DVR, lifting an injunction that barred Cablevision from using the technology pending appeal. Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge said, "This decision is a great victory for innovation, technological progress and consumers' rights."
http://benton.org/node/15838
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WATCHDOGS FILE BRIEF IN MYSPACE CASE
[SOURCE: CongressDaily, AUTHOR: Andrew Noyes]
The Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and a group of 14 law professors filed a joint friend-of-the-court brief arguing that violating an Internet service's "terms of service" agreement isn't a criminal offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The brief submitted in United States v. Lori Drew explains the legal theory behind the government's indictment of Drew would effectively criminalize the actions of millions of Web users. The suburban St. Louis mother allegedly created a false profile on the popular social networking site MySpace, posing as a teenage boy, to engage a 13-year-old neighborhood girl, Megan Meier, in conversation. Drew's conversations with Meier were allegedly cruel and harassing and Meier hanged herself.
http://benton.org/node/15837
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QUICKLY -- PTC Responds to Networks' Supreme Court Filings; FCC Receives Comments on WiMax; CPB Announces Second Round of Local Service Initiative Grants
PTC RESPONDS TO NETWORKS' SUPREME COURT FILINGS
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The Parents Television Council said the broadcast medium remains uniquely pervasive and if broadcasters think they aren't, they should return their licenses and allow the spectrum to be auctioned "in the public interest." That came in response to broadcasters' argument in a brief to the Supreme Court Friday that the court should rethink the "uniquely pervasive" and "spectrum-scarcity" arguments for regulating broadcast content.
http://benton.org/node/15836
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FCC RECEIVES COMMENTS ON WIMAX
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Comments continued to be filed with the Federal Communications Commission over whether some top cable operators and Google should be able to team up with Sprint Nextel and Clearwire to provide a new WiMax-delivered broadband service. Free-market think tank The Free State Foundation weighed in Monday, saying that it will boost competition and adding that it should "eliminate" -- or at least reduce -- the calls for imposing network neutrality on broadband providers.
http://benton.org/node/15835
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CPB ANNOUNCES SECOND ROUND OF LOCAL SERVICE INITIATIVE GRANTS
[SOURCE: Corporation for Public Broadcasting]
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced the second round of recipients of the Local Service Initiative (LSI) grants. The LSI grants provide seed money to stations for the development of public media initiatives that strengthen a station's role in its community and increase the public's awareness of the value of its service to the community.
http://benton.org/node/15834
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INTERNET COMPANIES AGREE ON CHINA CODE OF CONDUCT
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: ]
Technology companies and human rights groups have reached an agreement on a voluntary code of conduct for activities in China and other restrictive countries. The voluntary code will spell out "principles of freedom of expression and privacy" in countries where governments seek users' private information or block access to certain websites. In separate letters sent to Sens Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Tom Coburn (R-OK), the companies said the code's details were being worked out.
http://benton.org/node/15851
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AD SPENDING FORECAST TO SHIFT MORE TO DIRECT MARKETING
[SOURCE: USAToday, AUTHOR: David Lieberman]
Consumers will foot more of the bill for the media they want over the next five years as advertisers shift their spending from traditional media to direct marketing, according to the latest edition of private-equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson's Communications Industry Forecast. The annual report, a fixture on the desks of many media executives, should cheer video game and cable and satellite TV companies and Internet service providers (ISPs). But it could complicate efforts by ad-dependent broadcast TV and radio stations, consumer magazines, and especially newspaper companies to characterize their current struggles as a temporary blip in an anemic economy. "You could call (2008) a tipping point," with consumers poised for the first time to spend more on media than advertisers will, says James Rutherfurd, VSS managing director.
http://benton.org/node/15847
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VIOLENT FILMS VIEWED BY MILLIONS OF CHILDREN, STUDY FINDS
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Swati Pandey]
In a study published in the August issue of Pediatrics, Dartmouth Medical School researchers found that violent movies attract, on average, 12.5% of 10- to 14-year-olds in the country, with boys, minorities and children whose parents don't restrict viewing habits seeing the most gore. Researchers noted that as movies become more accessible, it's important to take note of the extent of kids' exposure to violence, especially since the ratings system can seem vague in describing how a film earned its rating.
http://benton.org/node/15846
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