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August 2011

Measuring Broadband Performance

Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
Friday, September 23, 2011
9:30 AM to 11:00 AM

The FCC recently released a report that contradicts previous speculation that American ISPs deliver much less broadband performance than advertised. Join ITIF on Friday, September 23, 2011 at 9:30 AM for a discussion about the report, highlighting its methodological improvements over previous studies and examining the stresses and strains on the broadband ecosystem. ITIF Senior Research Fellow Richard Bennett will lead the discussion. Stay tuned for additional information.

Participants:
Steve Bauer
Consultant, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Richard Bennet
Senior Research Fellow, ITIF

Alex Salter
CEO, SamKnows

Peter Sevcik
President, NetForecast


: In Search of a Pro-Consumer Policy

Technology Policy Institute
September 16, 2011
12:00pm - 2:00pm
http://techpolicyinstitute.org/events/show/97.html

Tech companies that become dominant inevitably come into the antitrust cross-hairs. Google is the latest example and is now the subject of investigations in both the U.S. and Europe over allegations it has abused its dominant position in online search. A distinguished group of experts will discuss the complex issues the antitrust agencies must address, including market definition, market power, existence and effects of “search bias”, the availability of effective remedies, and, ultimately, what is in the consumer’s best interest.

Confirmed panelists include:

  • Oren Bracha, Howrey LLP and Arnold, White and Durkee Centennial Professor, University of Texas Law School
  • Eric K Clemons, Professor, Information Strategy and Economics Group, Operations and Information Management, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
  • Michael Katz, Sarin Chair in Strategy and Leadership and Director, Institute for Business Innovation, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
  • Geoffrey Manne, Founder, International Center for Law & Economics and Lecturer in Law, Lewis and Clark Law School
  • Randal C. Picker, Paul H. and Theo Leffman Professor of Commercial Law, University of Chicago Law School
  • Thomas M. Lenard, President and Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Institute (moderator)

August 29, 2011 (Irene; Merger Shot Clock; Video Description Rules)

BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2011

We'll be catching up on last week's stories as soon as we can. See http://www.benton.org/taxonomy/term/6 for the latest updates.


EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS
   Wireless Phone Networks Stood Up Well to Hurricane

ACCESSIBILITY
   FCC Gives Industry Nine Months to Implement Video Descriptions

WIRELESS
   FCC restarts the clock on AT&T, T-Mobile deal
   What AT&T-Mo tells us about transparency - analysis
   Smartphones Are Bridging the Digital Divide - op-ed
   Study Shows AT&T Lags In Call Quality
   AT&T-Verizon-T Mobile Sets $100M for Mobile Payment Fight [links to web]

INTERNET/BROADBAND
   Report shows more US farmers relying on Internet [links to web]

CONTENT
   Steve Jobs Reigned in a Kingdom of Altered Landscapes - analysis
   Legislator Calls for Clarifying Copyright Law [links to web]
   Masked Protesters Aid Time Warner’s Bottom Line [links to web]

BROADCASTING
   Regulators Focus Eye on the Sale of KUSF
   Product Placement Rises in Networks’ Telenovelas [links to web]

JOURNALISM
   In Unsettled Times, Media Can Be a Call to Action, or a Distraction
   Seeing 9/11 Through a Digital Prism - op-ed [links to web]

NEW FROM PEW
   The Digital Revolution and Higher Education - research
   65% of online adults use social networking sites - research

COMPANY NEWS
   Kleiner Plays Catch-Up [links to web]
   Dish Network and DirecTV Find Themselves at Opposite Ends of the Satellite Spectrum [links to web]

STORIES FROM ABROAD
   In Unsettled Times, Media Can Be a Call to Action, or a Distraction
   UK's Home Office backs away from social network blocking after riots [links to web]
   Virgin raises concerns over rural competition [links to web]
   Google chairman attacks UK media red tape [links to web]
   Labour seeks stop-gap media controls [links to web]

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EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS

