October 2010

Internet security plan reviewed

The government is reviewing an Australian program that will allow Internet service providers to alert customers if their computers are taken over by hackers and could limit online access if people don't fix the problem.

Obama Administration officials have met with industry leaders and experts to find ways to increase online safety while trying to balance securing the Internet and guarding people's privacy and civil liberties. Experts and U.S. officials are interested in portions of the plan, set to go into effect in Australia in December. But any move toward Internet regulation or monitoring by the U.S. government or industry could trigger fierce opposition from the public. The discussions come as private, corporate and government computers across the U.S. are increasingly being taken over and exploited by hackers and other computer criminals.

US Ranks 15th, South Korea No. 1 in Cisco Broadband Rankings

South Korea extended its worldwide fixed-line broadband Internet leadership and the U.S. held onto joint 15th place as the technology's speed and availability expanded, according to a poll carried out by Cisco.

The broadband-quality rankings measure the proportion of households and businesses with access to broadband, combined with Internet-connection speeds. South Korea, which has 100 percent broadband penetration, topped Cisco's list for the third year in a row. Fixed-line customers' broadband access in the U.S., which shared its ranking with four nations, rose to 75 percent this year from 69 percent in 2009, Cisco said. Internet-download speeds in South Korea increased by 55 percent from a year earlier, said Cisco, the largest maker of routers and switches that direct Web traffic over networks. While the U.S. improved its broadband quality, it won't be fully prepared for technologies such as high-definition Internet television being developed by Apple Inc. and Google Inc. until next year, Fernando Gil de Bernabe, senior director at Cisco, said.

What would you do with gigabit Internet speeds?

South Korea has devised a national plan for 1,000Mbps connections to be commonplace by 2012. The government is encouraging enterprise to spend the 34 trillion Won (£19bn), required to complete the scheme. By way of a comparison, that figure is roughly the same as the nation's annual education budget. But what can a 1,000Mbps super-fast connection be used for? Firstly, it is about speed - Hollywood blockbusters can be downloaded in 12 seconds. And one thing that is becoming increasingly common is streaming television.

ESPN to Web Simulcast, Make Pay TV Online Gatekeeper

Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN will begin streaming its sports channels online to Time Warner Cable Inc. customers as soon as Oct. 25, part of the pay-TV industry's strategy to fend off Internet competitors.

Time Warner Cable customers with ESPN will be able to watch on computers with Web access, John Kosner, general manager of digital media at the Bristol, Connecticut-based sports network, said in an interview. Service on mobile devices is also planned. With the move, ESPN gives Time Warner Cable subscribers online access to its channels at no additional cost. ESPN is backing the cable industry's push to extend programs to the Web and combat the loss of viewers to companies such as Netflix Inc. As the network shifts to "TV Everywhere," ESPN.com will make fewer videos available to users of its services who don't subscribe to Time Warner Cable, Kosner said. "We believe this 'TV Everywhere' model is going to be what the industry at large is going to pursue," Kosner said. "We're going to make similar deals with lots of distributors."

Will Apple's Culture Hurt the iPhone?

If you want a smartphone powered by Google's Android software, you could get Motorola's Droid 2 or its cousin, the Droid X. Then there is the Droid Incredible from HTC, the Fascinate from Samsung and the Ally from LG. That's just on Verizon Wireless. An additional 20 or so phones running Android are available in the United States, and there are about 90 worldwide. But if your preference is an Apple-powered phone, you can buy -- an iPhone. That very short list explains in part why, for all its success in the phone business, Apple suddenly has a real fight on its hands. Americans now are buying more Android phones than iPhones. If that trend continues, analysts say that in little more than a year, Android will have erased the iPhone's once enormous lead in the high end of the smartphone market.

Key Factors for Successful Community Media Initiatives

The ongoing need for community media programs has much to do with the dearth of diverse voices and representation within mainstream media outlets. Immigrants, communities of color, and other marginalized groups are thus limited in their ability to address local community concerns, to tell their stories, and ultimately create a "communication infrastructure that can foster effective community."

Nevertheless, there are communities throughout the United States that have been successful at developing and sustaining local media projects: community media centers, local newspapers, Internet-based tools, television and radio stations. In the ongoing effort to bolster established as well as newly established community media projects, it is important to highlight and share these projects' experiences, insights, and lessons learned between and among practitioners in the field. Factors that practitioners have described as essential to the success of community media projects:
Community participation and ownership, Leadership development, Partnerships and collaborations between local media producers and community-based organizations, Capacity building and training, and Project management expertise.

