During questioning by Rep Peter Welch (D-VT) in a House Communications Subcommittee Federal Communications Commission oversight hearing, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said he was concerned, and everyone else should be too, about instances where subscriber access to online content was blocked as part of a programming dispute.
How does the recent net neutrality court case impact the public’s right to know? Learn how the Federal Communications Commission is addressing network neutrality issues at the 2014 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Las Vegas.
Gigi Sohn, special counsel for the Federal Communications Commission's External Affairs will discuss net neutrality during the conference session “Information Manipulation Part I: Net Neutrality,” which takes place June 28, 2014, in the Las Vegas Convention Center.
A panel of respondents will join Sohn in exploring the America Library Association’s actions to support an open Internet. Panelists include Vivian R. Wynn, chair of the American Library Association's Committee on Legislation and president of Wynn Library Consulting; Aaron Dobbs, Shippensburg University Systems and Electronic Resources Librarian; and Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s Washington Office.
The Federal Communications Commission will look into issues raised recently by Netflix and other companies about Internet traffic delivery, chairman Tom Wheeler said at a hearing, as he faced a bipartisan chorus of complaints about his recent net neutrality proposal.
Chairman Wheeler said that the FCC “needs to look at and will be looking at” an issue raised by Netflix about deals it has had to cut recently to get its traffic delivered more quickly to Comcast, Verizon and other Internet providers.
Content companies routinely enter into peering, or interconnection, agreements with middle-mile Internet providers to carry traffic more efficiently across the Internet so it can get to consumers more quickly. Netflix recently signed a paid deal to deliver traffic directly to Comcast’s network after customers complained about delayed videos.
[Commentary] Apple is reportedly building its own content delivery network and is in the process of signing peering agreements with the big Internet service providers (ISPs), according to Dan Rayburn, an industry consultant and analyst.
Rayburn uses Apple’s apparent willingness to sign peering agreements with ISPs as a way to argue that Netflix’s complaints about having to pay Comcast an interconnection fee are dubious.
But what’s dubious is not Netflix’s complaints over paid peering agreement or Apple’s willingness to enter into these agreements. Instead, the bigger issue is the secretive nature of how content is exchanged on the Internet at a time when a number of the significant content and broadband players are consolidating. Not only are these deals secretive, but they happen in markets that aren’t competitive.
Both edge providers and ISPs consolidating their power -- Google’s YouTube potentially buying Twitch, which is a growing source of traffic (about 1.35 percent of total bandwidth according to Sandvine) is an example of this consolidation on the edge provider side.
Meanwhile, while AT&T’s Dish deal or Comcast’s proposal to buy Time Warner Cable shrinks the overall ISP market -- fewer players are at the negotiating table.
Privacy advocates that have pushed for legislation to reform US government surveillance are backing away from a House bill that they say has been "watered-down" as it heads to the floor.
Though the original bill intended to end sweeping surveillance programs, the bill that the House will vote on soon allows for “mass surveillance on a slightly smaller scale,” according to Harley Geiger, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The bill -- the USA Freedom Act, authored by Patriot Act Rep Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) -- was originally written to prohibit the US government's sweeping surveillance program. But after moving through the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, where it saw some changes but retained the support of privacy advocates, last minute negotiations between House leadership and the Obama Administration have left the bill with weakened language when it comes to banning mass surveillance, advocates say.
Rep Sensenbrenner filed a manager’s amendment at the House Rules Committee to be considered on the floor in place of the bill that passed the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. Rep Sensenbrenner’s amendment still prohibits bulk collection but would allow government officials to search for records using “a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device, used by the Government to limit the scope of the information or tangible things sought.”
While the standard in Rep Sensenbrenner's amendment is more specific than the one under current law, it leaves too much room for interpretation, as opposed to earlier versions of the bill, Geiger said. It may keep the intelligence community from sweeping surveillance on a national level, but “it is ambiguous enough to allow for large scale collection,” he said.
[Commentary] A last-minute change to the National Security Agency reform bill making its way through Congress, as reported by the Guardian, may minimize one of the greatest dangers of the program.
Or it may make things far worse! Even though you may not talk to terrorists, you and a suspected terrorist may both use FedEx, so you still might have your most intimate relationships exposed to NSA’s analysis.