COMMUNICATIONS THROUGH STORM
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Jenna Wortham, Joshua Brustein]
Wireless phone networks held up well against Hurricane Irene despite widespread losses of power. Many people who lost electricity were able to communicate using e-mail and social networks, thanks to battery-powered mobile devices. As cleanup crews and homeowners began to assess the scope of the damage on August 28, wireless phone companies were reporting that the storm’s effect on their networks was minimal and that most customers did not experience cellular disruptions, despite the high winds and ferocious rains. The providers said the full extent might not be known until after the storm moved offshore. The Federal Communications Commission, which activated the Disaster Information Reporting System, an online tool that helps the agency gather information and assess the breadth of damage to the communications networks, is still gauging the extent of the disruptions. It said that no 9-1-1 center was without service and that it had received no reports of public safety communications disruptions. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said that a handful of radio sites and thousands of wirelines went down during the storm, leaving 132,000 landline subscribers without service. The majority of those were concentrated in North Carolina and Virginia. The FCC said that 1,400 cell sites along the coast were down, and several hundred were running on backup power.
benton.org/node/88092 | New York Times | The Hill
Recommend this Headline
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ACCESSIBILITY

VIDEO DESCRIPTION RULES
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The Federal Communications Commission will give broadcasters and cable operators nine months -- until July 1, 2012 -- to have their new video description regimes in place. The FCC is under a deadline itself since Congress gave it until Oct. 8, 2011 to have the video description rules in place. The rules implement the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which requires the captioning of any online video that is closed-captioned on TV, and asks the FCC to study captioning of Web-original video. It also requires smartphones and other mobile devices to be accessible to the disabled, if that is achievable, and restores the FCC's video description rules thrown out by the courts in 2002. The FCC order addresses some of the concerns of small cable operators, providing technical exemptions and clarifying that only systems with at least 50,000 subs in a market will be required to pass through the video descriptions.
benton.org/node/88067 | Broadcasting&Cable | FCC | FCC Commissioner Copps | FCC Commissioner Clyburn | The Hill
Recommend this Headline
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WIRELESS

MERGER SHOT CLOCK
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Hayley Tsukayama]
The Federal Communications Commission has restarted the informal 180-day clock on the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile. The FCC stopped the informal countdown on July 21, saying that AT&T had indicated it had revised its models to support the merger’s approval. In a letter, the FCC said it had “received AT&T’s answers to our specific questions as well as AT&T’s confirmation that it believes our record is complete with respect to the models.” “Our understanding is that, unless specifically prompted by a request from the Commission or the Department of Justice, AT&T will not be submitting any further revisions to the models,” wrote Rick Kaplan, head of the FCC’s wireless telecommunications bureau. Friday, Aug. 26, is Day 83 of the informal 180-day time frame set aside for the agency’s review.
benton.org/node/88089 | Washington Post | FCC | LATimes | WSJ
Recommend this Headline
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AT&T/T-MOBILE AND TRANSPARENCY
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Stacey Higginbotham]
[Commentary] Sometimes knowing you are observed is enough to make you behave well. That’s why the free press is so valued in the U.S, why we have the Freedom of Information Act and why several states have sunshine laws that allow citizens and the press to hold officials accountable. So there’s a tendency to trumpet the unintentional exposure of information in AT&T’s recent filings with the Federal Communications Commission as the reason the agency is taking a closer look at figures provided by the Nation’s No. 2 carrier about its claims. The agency also restarted the so-called shot clock, which means the agency will try to have a decision in the next 97 days.
Earlier this week, the FCC asked AT&T for more details on its economic models and newspapers and bloggers rushed to ascribe that request for more information to AT&T’s accidental release of information the week before. In the letter, which was subsequently redacted again, AT&T had laid out the economic rationale for a decision to avoid providing LTE for 97 percent of the country, citing a $3.8 billion price tag for going beyond the 80 percent mark. The filing got a flurry of attention as many rightly wondered why AT&T was so reluctant to spend $3.8 billion on a build out when it was willing to spent 10 times that on buying T-Mobile. So did the FCC listen to all the hoopla and realize it needed to ask for more information? God, I hope not. The FCC had all the information in the first place — it’s just the rest of us who weren't privy to AT&T’s machinations around building out an LTE network to rural areas.
benton.org/node/88086 | GigaOm
Recommend this Headline
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SMARTPHONES AND THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Lucy Hood]
[Commentary] Federal regulators weighing the proposed AT&T and T-Mobile merger must not ignore a significant but quietly unfolding revolution in how Americans connect to the Internet for information and products. The changes began with the 2007-2008 launch of the iPhone and Android and have accelerated with the introduction of low-cost cellphone plans. What is most striking about this smartphone revolution is its democratic character. For years, government officials, as well as academics, worried that the rise of the Internet would create a digital divide between those who could connect and those who couldn't. They wrestled with how to bring broadband to rural communities and to poor urban residents who couldn't afford laptops or a broadband connection at home. Many decried the U.S.'s 12th place ranking -- behind South Korea, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany -- in fixed-broadband connectivity. But no one metric can begin to capture the complexity of today's marketplace for Internet connectivity. Officials who still cling to such statistics as fixed-broadband access, and regulators who make policy around them, overlook the emerging reality brought about by rapid technological progress, business innovation and a dynamic wireless market. The smartphone revolution enables people to take matters into their own hands and find effective ways to narrow the digital divide.
[Hood is executive director of the Institute for Communication Technology Management at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. The institute's 30 corporate sponsors include wireless and communications companies, among them AT&T, Verizon and US Cellular.]
benton.org/node/88071 | Wall Street Journal
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AT&T CALL QUALITY
[SOURCE: National Journal, AUTHOR: Sara Jerome]
A major study of phone call quality among the four national wireless carriers and top regional carriers was not flattering for AT&T. The study, released Thursday by J.D. Power and Associates, showed that AT&T, the second-largest carrier, did not rank first in any of six geographical regions. AT&T ranked fourth in Northeast, North Central, and West, third in the Southeast, and second in Mid-Atlantic and North Central. Verizon Wireless was the top national carrier in every region. U.S. Cellular beat Verizon in North Central.
benton.org/node/88085 | National Journal
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CONTENT