The FCC's new "bill shock" rule for cell phones doesn't go far enough

On Oct. 14, the Federal Communications Commission proposed a rule compelling mobile service providers to alert customers on the verge of exceeding monthly usage limits and incurring overage charges. These would be in the form of text or voice alerts on the phone itself, not unlike the conspicuous emergency message you're liable to receive if you're late paying your cell phone bill. Mobile carriers would similarly have to alert consumers if they were about to incur roaming charges. They would also have to give customers better and more conspicuous tools to keep track of how close they were to reaching a usage limit, and perhaps provide them with a tool to cap usage automatically so that exceeding usage limits became impossible.

This regulation, if made final after the required 60-day comment period, would be a big improvement over the status quo. Even so, it doesn't go far enough. It starts from the wrong premise. The FCC rule shouldn't just compel cell phone companies to give consumers conspicuous warnings before they rack up big overages. They should make such overages impossible. Rather than give consumers a tool that could cap usage and prevent overages (something Verizon, incidentally, claims it already provides), the mobile carriers should cap usage themselves, either when overages begin or when some noncatastrophic overage level has been reached. At that point, consumers should receive a text or voice message alerting them that if they want to keep running up overages they must affirmatively tell the mobile carrier that they want to by dialing in some word or number. They must, in other words, leave the mobile carrier with absolutely no doubt that they have given this weighty question the attention it deserves. In the few instances where consumers signal that they understand the stakes and want to keep racking up overages anyway, they should of course be permitted to do so.

Genachowski Enters FCC In 12-Step Program To Stop Enabling Consumer Abuse

[Commentary] The first step in recovery is admitting you have a problem. For regulatory agencies, the first step is admitting that industry has a problem and that the wonderful happy world of the unregulated market - no matter how wildly competitive it might or might not be - doesn't always protect consumers and that in fact, sometimes, free market dogma to the contrary, you actually reach the best result for everyone by having government set basic rules of disclosure and enforcement.

This week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski started taking the FCC in the welcome direction of consumer protection. The agenda is to have the FCC empower consumers by requiring clear disclosure of things like billing terms and possible fees. In addition, require businesses to give consumers tools to avoid hidden fees and set some standard definitions for things like "download speed" that ensure that customers can easily understand the terms of an agreement before signing and can verify that they get what they pay for. These things may seem so common sense that one might mistake Genachowski's initiative for something trivial rather than a dramatic 180-degree turn over the last ten years.

Rural phone companies: Blame big carriers for 'bill shock'

Rural phone companies said they should not have to follow "bill shock" regulations just because bigger phone companies are failing their customers.

"Rural and regional carriers should not be subjected to a bill shock mandate as a result of the largest national carriers' inability to provide quality and informative customer service," said Steven Berry, president and chief executive of the Rural Cellular Association (RCA). He said that if the FCC adopts regulations to force wireless companies to notify customers before and when they have reached limits in their monthly payment plans, it should be careful to make them "flexible" enough so they do not cripple rural carriers. "Automatic bill shock alerts will impose an undue and burdensome cost, which will ultimately be borne by the rural consumer, for rural and regional carriers to implement," said the RCA.

Comcast-NBCU merger review expected to go into 2011

The federal reviews of Comcast's proposed merger with NBC Universal will likely extend into early 2011, according to Stifel Nicholaus analyst Rebecca Arbogast.

One increasingly thorny part of the merger is Comcast's tangle of relationships with broadcasters and competitors. Those ties get even more complicated as Comcast seeks to acquire a vastly larger library of channels and content from NBC, analysts say. In a research note to investors, Arbogast noted the Federal Communications Commission recently made additional requests to Comcast and NBCU for extensive information and documents on programming deals. That information is due Oct. 18. Among dozens of questions, the FCC asked for information related to Comcast's agreement to distribute its regional sports network programs and other channels like E! and Sprout to competitors Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, Dish and others.

"We believe the detailed information requests are consistent with the broad and deep probing that both the FCC and DOJ have been doing in their reviews, and are a further sign of the complexity of the policy issues raised by a major industry transaction combining video distribution, content, and broadband/Internet assets," Arbogast wrote in an earlier note on Oct. 4. "We also do not believe such second requests for information in big, complicated deals are uncommon, but we do believe this one increases the likelihood the government's review will not be completed until early next year."

Benton

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