Remember the 1990′s when companies rushed to brand their products as “enviro-friendly” to attract green-conscious consumers? Forrester Research suggests the same phenomenon could happen in response to how firms handle privacy and personal data.
In response to an Overstock.com promotional campaign to price all of its books at least 10 percent below Amazon, Amazon is slashing hardcover prices to historic lows.
The public telephone network remains the backbone of our nation’s telecommunications infrastructure, but any changes in technology need to reflect a bedrock principle— we must make sure the transition results in an actual upgrade in technology without a downgrade in the services upon which Americans depend.
Leaders from telecom, rural broadband, and Internet industry joined PK's President Gigi Sohn to discuss the challenges of the IP transition at the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the “State of Wireline Communications.” There were a number of issues raised at the hearing that will require policymakers to act as more and more consumers cut the cord and move to mobile wireless and VoIP services. The Federal Communications Commission has been tasked with providing guidance with national policy, but changes are already happening at the state level.
Rate of return carriers face less uncertainty with regard to universal service fund (USF) high-cost loop support as the result of an order adopted by the Federal Communications Commission– in the short term, at least.
In the order the FCC said that for 2014 it would maintain the approach to USF benchmarking used in 2013 – summing the capital and operating expense caps. “We do this to provide sufficient time, after reconciliation of recently filed study area boundary data, for public input on the development of a single cap, as required by the commission,” said the chief of the FCC Wireline Competition Bureau in the order. In addition, the order delays the phase-in of high-cost loop support reductions by one year rather than making them fully effective in 2014.
In Emeryville, California, an enormous new school building will house the K-12 school, but also serve as a place for the entire community to gather and learn.
[Commentary] 2013 is a tipping point, in which, for the first time in history, smartphones will outsell plain ones. So there's very little sense, as far as my son is concerned, in memorizing anything: presidents, the periodic table of the elements, the state capitals or the multiplication tables above 10. That's an understandable argument. On the other hand, there is a powerful counterargument: As society marches ever forward, we leave obsolete skills in our wake.
That's just part of progress. Why should we mourn the loss of memorization skills any more than we pine for hot type technology, Morse code abilities or a knack for operating elevators? Maybe memorization is different than those job skills. Maybe having a store of ready information is more fundamental, more important, and thus we should fight more fiercely to retain it. And yet we've confronted this issue before—or, at least, one that is almost exactly like it. When pocket calculators came along, educators and parents were alarmed about students losing the ability to perform arithmetic using paper and pencil. After hundreds of generations of teaching basic math, were we now prepared to cede that expertise to machines?
[Commentary] When former National Security Agency contractor Ed Snowden exposed the inner workings of the country's biggest intelligence organization, he said he did so to roll back a spying apparatus that put the United States on the path to "turnkey tyranny." According to experts who are advising U.S. email, cloud data storage, and social media companies, executives are concerned that foreign governments -- particularly ones with fewer protections for personal privacy and free speech -- are already beginning to demand that U.S. tech companies relocate their servers and databases within their borders.
Under normal circumstances, companies would rarely comply with those migration demands, especially if those countries have reputations for heavy-handed internal policing. But now that the United States is being seen as a global spying power, they may have little choice. Other governments can make their relocation demands in the name of protecting citizens from the intrusive powers of the NSA. Then those regimes can use U.S. tech to make their own law enforcement and intelligence agencies more NSA-like.
[Commentary] The materials recently released by the Incentive Auction Task Force provide considerably more details than had previously been available about the Commission’s move to repack the TV spectrum.
Move? Let’s stick with that analogy for a moment. Think of the available spectrum as the empty moving van and all the TV Stations (as well as some other spectrum users) as the entire contents of your house that need to be moved. The first chore in moving is to get organized so that everything will fit in the moving van in one trip. In its recent releases, the FCC has put the entire contents of its TV spectrum house out on the driveway. They’re now looking, first, at the piles of boxes and furniture and, next, at the empty moving truck. They’re scratching their heads trying to figure out what pieces to start with. So, like any good engineer, they wrote some software to help solve the problem.
One way or another, the road for Aereo will come to an end, at least with respect to getting its hands on valuable television programming without paying for it.
By any common-sense standard, Aereo is retransmitting local TV signals to devices over the Internet, reselling them to subscribers for a monthly fee. In that sense, it’s identical to cable or satellite TV operators, which under federal law must pay a fee to the broadcaster (unless the latter opts for “must-carry” designation). Even if Aereo were to win in the Supreme Court, broadcasters won’t give up the fight. Broadcasters could try to modify the law to explicitly cover services like Aereo’s (which could take years). They also have threatened to shift their most popular TV shows and sports programming to pay TV, or even convert broadcast stations to cable channels. Those are moves rife with political risk, given that the basic bargain of the government’s spectrum licenses to broadcasters is that they make TV free over the air. But if push comes to shove and Aereo and others are permitted to redistribute “free TV” at no cost, CBS or Fox would certainly put NFL games or popular primetime dramas on cable nets instead.
Markup
Senate Commerce Committee
July 30 2013
2:30 PM
The Senate Commerce Committee will hold an executive session on Tuesday, July 30, 2013 at 2:30 p.m. to markup several bills and nominations including:
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