JOBS RESIGNS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: David Carr]
[Commentary] Again and again, Apple's Steve Jobs would step up to entrenched players in the media with calcified business models and explain their business to them in ways they did not recognize from the inside. Apple is a technology company, but as someone who writes about the insular kingdom of media, I can't think of a bigger player on the board in the last 10 years. In music, in movies and in publishing, Apple has upended long-standing paradigms and altered the media landscape. (Television has been another story, so far, though there are rumors that the company is turning its guns on TV in a big way.) So what secret tunnel did he use to bypass and overcome traditional media businesses? One carved by consumers. By placing sexy, irresistible devices in the hands of the public, he reverse-engineered the business model of the industries that produce the content for Apple’s gorgeous hardware. When the iPod and iTunes were unveiled in 2001, the music industry was under siege from piracy, with services like Napster thriving on the free use of its content. Jobs’s take-it-or-leave-it deal gave Apple control over pricing, data, distribution and platform, a proposal of towering hubris. But the industry, kicking and screaming all the way, eventually went along, and 10 billion song downloads later, digital revenue is a fundamental part of the business. In the process, Apple brought a practical end to the album format — allowing people to buy individual songs and create their own playlists. ITunes not only supplied a legitimate, easy-to-use alternative to piracy, it created a runway for services like Pandora and Spotify.
benton.org/node/88082 | New York Times
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BROADCASTING

KUSF UPDATE
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Reyhan Harmanci]
When KDFC, the popular commercial classical radio station, was sold to the University of Southern California in January and bumped down to 90.3, the nonprofit end of the dial, hundreds of thousands of classical music fans lost the ability to hear the station’s offerings, thanks to the downgraded signal strength. But that was not the only local effect of the sale. For over three decades, 90.3 had been home to the much-loved University of San Francisco radio station KUSF, which was yanked off the airwaves to make room for KDFC when USF sold its license to USC for $3.75 million. In the days and months after the abrupt sale, fans of KUSF gathered support and started an ad-hoc streaming service called KUSF-in-Exile. But even with the public interest, most people thought the Federal Communications Commission would approve the sale; that regulatory agency rarely blocks transactions and makes it a point not to weigh in on the content of the programming. Now, though, more than six months after KUSF went off the air, that easy approval is not such a sure bet.
benton.org/node/88079 | New York Times
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NEW FROM PEW