Right now, the NSA tries to minimize the number of innocent people whose call records get sucked up in queries by taking those voicemail and cable provider numbers out of the database. The new language in the USA Freedom Act would “require the prompt destruction of all call detail records” turned over by the telecoms “that the Government determines are not foreign intelligence information.”
If the NSA thinks you have interesting friends and relatives in China or Russia or anywhere else, it might keep your data. If it thinks you have ties to the drug trade, it might keep your data. If you work for an interesting foreign-owned company, it might keep the data. Plus, what process is the NSA going to use to decide if your phone number -- after all, it’s just a number, without a name -- is “foreign intelligence information” or not?
The NSA has to conduct some seriously intrusive analysis just to determine if your phone number amounts to foreign intelligence information! So to learn enough about your phone number to decide to destroy it, the NSA probably has to do intrusive searches on your number.
California has become the largest state to pass some version of the “4th Amendment Protection Act” in one of its lawmaking bodies.
The Golden State’s senate passed the bill, and the bill likely will come before the state assembly later this summer. As currently drafted, the California bill prohibits “the state from providing material support, participation, or assistance to any federal agency attempting the illegal and unconstitutional collection of electronic data or metadata, without consent, of any person not based on a valid warrant that particularly describes the person, place, and thing to be searched or seized or a court order, or in accordance with judicially recognized exceptions to warrant requirements.”
State Senator Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), who authored the bill, told Ars that the bill is a “substantive and symbolic” way to counter the effects of the National Security Agency (NSA). Lieu is an Air Force veteran who served as a prosecutor in the Judge Advocate General corps, and he currently serves as a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force reserves.
[Commentary] At its core, there is no great mystery (or great strategic vision) behind AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV. As more services are delivered via IP over broadband networks, previously distinct business such as voice, media delivery, home automation and data, are becoming much less distinct. No matter their industry of origin, service providers of all stripes increasingly are all in the same business (or collection of businesses).
So the real battle has become one simply of subscriber bases and customer lock-in rather than the value or margins of any one service. Eventually, every service provider will be delivering everything to everyone.
The tools for managing and monetizing live-event streaming are getting better and more scalable, at a time when advertisers are increasingly focused on live, DVR-proof programming. Live events are also likely to be critical to the growth of the mobile video business, particularly as more spectrum becomes available after 2015 and technologies like multicasting develop.
Consumers may be wary of paying data charges to watch on-demand content they could watch at other times on non-metered platforms. But for most consumers, live events still need to be watched live, and they’ll pay for the ability to watch them.
[Sweeting is Principal, Concurrent Media Strategies]
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler signaled the FCC does not plan to score stations giving up spectrum for auction on their "enterprise" value and said he expects the FCC will have border spectrum coordination "understandings" with Canada and Mexico -- if not signatures on the bottom line -- before the incentive auction.
While network neutrality was the major topic at the House Communications Subcommittee hearing, the legislators minored in peppering the chairman with questions about the incentive auction and recent FCC moves on joint sales agreements, sharing agreement guidance and the overdue quadrennial review(s).
Chairman Wheeler's seemingly neutral position on auction participation came in response to pointed questions from Rep Greg Walden (R-OR), chair of the Subcommittee and himself a former broadcaster. Chairman Wheeler has repeatedly said the goal is not to prevent sharing in the public interest, but what he sees as efforts to circumvent the ownership rules. He said the reality with JSA's was that it was becoming a K Street cottage industry of lawyers finding creative ways to get around the FCC's rules and "pervert" the basic concept of ownership.
Scores of filing cabinets containing thousands of patient medical records are disappearing into the cloud.
Use of electronic health records systems in doctors' offices has doubled in recent years, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2012, 72 percent of office-based physicians reported using electronic health records, up from 35 percent in 2007, the CDC says. The report finds that adoption of electronic health records was higher among younger physicians compared with older physicians, among primary-care physicians rather than specialty doctors, and among larger practices than smaller.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is helping guide implementation of the Hitech Act reforms. Led by Karen DeSalvo, the office is currently navigating the process of getting different electronic health systems to talk to each other -- a process known as interoperability.
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