March 2014

Ratings War in Mexico Pits Nielsen Against TV Giants Televisa and Azteca

Nielsen expanded into one of the hottest emerging markets when it bought control of a local Mexican company nearly two years ago. From the start, however, the journey to Mexico for Nielsen has become the corporate equivalent of a television horror show.

Just hours after it agreed to acquire a majority stake in its local partner Ibope, Nielsen executives got bad news: The names, addresses and telephone numbers of hundreds of families that contributed to Ibope's ratings were stolen by an anonymous hacker and widely leaked. It is a ratings firm's nightmare scenario. The list of participating families is supposed to be a closely guarded secret in any market, intended to prevent viewers from being pressured to watch certain programs and skew results. Mexico's television broadcasting duopoly, Grupo Televisa and Azteca, jumped on the leak to launch a withering attack on the combined Nielsen Ibope. Both filed criminal and civil charges against the entity, claiming fraud among other allegations. Azteca no longer uses the company's ratings, and even tried to seize its famous "people meters" in court actions.

SoftBank’s investment in Sprint may have been a bad bet on consolidation

[Commentary] Masayoshi Son continues to lobby both the US business community and regulators aggressively to convince them that further consolidation among mobile carriers would be good for competition. Son is right that Verizon and AT&T continue to dominate the market, and Sprint certainly faces some big challenges if it is to develop a world-class LTE network that would help even the playing field. But regulators are clearly doubtful that any merger between the two smaller tier-one carriers would be a good thing for consumers, and I believe T-Mobile’s recent series of successfully disruptive moves has proven that a lesser carrier can be a formidable challenger. Son’s persistence indicates SoftBank’s investment in Sprint may have been based on an assumption of a merger between the two US operators. If that’s the case, it may prove to be a costly mistake.

Frustrated Cities Take High-Speed Internet Into Their Own Hands

Only a handful of American cities have super-fast fiber-optic networks. Many others are looking on with "visceral jealousy," says Susan Crawford, a visiting professor of intellectual property at Harvard Law School. "And it's disrupting what has otherwise been a very smooth, unbroken, complacent approach to communications in America."

Crawford says cities need to take the lead on building fiber-optic networks because most private broadband providers don't think it's economically worthwhile. But cable and telecommunications companies like Comcast dispute that. Comcast recently said that it would offer faster speeds -- but only when consumers demand it. So far, the demand simply doesn't justify the massive investment, says Fred Campbell, director of the nonprofit Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology. Indeed, cities that have been left out of Google Fiber are thinking about how to do something similar on their own.

Spy chief outlines hopes for cybersecurity bill

Congress needs to overhaul a pair of privacy laws to allow the government to communicate with private companies and foreign nations, according to National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander.

The spy chief, speaking at Georgetown University, said that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Stored Communications Act need to be amended to let companies and agencies share critical information about cyber threats. “An attack on Wall Street or an exploit against Wall Street, NSA and Cyber Command would probably not see that,” he said, referring to cyber intrusions meant to either take down or steal information from a server. “The fact is we don’t have an ability to see it and the Internet service providers and others are forbidden from sharing that information with us, with the government -- [the Department of Homeland Security], FBI, NSA and Cyber Command -- because of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Stored Communications Act.” “We have capabilities to help defend the nation but we don’t have a way of sharing them back and forth, and if we did share them, we have to figure out how to work liability with those companies so that they’re protected from the facts that they have given,” he added. He added that the information at issue “isn’t our privacy information. This is attack information or exploitation information.”

Journalist: NSA won’t give me a secure channel to communicate on

Barton Gellman, one of the few journalists that has been given access to the entire trove of documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, said that American federal authorities have declined to provide him with a secure means to communicate with them.

The Washington Post reporter says it's a "core duty" to publish leaker's National Security Agency cache. “There's a peculiar thing: [intelligence agencies and I] do have conversations about stories that I'm going to publish,” Gellman said. “I want to know context and I want to authenticate information or not be radically out of context. And sometimes they want to make a case to me about something that I don't know that would make a difference on what to publish. So I’ve said to them: 'How would you like to communicate other than open e-mail or telephone?' And they've yet to give me a secure channel -- which I find surprising.”