DIGITAL HIGHER ED
[SOURCE: Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, AUTHOR: Kim Parker, Amanda Lenhart, Kathleen Moore]
As online college courses have become increasingly prevalent, the general public and college presidents offer different assessments of their educational value, according to a new Pew Research Center report. Just three-in-ten American adults (29%) say a course taken online provides an equal educational value to one taken in a classroom. By contrast, about half of college presidents (51%) say online courses provide the same value. More than three-quarters of college presidents (77%) report that their institutions now offer online courses, and college presidents predict substantial growth in online learning: 15% say most of their current undergraduate students have taken a class online, 50% predict that ten years from now most of their students will take classes online.
benton.org/node/88063 | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project
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SOCIAL MEDIA USE
[SOURCE: Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, AUTHOR: Mary Madden, Kathryn Zickuhr]
Fully 65% of adult Internet users now say they use a social networking site like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn, up from 61% one year ago. This marks the first time in Pew Internet surveys that 50% of all adults use social networking sites. The frequency of social networking site usage among young adult Internet users under age 30 was stable over the last year – 61% of online Americans in that age cohort now use social networking sites on a typical day, compared with 60% one year ago. However, among the Boomer-aged segment of Internet users ages 50-64, social networking site usage on a typical day grew a significant 60% (from 20% to 32%).
benton.org/node/88062 | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project
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STORIES FROM ABROAD

MEDIA AS DISTRACTION
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Noam Cohen]
The mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone. Apparently even during a revolution. That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.” Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Hassanpour, who already has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, studied the recent uprising in Egypt. His question was, how smart was the decision by the government of President Hosni Mubarak to completely shut down the Internet and cellphone service on Jan. 28, in the middle of the crucial protests in Tahrir Square? His conclusion was, not so smart, but not for the reasons you might think. “Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action,” he writes.
benton.org/node/88078 | New York Times
Recommend this Headline
back to top

Wireless Phone Networks Stood Up Well to Hurricane

Wireless phone networks held up well against Hurricane Irene despite widespread losses of power.

Many people who lost electricity were able to communicate using e-mail and social networks, thanks to battery-powered mobile devices. As cleanup crews and homeowners began to assess the scope of the damage on August 28, wireless phone companies were reporting that the storm’s effect on their networks was minimal and that most customers did not experience cellular disruptions, despite the high winds and ferocious rains. The providers said the full extent might not be known until after the storm moved offshore. The Federal Communications Commission, which activated the Disaster Information Reporting System, an online tool that helps the agency gather information and assess the breadth of damage to the communications networks, is still gauging the extent of the disruptions. It said that no 9-1-1 center was without service and that it had received no reports of public safety communications disruptions.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said that a handful of radio sites and thousands of wirelines went down during the storm, leaving 132,000 landline subscribers without service. The majority of those were concentrated in North Carolina and Virginia. The FCC said that 1,400 cell sites along the coast were down, and several hundred were running on backup power.

FCC restarts the clock on AT&T, T-Mobile deal

The Federal Communications Commission has restarted the informal 180-day clock on the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile. The FCC stopped the informal countdown on July 21, saying that AT&T had indicated it had revised its models to support the merger’s approval.

In a letter, the FCC said it had “received AT&T’s answers to our specific questions as well as AT&T’s confirmation that it believes our record is complete with respect to the models.” “Our understanding is that, unless specifically prompted by a request from the Commission or the Department of Justice, AT&T will not be submitting any further revisions to the models,” wrote Rick Kaplan, head of the FCC’s wireless telecommunications bureau. Friday, Aug. 26, is Day 83 of the informal 180-day time frame set aside for the agency’s review.

What AT&T-Mo tells us about transparency

[Commentary] Sometimes knowing you are observed is enough to make you behave well. That’s why the free press is so valued in the U.S, why we have the Freedom of Information Act and why several states have sunshine laws that allow citizens and the press to hold officials accountable. So there’s a tendency to trumpet the unintentional exposure of information in AT&T’s recent filings with the Federal Communications Commission as the reason the agency is taking a closer look at figures provided by the Nation’s No. 2 carrier about its claims. The agency also restarted the so-called shot clock, which means the agency will try to have a decision in the next 97 days.

