May 2013

Yahoo Wants Out of Microsoft Deal

Yahoo has been quietly trying to find a way out of its struggling Web-search partnership with Microsoft, a person familiar the situation said, but has so far failed in that effort.

The Silicon Valley Internet company disclosed in a regulatory filing that Microsoft had extended a revenue guarantee associated with the partnership, the second such extension since the 10-year pact took effect in 2010. Chief Executive Marissa Mayer has been seeking to end the contract with Microsoft since joining Yahoo from Web-search giant Google last year, this person said, adding that Microsoft has indicated it wasn't interested in doing so. Yahoo's revenue per search has been worse under the Microsoft deal than when it operated its own Web-search technology and advertising system.

GOP senators push bill to end cellphone subsidy

Sens. David Vitter (R-LA), Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Dan Coats (R-IN) have introduced a bill that would end the cellphone portion of the Federal Communications Commission's Lifeline program.

“This phone program has expanded far beyond its original intent, and as so many middle class Americans struggle underneath this economy, it is really offensive for Washington to make taxpayers pay for free cell phones for others,” Sen Vitter said. The program pays for phone service, not the phones themselves. But many companies that receive funding through the program offer free and low-cost phones to their subscribers. The program is funded through fees that the telephone companies pass on to consumers on their monthly bills, not taxes. Congress first enacted Lifeline in 1985, and the FCC expanded the program to cover cellphone service in 2005. Sen Inhofe said the program has become so expansive that it "no longer addresses its primary mission to help those with the most dire needs." "Our legislation will restore Lifeline to its original intent and also protect taxpayers from further excessive government spending,” he said.

FCC Hosts 600 MHz Band Plan Workshop

The Federal Communications Commission hosted a public workshop May 3 as part of its LEARN program. The workshop focused on how best to structure the 600 MHz wireless band plan in the upcoming incentive auction.

In proposing a band plan, the Commission focused on five key policy goals: utility, certainty, interchangeability, quantity, and interoperability. The workshop focused on tradeoffs of elements within these goals to achieve balance. At the workshop, FCC staff moderated a highly informative discussion among stakeholders representing a wide range of interests, including television broadcasters, licensed mobile broadband providers, device and component manufacturers, and other interested parties. The discussion indicated support for many of the band plan elements proposed in our Incentive Auction NPRM. We also received valuable input regarding some of the more challenging issues associated with developing the 600 MHz band plan. In particular, we had very productive technical discussions on intermodulation and harmonics interference, mobile antenna issues, filter pass band issues, and how to accommodate technical flexibility in the band.

TV Homes On Rise, Hits 115 Million

Based on its new definition of a TV home -- one that can include a broadband connection -- Nielsen says the number of TV homes is up versus the year before to 115.6 million homes. Nielsen says its TV household Universe Estimate (UE) grew 1.2% over its estimate for the 2012-2013 season, which was at 114.2 million. In addition, Nielsen says the total number of TV viewers is 1.6% higher to 294 million individuals ages 2 and older.

Syria Has Dropped Off the Internet, Again

Internet traffic into and out of Syria has ground to a halt again.

The last time this happened, the folks at Renesys, a research firm that tracks the health of the Internet’s underlying plumbing, noticed that all five networks bringing Internet traffic into Syria went down more or less at once. There are four physical cables that bring bandwidth into Syria and three of them land in the coastal city of Tartus. A fourth comes in from Turkey to the north. Chances are routers in the telecommunications building were reconfigured to stop announcing themselves in the global routing tables, essentially making them invisible to the rest of the Internet. The question — as with last time this happened — is why now?

NCTA Says Farm Bill Needs to Fix RUS Program

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association wants to make sure the Farm Bill, likely being marked up in the Senate Agriculture Committee this week, fixes what it says is the ongoing problem of government subsidies to grow broadband where the service is already planted.

NCTA has long complained that the USDA's Rural Utilities Service loan program has no requirement that the money goes to unserved areas. RUS modified its rules after a USDA Inspector General's report that highlighted the overbuilding. NCTA says that the changes RUS made in the wake of that report do not resolve the overbuild issue. "The fact is these rules still allow loans in areas that are 100 percent served. Currently, there is no requirement that a single unserved household be included in the project's service area in order to earn funding approval."

FCC Moves June Meeting

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski moved the FCC’s June meeting from the June 6 to June 27. Chairman Genachowski plans to leave the FCC next week and Commissioner Robert McDowell is likely to leave soon, too. Moving the meeting would give Interim Chairman Mignon Clyburn more time to prep for her first public meeting.

Rep Blackburn Wants Answers From FCC on Lifeline

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) took aim at the Federal Communications Commission's Lifeline program and wants the FCC to freeze the program until it can answer whether the government subsidy for telecom service to low-income Americans was used by terrorists.

In calling out the program, she repeated her invocation of the Boston bombers from an April 24 hearing on the program, saying in a release, "The fact that the FCC can't even comment on whether or not the Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston Marathon bombers, participated in the Lifeline program is further proof the program is mismanaged and dysfunctional." Reps Blackburn and Tim Griffin (R-AR) said the program remains "plagued" by waste, fraud and abuse and called on the FCC to freeze the fund until she got answers. The letter also said that Lifeline-supported phones are "often" found at crime scenes and used in drug deals, citing law enforcement officials.

FCC Rejects Petition Against 3 Fox Stations

The Federal Communications Commission’s Media Bureau has turned down a watchdog group’s effort to block the renewals of the Fox Television Stations Inc. licenses in Washington (DC) and Baltimore (MD), holding that the group had not made the case for an agency crackdown, despite allegations of phone-hacking and other wrongdoing by News Corp. subsidiaries in the United Kingdom. The group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asked the FCC last August to block the renewal applications of Fox for its WTTG and WDCA Washington and WUTB in Baltimore, citing the phone-hacking and bribery scandal that rocked Fox parent News Corp. and its chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch last year.

NYT’s Jill Abramson: Social media was biggest difference between Boston and 9/11

When bombs in Boston went off last month, Jill Abramson went in minutes from being a “joyous executive editor” at a ceremony celebrating the New York Times‘ recent Pulitzer Prize wins to overseeing a major story.

Abramson is familiar with working on major news events, including 9/11, but said her primary concerns were different this time. “In Boston, what was first and foremost was making sure our standards were understood,” Abramson said at the Wired Business conference in New York City. Abramson said that, for major stories in the past, the only focus was the next day’s paper. This time around, she was preoccupied with ensuring that no one at the paper seized on one of the many thinly sourced rumors flying around on social media.

Benton

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