July 2014

Mexico Advances Telecom Law to Challenge Slim’s Dominance

An overhaul of Mexico’s telecommunications industry is one step closer to becoming law and may force billionaire Carlos Slim’s América Móvil to break up or face penalties for dominating the phone business.

Mexico’s lower house is set to debate the bill that was passed by the Senate after more than six months of delays and legal challenges. An extraordinary session to discuss and approve the bill will be requested, and the law could be passed very soon, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, head of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party in the lower house, said. If approved, it would then require the endorsement of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has spearheaded the push for the sweeping legislation.

fter 17 hours of debate, the Senate on July 5 passed the bill that supporters say will help spark new competitors to take on América Móvil along with billionaire Emilio Azcarraga’s Grupo Televisa, which has dominated the broadcast industry for decades. In addition to restrictions on prices and requirements to share infrastructure, the law also lets such dominant companies propose their own breakups to reduce their market share.

“With more investment we will have more competition, more quality and options of service and accessible prices for users,” Beltrones said. “It’s urgent that we approve this reform.” The companies will face the harshest penalties they’ve ever encountered if they violate the new rules. The bill calls for fines of as much as 10 percent of Mexican annual sales -- and double for repeat offenses. América Móvil got 299 billion pesos ($23 billion) in Mexican revenue in 2013, while Televisa had about 70 billion pesos.

Healthcare’s digital future

The adoption of IT in healthcare systems has, in general, followed the same pattern as other industries.

In the 1950s, when institutions began using new technology to automate highly standardized and repetitive tasks such as accounting and payroll, healthcare payers and other industry stakeholders also began using IT to process vast amounts of statistical data.

Twenty years later, the second wave of IT adoption arrived. It did two things: it helped integrate different parts of core processes (manufacturing and HR, for example) within individual organizations, and it supported B2B processes such as supply-chain management for different institutions within and outside individual industries.

Many institutions in the private and public sector have already moved to the third wave of IT adoption -- full digitization of their entire enterprise, including digital products, channels, and processes, as well as advanced analytics that enable entirely new operating models.

No longer limited to helping organizations do a certain task better or more efficiently, digital technology has the potential to affect every aspect of business and private life, enabling smarter choices, allowing people to spend more time on tasks they deem valuable, and often fundamentally transforming the way value is created.

What will this third wave of IT adoption look like for healthcare? Programs like the N3 communication network in the United Kingdom and the secure telematics platform in Germany have created powerful infrastructures that have the potential to support the third wave of digital services in healthcare.

Rural students deserve 21st-century education

[Commentary] Schools in rural areas routinely get less funding per student than those in wealthier, urban areas. For example, E-Rate distributes to students in Washington, DC, roughly three times the amount that Kansas students receive -- even though our nation’s capital has a much larger tax base and broadband is cheaper to deploy there than in rural Kansas.

Indeed, small Kansas towns from Colby to Coffeyville and Elkhart to Seneca tend to get less money than large school districts with more resources.

These disparities undermine E-Rate’s core mission of giving rural schools the same technological tools as their urban and suburban counterparts. One reason for this unfair distribution of funding is the complex E-Rate application process.

To apply for E-Rate funds, schools must complete a seven-step process with six application forms spanning 17 pages -- just for basic service. If a school wants to invest in a technology the federal government does not consider a priority, additional paperwork is required. Moreover, schools are required to sign service contracts months before the school year begins, and possibly years before the school knows if E-Rate funding will even be available to offset the cost of those services.

All of this means that it is expensive and burdensome to apply. E-Rate also doesn’t give schools a budget. That means urban schools at the front of the line often get as much money as they want while many rural schools at the back of the line must make do with what is left.

The result is some schools using E-Rate to subsidize BlackBerrys for administrators while other schools can’t even get funding for classroom Wi-Fi. That’s not right. To fulfill E-Rate’s promise to all of our students, we must cut the bureaucracy and refocus the program on our children’s needs. We must create a student-centered E-Rate program.