Earlier this week, the FCC asked AT&T for more details on its economic models and newspapers and bloggers rushed to ascribe that request for more information to AT&T’s accidental release of information the week before. In the letter, which was subsequently redacted again, AT&T had laid out the economic rationale for a decision to avoid providing LTE for 97 percent of the country, citing a $3.8 billion price tag for going beyond the 80 percent mark. The filing got a flurry of attention as many rightly wondered why AT&T was so reluctant to spend $3.8 billion on a build out when it was willing to spent 10 times that on buying T-Mobile. So did the FCC listen to all the hoopla and realize it needed to ask for more information? God, I hope not. The FCC had all the information in the first place — it’s just the rest of us who weren't privy to AT&T’s machinations around building out an LTE network to rural areas.

Study Shows AT&T Lags In Call Quality

A major study of phone call quality among the four national wireless carriers and top regional carriers was not flattering for AT&T. The study, released Thursday by J.D. Power and Associates, showed that AT&T, the second-largest carrier, did not rank first in any of six geographical regions. AT&T ranked fourth in Northeast, North Central, and West, third in the Southeast, and second in Mid-Atlantic and North Central. Verizon Wireless was the top national carrier in every region. U.S. Cellular beat Verizon in North Central.

Steve Jobs Reigned in a Kingdom of Altered Landscapes

[Commentary] Again and again, Apple's Steve Jobs would step up to entrenched players in the media with calcified business models and explain their business to them in ways they did not recognize from the inside.

Apple is a technology company, but as someone who writes about the insular kingdom of media, I can't think of a bigger player on the board in the last 10 years. In music, in movies and in publishing, Apple has upended long-standing paradigms and altered the media landscape. (Television has been another story, so far, though there are rumors that the company is turning its guns on TV in a big way.) So what secret tunnel did he use to bypass and overcome traditional media businesses? One carved by consumers. By placing sexy, irresistible devices in the hands of the public, he reverse-engineered the business model of the industries that produce the content for Apple’s gorgeous hardware. When the iPod and iTunes were unveiled in 2001, the music industry was under siege from piracy, with services like Napster thriving on the free use of its content. Jobs’s take-it-or-leave-it deal gave Apple control over pricing, data, distribution and platform, a proposal of towering hubris. But the industry, kicking and screaming all the way, eventually went along, and 10 billion song downloads later, digital revenue is a fundamental part of the business. In the process, Apple brought a practical end to the album format — allowing people to buy individual songs and create their own playlists. ITunes not only supplied a legitimate, easy-to-use alternative to piracy, it created a runway for services like Pandora and Spotify.

Regulators Focus Eye on the Sale of KUSF

When KDFC, the popular commercial classical radio station, was sold to the University of Southern California in January and bumped down to 90.3, the nonprofit end of the dial, hundreds of thousands of classical music fans lost the ability to hear the station’s offerings, thanks to the downgraded signal strength. But that was not the only local effect of the sale.

For over three decades, 90.3 had been home to the much-loved University of San Francisco radio station KUSF, which was yanked off the airwaves to make room for KDFC when USF sold its license to USC for $3.75 million. In the days and months after the abrupt sale, fans of KUSF gathered support and started an ad-hoc streaming service called KUSF-in-Exile. But even with the public interest, most people thought the Federal Communications Commission would approve the sale; that regulatory agency rarely blocks transactions and makes it a point not to weigh in on the content of the programming. Now, though, more than six months after KUSF went off the air, that easy approval is not such a sure bet.

In Unsettled Times, Media Can Be a Call to Action, or a Distraction

The mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone. Apparently even during a revolution.

That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.” Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Hassanpour, who already has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, studied the recent uprising in Egypt. His question was, how smart was the decision by the government of President Hosni Mubarak to completely shut down the Internet and cellphone service on Jan. 28, in the middle of the crucial protests in Tahrir Square? His conclusion was, not so smart, but not for the reasons you might think. “Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action,” he writes.

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