International Groups Cite Aereo Treaty Issues

In an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court, the Canadian Media Production Association, Music Canada, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists and many others, said that allowing Aereo model is jeopardizing a host of treaties by allowing company to deliver those TV signals over the Internet without paying copyright fees.

They argue that a number of international agreements rest on an interpretation of copyright law that forecloses "bypassing the communications to the public [performance] right by using point-to-point technology." They also point to the "Charming Betsy" doctrine, which holds that acts of Congress should never be construed to violate such treaties "if any other possible construction remains." They argue that even if the performance right were ambiguous in statue, the Charming Betsy doctrine would trump it. "While amici believe that the language of the Transmit Clause unambiguously leads to the conclusion that Aereo’s transmissions are public performances, the treaty obligations entered into by the United States on multiple occasions would require the same conclusion even if the statutory text was ambiguous," they concluded. The treaties at issue, they say, include the WIPO [World Intellectual Property Association] Copyright Treaty; the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty; the Free Trade Agreement, US-Australia; and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Federal Tech Funding Dips Slightly In Obama’s Fiscal 2015 Request

Funding for civilian information technology projects and maintenance is essentially flat in President Obama’s proposed budget for the 2015 fiscal year, and the Defense Department's requested technology allowance is down slightly, federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said.

The 2015 request for information technology spending is about $79.1 billion, including $43.7 billion for civilian IT and $35.4 billion for defense, VanRoekel said. That’s down from about $81.4 billion enacted in the 2014 fiscal year. The lower number is possible thanks to an increase in shared technology services across government and strategic sourcing for commodity IT such as computers and Internet service, VanRoekel said. The overall technology spending figure is in line with previous Obama Administration budgets, which have flatlined technology spending at around $80 billion. During the Bush Administration, government technology spending grew at about 7 percent annually.

1 in 10 Americans think HTML is an STD, study finds

A recent study found that many Americans are lost when it comes to tech-related terms, with 11% saying that they thought HTML -- a language that is used to create websites -- was a sexually transmitted disease.

The study was conducted by Vouchercloud.net, a coupons website, as a way to determine how knowledgeable users are when it comes to tech terms. "Technology is a huge interest for our user base, and month after month we see thousands of people visiting our site to look for coupons and deals to use when purchasing their favorite tech products," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. "It seems that quite a few of us need to brush up on our tech definitions."

Besides HTML, there were some other amusing findings:

77% of respondents could not identify what SEO means. SEO stands for "Search-Engine Optimization"
27% identified "gigabyte" as an insect commonly found in South America. A gigabyte is a measurement unit for the storage capacity of an electronic device.
42% said they believed a "motherboard" was "the deck of a cruise ship." A motherboard is usually a circuit board that holds many of the key components of a computer.
23% thought an "MP3" was a "Star Wars" robot. It is actually an audio file.
18% identified "Blu-ray" as a marine animal. It is a disc format typically used to store high-definition videos.
15% said they believed "software" is comfortable clothing. Software is a general term for computer programs.
12% said "USB" is the acronym for a European country. In fact, USB is a type of connector.
Despite the incorrect answers, 61% of the respondents said it is important to have a good knowledge of technology in this day and age.

APTS: We Need Ready To Learn and Digital Funds

The Association of Public Television Stations had a couple of bones to pick with the President's proposals for noncommercial funding. While the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got the $445 million it asked for in the just-released budget -- which now goes to the Congress for its input -- there were some disappointing cuts for APTS. APTS President Patrick Butler said he was pleased that CPB's ask was not pared back and that the President continued to show "steadfast support" for public broadcasting. Indeed, the President's own budget cutting advisory panel of a couple years back proposed cutting out funding all together. But Butler said he was disappointed that the budget again recommends that the Ready to Learn program be moved under the general DOE budget rather than having its own allocation. The 2013 budget also made the same recommendation, which was excised by Congress. "We look forward to preserving Ready To Learn as a stand-alone service that does exactly what it was intended to do, and does it very well."

Verizon in talks with content providers for online video service

Verizon Communications is in talks with content providers to deliver web-based TV services to mobile platforms, said chief executive Lowell McAdam. Verizon's goal "is to work with the content providers," said McAdam at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. "I have personally had discussions with the CEOs of the large content companies, and we would love to partner with them to see how we can take FiOS contact mobilely across the country." he said.

Benton

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