March 2014

A consortium of industrial giants -- including AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and Intel -- said that they would cooperate to create engineering standards to connect objects, sensors and large computing systems in some of the world’s largest industrial assets, like oil refineries, factories or harbors. The White House and other United States governmental entities were also involved in the creation of the group, which is expected to enroll other large American and foreign businesses.

“I don’t think anything this big has been tried before” in terms of sweeping industrial cooperation, said William Ruh, vice president of GE’s global software center. “This is how we will make machines, people and data work together.” The group, called the Industrial Internet Consortium, hopes to establish common ways that machines share information and move data. Creating standards for things like the electricity levels within small machines, or the kinds of radio technology a railroad might use to signal track conditions, can increase the size of the potential market and speed product development.

Turkey's telecommunications authority blocked Google's video sharing website YouTube, exactly a week after preventing people from accessing Twitter, in a move likely to intensify domestic and international criticism just three days ahead of critical local elections. The move came just hours after a leaked recording published on YouTube purporting to show a conversation where Turkey's foreign minister, spy chief and a top general appear to discuss scenarios which could lead to a Turkish attack against Jihadist militants in Syria. The block was announced on the telecommunications authority's website, which said it had taken an "administrative measure" against the site "after technical analysis and legal consideration."

Local news has become a tough sell, especially online. It’s not that people aren’t interested in their communities -- local news usually ranks as the top priority in surveys -- it’s that the economics of the digital age work strongly against reporting about schools, cops and the folks down the street. In drawing readers and viewers from a relatively small pond, local news outlets struggle to attract enough traffic to generate ad dollars sufficient to support the cost of gathering the news in the first place. Conversely, sites that report and comment on national and international events draw from a worldwide audience, making it relatively easier to aggregate a large audience and the ad dollars that come with it. One result: A steady, years-long decline in local-news reporting, as newspapers -- the largest source of local news -- have gradually cut back their reporting staffs. A second upshot: The biggest investments in digital news have gone toward start-up ventures that target broad and borderless audiences, bypassing community news altogether.

The Federal Communications Commission has raised more than $53 billion for the Treasury in auctions revenues since 1994 – $1.56 billion of that just last month. We are on course to raise billions more in the next few years to fund, among other things, the deployment of an interoperable broadband network for our nation’s first responders, as well as to reduce the deficit. The Commission supports an industry that is essential to our nation’s economy and stimulates ever-higher levels of financial growth. We have repurposed and re-engineered significant amounts of spectrum to fuel these industries -- including spectrum that would have been considered almost useless barely a decade ago. During the past three years, the Commission has reformed the Universal Service Fund (USF) -- a massive undertaking designed to take this 20th Century program into the next decades of the 21st Century -- and now we are building on that reform with a sharpened enforcement focus. The Commission’s activities are entirely funded by those it regulates. In other words, there is a zero relationship between Commission expenditures and the federal deficit. We have no direct appropriation, and we work hard to raise funds to put money back into the Treasury. In fact, the industries that we regulate contributed $17 million to sequestration since that money was derived from their licensing fees. Auctions revenues cover auctions costs, and the USF funds cover USF program costs.