September 2011

California's top Democrats reject Amazon offer

Top Democrats denounced an offer by Internet retailer Amazon to create thousands of new jobs if the state postpones for more than two years its effort to force online merchants to collect sales taxes on purchases by Californians.

Legislators and their bricks-and-mortar retail allies cast doubt that Amazon would follow through with a promise to build two distribution centers in the state and hire as many as 7,000 people. The company, which has a total workforce of 38,000, has made similar promises in other states that also are trying to force Amazon to collect sales taxes, they said.

"More jobs will ultimately be created in California when we have a tax system that is fairly and adequately applied to everyone in our state," Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez (D-Los Angeles) said. "And, we're not going to allow the notion of jobs that may or may not materialize to dictate our position on an issue of fundamental fairness to all businesses in California," he said.

Many US schools adding iPads, trimming textbooks

While iPads have rocketed to popularity on many college campuses since Apple introduced the device in spring 2010, many public secondary schools this fall will move away from textbooks in favor of the lightweight tablet computers. Apple officials say they know of more than 600 districts that have launched what are called "one-to-one" programs, in which at least one classroom of students is getting iPads for each student to use throughout the school day. Nearly two-thirds of them have begun since July, according to Apple.

Airline passenger arrested for not turning off cellphone in flight

El Paso (TX) police arrested a Southwest Airlines passenger on a flight from Phoenix after he refused to turn off his cell phone. Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Whitney Eichinger in Dallas said the man turned his cell phone on as the flight was landing in El Paso. Eichinger says when the man was asked to turn his phone off, he did not and when the plane pulled up to the gate, El Paso authorities met the aircraft.

Mayor Ed Lee shares his vision for tech in SF

A Q&A with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee.

Technology has emerged as a central issue in San Francisco's mayoral race, chiefly because it's emerged as a central issue in local life. It's the sector generating jobs and sucking up empty real estate. It already employs a substantial portion of the population. And it provides the products and services that connect, entertain or enlighten many more residents. All of which is why mayoral hopefuls are jockeying to cast themselves as the tech candidate. They're playing up their tech bona fides, reaching out to young engineers, lining up gold-plate industry endorsements, and - at least in one case - claiming credit for just about every lease that gets signed. But technology is also the sector generating many of the divisive policy issues of the day, like cell phone tower construction, AT&T's recently approved utility boxes and the tax breaks being granted to certain young businesses. The outcomes of these hotly debated topics bear real weight on local lives - from whether we can get cell phone service to whether jobs come or go.

Irene's Fury is Number One Story

Characterized by some as an overhyped event, Hurricane Irene was the No. 1 story in the American news media last week as the press turned from tracking its path to assessing the damage wrought by the storm.

From August 29-September 4, coverage of Irene filled 20% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That was down slightly from the previous week when it was the No. 2 story, filling 21% in PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index, which by itself was the most attention to any hurricane since PEJ began tracking news in January 2007. The storm -- which claimed more than 40 lives and did billions of dollars worth of damage in the US -- struck the most populous areas of the East Coast the weekend of August 28. For most of last week, Irene was no longer a hurricane, but the full extent of that damage was just becoming clear. On Monday August 29, nearly half of the overall newshole studied by PEJ was devoted to Irene and coverage stayed high for the first half of the week. It then diminished dramatically in the latter part of the week.

Google’s Android Attracts Anti-Trust Heat In South Korea

Authorities in Seoul look like carrying out their own version of the antitrust inquiries currently being carried out by the European Commission and U.S. Department of Justice toward Google.

The Korean Fair Trade Commission “raided” Google’s local HQ and were due to return August 7, according to a Reuters source, after Internet service provider NGN and portal operator Daum complained that Google’s Android mobile OS locks users in to Google as handsets’ default search and navigation provider. The Korean interest shows how concerns over Google’s dominance on the web have spread to those on mobile operating systems.

Google Says Its Internet License for China Has Been Renewed by Government

Google, which moved its Chinese search-engine service offshore last year to avoid the country’s online censorship rules, said China’s government renewed the company’s Internet license. “We can confirm that the government has renewed our ICP license,” Google said without elaborating.

Murdoch Son’s Testimony on Hacking Is Challenged by 2 Former Executives

After a month’s lull, the phone hacking scandal that has rocked Rupert Murdoch’s media empire resumed with fresh intensity on August 6. Murdoch’s son James clashed publicly with two former senior news executives over a meeting that parliamentary investigators have identified as a critical milestone in attempts by some of his father’s trusted lieutenants to contain the scandal.

The two former executives said at a parliamentary hearing that they had informed James Murdoch, chief of News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, at a 15-minute meeting in London in 2008 that the hacking of voice mail as a reporting tool went beyond the work by a lone “rogue” reporter and a private investigator that the company had acknowledged at the time. The men said they had conveyed that message as part of a plan to win Mr. Murdoch’s backing for a record $1.4 million settlement that bound a hacking victim to silence about his case. The former executives — Tom Crone, former legal manager for the Murdoch-owned newspapers in Britain, and Colin Myler, former editor of the now-defunct News of the World — said the settlement had been intended to avoid millions in legal costs, but several members of Parliament suggested that it was part of a cover-up intended to buy the hacking victim’s silence and prevent the scandal from spreading.

Hong Kong TV Officials Resign Over False Report

Two months after Asia Television, a broadcaster based in Hong Kong, carried an apparently false report that the former Chinese president Jiang Zemin had died, two of the broadcaster’s top news executives have taken responsibility for the report and resigned.

The two executives — Leung Ka-wing, a senior vice president, and his deputy, Tammy Tam Wai-yee — disclosed their resignations late Monday. Asia Television’s news channel reported in a bulletin on July 6 that the 85-year-old Mr. Jiang, who led the Communist Party in China from 1989 to 2002, had died. The channel later retracted the report and apologized. China was swept by rumors of Mr. Jiang’s illness or death after he failed to appear at an observance of the Communist Party’s 90th anniversary in early July. Though the official Xinhua news agency rejected the Asia Television report as “pure rumor,” there has been no official word on Mr. Jiang’s condition. The Hong Kong Broadcasting Authority has said that it is investigating 41 complaints about the report.

House Commerce Committee's Fall Agenda

House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) announced highlights of the Committee’s pro-jobs, pro-growth agenda for the fall.

Subcommittee on Communications and Technology: Broadband and wireless spectrum policy are vital jobs issues and spectrum legislation and FCC process reform will be at the forefront to advance wireless broadband, promote deployment of an interoperable broadband public safety network, create jobs, and reduce the deficit. The economic impact of streamlined regulations can be significant - in the last decade, the wireless industry has invested more than $240 billion on network structures and equipment. Combine the growing need for wireless broadband deployment with the private sector's resources, and the industry is ripe for job seekers.
Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade: With new technologies leaving consumers uncertain about how their personal information is collected and maintained online, privacy will continue to be a top priority for the subcommittee. Among areas of concern include consumer knowledge of online data collection and opportunities to control what information is obtained and maintained; aggregation and anonymization of individually identifiable information; the role of data collection to improve the online user experience and provide free online content; the ability to mitigate unwanted marketing and other targeted outreach or rejection of services based on an individual’s online profile; and the competitive consequences of different foreign privacy regimes for American firms.

Benton

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