April 2014

Although mobile Web will continue to dominate search budgets in the next four years, there will also be a shift towards more in-application spend, according to a new study from Juniper Research.

Juniper’s new “Mobile Search & Discovery: Market Prospects 2014-2018” report looks at how mobile search will grow primarily through location-based apps and hyperlocal targeting in the next four years. With more time-sensitive searches taking place on smartphones and tablets, mobile is increasingly becoming the platform that marketers are investing more in versus desktop with specific, targeted keywords.

The expected $16.8 billion mobile search industry in 2018 represents a jump from $6.4 billion in 2013. When it comes to tactics that marketers use, mobile Web will continue to dominate the majority of mobile search spend, demonstrating the power that Google will continue to show in the years ahead. Juniper’s study also looks at which markets will spend the most in terms of mobile search.

The Far East and China will bring in the majority of mobile search spend by 2018. In 2013, North America represented the area with the largest amount of mobile spend in 2013, indicating that the growth in mobile search advertising will grow globally in the next few years. Juniper expects that North America will be the No. 2 area in terms of mobile search spend by 2018, followed by Western Europe. Other key areas include the rest of the Asia Pacific region and India.

America is the reason why everyone thinks the Internet is awesome and, more important, it's why Russia and China haven't already taken over the Web and foisted their draconian rules on the rest of us.

That's apparently what some members of the House believe, at any rate. Republican lawmakers grilled officials about a recent proposal that would end the Commerce Department's business relationship with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit charged with administering the Internet's system of names and numbers. This system syncs Web domains to IP addresses and makes sure that when you type in Google's address, you actually land there. Maintaining this system has technically been the US government's job.

But for more than a decade, it has contracted with ICANN to do the work. This contractual relationship is what people are talking about when they refer to the United States' "control" of the Internet. It also helps that ICANN's international headquarters are in California.

Now the Obama Administration may let that contract lapse, replacing it with a multistakeholder body composed of corporations, states, advocacy groups and other potential members. It's not yet clear what that body will look like, but this idea already has some members of Congress worried. They're concerned it means the United States is giving up its influence over the Web -- even though that critique has already been debunked.

The power over the Internet that some in Congress think the United States has to beat back authoritarian regimes doesn't actually reside in the United States at all. But that reality is being obscured by a myth: that the United States, having played a pivotal role in the Internet's creation, has a magical power to thwart speech-stifling regimes.

[Commentary] Some 45 years after design work started on the cellular network and the Internet, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued an Internet Protocol (IP) Technology Transitions Order amounting to a reluctant invitation for trials on the decommissioning of the legacy telephone network.

While the telephone network is no longer the centerpiece of telecommunications in the United States or around the world, the FCC is clearly anxious about turning it off, probably because the FCC and telephone network grew up together. This reluctance is apparent in the many obstacles the FCC’s transition order places in the way of the decommissioning trials. While it is worthwhile to ensure that no essential capabilities are abandoned in the transition from the telephone network to its replacement (pervasive broadband networks running IP), it is important for the FCC to approach this transition sensibly.

[Commentary] At the press conference following the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) March 31 Open Meeting, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler made the following observation: “Interconnection is part of the Network Compact. ‘Peering’ is just a $3.50 word for interconnection.” Personally, I think most people are totally misreading this.

Chairman Wheeler’s statements make it look more likely to me that the FCC will start looking closely at the Internet peering market, not less likely, especially as part of the Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal.

l rant at considerable length that (a) Chairman Wheeler is right, this is not a “network neutrality” issue, but the same goddam interconnection issue that we have struggled with for more than a hundred years in every networked industry from railroads to electricity to broadband; (b) The FCC needs to actually look at this and study it and understand how the market works before it makes any decisions on what to do; and, (c) While Chairman Wheeler is not saying -- in any way, shape or form -- that he actually plans to do anything before he has real information on which to base a decision, he is signaling -- for anyone actually paying attention -- that he is, in fact, going to actually look at this as part of his overall transition of the agency around his “Fourth Network Revolution” and “Network Compact” ideas.