July 2011

Sen Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said the US should investigate whether News Corp papers had broken US laws following reports that victims of the September 11 attacks may have had their phones hacked by detectives working for the News of the World. “The reported hacking by News Corporation newspapers against a range of individuals – including children – is offensive and a serious breach of journalistic ethics,” said Chairman Rockefeller. “This raises serious questions about whether the company has broken [any] US law, and I encourage the appropriate agencies to investigate to ensure that Americans have not had their privacy violated.”

The Federal Communications Commission won’t involve itself in the U.K. probe of allegations that journalists at the now-defunct News of the World newspaper tapped phones and paid police for stories, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said.

[Commentary] The only sort of power a news organization can wield safely is the power to persuade. Every other sort — no matter how high-minded or expedient the reason for taking it up — is a kind of slow poison that twists the souls of the journalists involved and, ultimately, makes their enterprise dangerously self-interested and unaccountable.

That's the fundamental lesson to be taken from the spectacle of the Murdoch meltdown now underway in London. America's media culture has become coarser and more vulgar and politically divisive since Murdoch became a force here and began pushing U.S. journalism closer to the British model. News Corp.'s unquestioned financial success has taken other media organizations — many essentially unmoored from their own values by the stress of technological change — down these same paths. Pre-Murdoch, could we really imagine a dubious gossip website and syndicated TV program such as TMZ being regularly quoted by mainstream media? Would CNN have given license to one of its news personalities to campaign for a guilty verdict in a criminal trial — and to excoriate a jury for disagreeing with her — as it has done with Nancy Grace in the Casey Anthony trial? The seeds of Murdoch's British newspapers' abuse of trust and power were sown in a media culture whose essentials — salacious celebrity coverage, gossip, overt partisanship — have infiltrated our own under his influence. The meltdown in London ought to be a wake-up call.

[Commentary] When it comes to speed, the United States is to the Internet what Jamaica is to bobsledding. We rank a shameful 25th around the globe. Even the tech Shangri-La of San Francisco isn't much better, with average download speeds in some neighborhoods that are one-tenth of what you'd get in South Korea. The good news is that there are some people pushing feverishly to catch up; the bad news is that it's a very bumpy track.

Two outspoken advocates for the local cause are Dana Sniezko, a nonprofit Web developer and technology activist who started the informative site SFFiber.info; and Alex Menendez, co-founder of MonkeyBrains, a San Francisco Internet service provider that's developed interesting (though ultimately limited) ways to boost Internet speeds in patches of the city. They're both lobbying San Francisco officials to make it easier for ordinary companies to lay fiber or install their own ultra-fast cables throughout the city. They see it as the best bet for loosening the grip on local Internet service that AT&T and Comcast currently hold, and leapfrogging from aging DSL and cable technology to direct fiber connections to the home.

LightSquared was the nation’s great wireless hope before its bid to win regulatory approval hit static in Washington. The startup seemingly had it all: hot new technology to speed smartphone connections, a billionaire backer, big-name partners and a White House that made spreading wireless Internet a national goal. These days, the company that’s received more than $5 billion in investments has been running a political gauntlet inside the Beltway.

“You usually solve interference issues through good engineering, not the political process,” LightSquared's CEO Sanjiv Ahuja told POLITICO. He’s still hopeful “good technology and good science will prevail.” The makers of GPS devices have launched a lobbying effort to convince lawmakers and regulators that LightSquared’s signals will disrupt their services — and federal agencies that rely on GPS systems to monitor air traffic and control military weapons also have raised interference alarms. The FCC and Commerce Department, meanwhile, are reviewing LightSquared’s proposal to mitigate GPS disruption, and officials maintain they won't green light the technology until interference issues are resolved. As LightSquared struggles to overcome regulatory and political hurdles, it raises questions about whether the barriers for new entrants into the well-established wireless landscape are simply too high.

If LightSquared, which is financed by big-shot billionaire Philip Falcone, of Harbinger Capital, can’t break into the market — who can?