October 2010

CenturyLink is acquiring Qwest for $10.6 billion, but competitors and union employees are saying they will opposing the deal in state regulatory hearings unless they get guarantees that they won't be hurt by planned cost-cutting in the Qwest operations over the next five years.

Qwest and CenturyLink are trying to head off that threat by presenting their own vision of what Minnesota's largest phone company would look like in the future. The hearings are currently in a middle phase in which testimony is being taken; regulators aren't expected to rule on whether the acquisition can take place until early next year. The two phone companies issued a list of guarantees about what they would and wouldn't change in Qwest's Minnesota operations over the next two to three years, providing the acquisition is approved by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. In addition, the two phone companies guaranteed a minimum investment in high-speed Internet service in Minnesota, totaling $50 million over five years. One-third of the money would be spent in areas that are unserved or underserved. The guarantees, which were negotiated privately between Qwest, CenturyLink and the Minnesota Department of Commerce, appear to be designed to mollify opponents of the acquisition. The opponents point out, however, that the $50 million guarantee is actually less than Qwest has been spending on broadband in the state.

In Europe, YouTube is still perceived in some circles as an illicit conduit for bootleg music. In France, a government study in January suggested a special advertising tax on YouTube, the dominant site for streaming music video, to reimburse musicians. In Germany, the producer of the British singer Sarah Brightman, together with the German music royalties group, are suing Google, which owns YouTube, over copyrighted songs and videos on the site. But increasingly, these challenges appear to be the exceptions as Google, using a carrot-and-stick approach of negotiation and music blackouts, begins to root out the legal hurdles to YouTube's growth in Europe. Since September 2009, despite its legal challenges in Germany, Google has signed royalty agreements with music copyright collecting societies in seven European countries representing more than half of the European online music market.

Hungary plans to implement a new tax on the telecoms sector could damage the development of the country's market and weaken the pace of technological rollouts. The findings, published in the wake of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's announcement on the proposed new tax, notes that the experience of other European Union (EU) markets shows that there is no credible case to support a special tax on the sector.

Nielsen analyzed cellphone bills of 60,000 mobile subscribers and found adults made and received an average of 188 mobile phone calls a month in the 2010 period, down 25% from the same period three years earlier. Average monthly "talk minutes" fell 5% for the period compared with 2009; among 18- to 24-year-olds, the decline was 17%.

Text messages -- also known as SMS (Short Message Service) -- take up less bandwidth than phone calls and cost less. A recent survey of 2,000 college students asked about their attitudes toward phone calls and text-messaging and found the students' predominant goal was to pass along information in as little time, with as little small talk, as possible. Part of what's driving the texting surge among adults is the popularity of social media. Sites like Twitter, with postings of no more than 140 characters, are creating and reinforcing the habit of communicating in micro-bursts. And these sites also are pumping up sheer volume. Economics has much to do with texting's popularity. Text messages cost carriers less than traditional mobile voice transmissions, and so they cost users less.

Texting's rise over conversation is changing the way we interact, social scientists and researchers say. We default to text to relay difficult information. We stare at our phone when we want to avoid eye contact. Rather than make plans in advance, we engage in what Rich Ling, a researcher for the European telecom company Telenor and a professor at IT University in Copenhagen who studies teens and technology, has named "micro-coordination"—"I'll txt u in 10mins when I know wh/ restrnt." Texting saves us time, but it steals from quiet reflection.