NAB, NCTA Pitch FCC On Online Clip Captioning Flexibility

Broadcasters and cable operators are on the same page when it comes to providing captions for online video clips: Online clips should not be held to the same quality standard as full-length captions on TV programming, and the clip requirement for time-sensitive clips should not kick in before mid-to-late 2017.

That is according to arguments made to Federal Communications Commission staffers by National Association of Broadcasters and National Cable & Telecommunications Association execs as the FCC prepares to vote at its July 11 public meeting on extending closed captioning requirements to online clips.

Both associations were concerned with time-sensitive clips, like breaking news, and advanced clips, like online promos for shows that have not aired yet. NCTA said programmers need flexibility to experiment with new ways of providing captions for clips, including voice recognition technology. NAB says broadcasters are working on ways to automate the captioning process to speed it up.

FCC Announces Review Teams For Proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable-Charter And AT&T-DirecTV Transactions

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler announced the members of an inter-bureau steering committee and the working team leaders established to coordinate the agency’s review of merger applications from Comcast-Time Warner Cable-Charter and AT&T-DirecTV. Jonathan Sallet, General Counsel, will chair the steering committee that will oversee both sets of transactions.

Bureau chiefs on the steering committee include Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake, International Bureau Chief Mindel de la Torre, Wireline Competition Bureau Chief Julie Veach, and Wireless Telecommunications Bureau Chief Roger Sherman.

Hillary Burchuk will lead the working team responsible for the review of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable-Charter transaction. Bill Dever from the Wireline Competition bureau will be her deputy.

The Comcast-Time Warner Cable-Charter working team will report to the steering committee. Jamillia Ferris will join the Office of General Counsel to lead the working team for the review of the proposed AT&T-DirecTV transaction.

Elizabeth Andrion from the Office of Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis will serve as her deputy.

William Rogerson will serve as senior economist overseeing the review of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable-Charter and has been selected to serve as senior economist overseeing the review of the proposed AT&T-DirecTV transactions.

Shane Greenstein will serve as senior economic consultant, providing guidance on the proposed Comcast-TWC-Charter and AT&T-DirecTV transactions.

Building a More Diverse Workforce Through Software

A Q&A with Gild CEO Sheeroy Desai and chief scientist Vivienne Ming. Tech companies have a diversity problem, especially when it comes to hiring software engineers.

Software may be eating the world, but for the most part that software is created by white males, despite the fact that there are many qualified engineers in the marketplace who are neither.

A series of self-reinforcing cycles reinforces the status quo. Companies tend to hire alumnae from certain universities and workers from particular companies; they also rely heavily on referrals from existing employees. The result is a workforce with a lot of faces that look similar.

It’s the kind of problem you might expect could be solved by, well, software. Human biases in hiring, innocent and otherwise, can be corrected by an approach that ranks candidates based on the quality of their body of publicly visible work -- or so the thinking goes. That’s what Gild does. It’s one of a few up-and-coming companies that has sought to give its customers -- some 300 companies at last count -- a leg up in finding qualified software developers.

Gild CEO Sheeroy Desai and chief scientist Vivienne Ming talked about how the company is starting to help its customers grapple with the difficulties of building a more diverse work force.

LTE, Are You Always This Loud? Love, Wi-Fi

[Commentary] About 200 Megahertz of spectrum exists for Wi-Fi transmissions, including the extra 100 MHz in the 5-Gigahertz band granted by the Federal Communications Commission in March. Right now, that spectral slice is carrying 50% to 60% of the Internet’s traffic. Mobile carriers, by contrast, maneuver their traffic over some 600 MHz of spectrum -- licensed spectrum, which means they paid for it. (Dearly.) Some 2% to 3% of the Internet’s traffic moves within that slice. The concern is that LTE traffic will deliberately dump into the unlicensed territories, offloading giant blobs of traffic that can’t see or hear what’s already there -- such as anything moving over Wi-Fi. Is this a real problem? Not yet. Could it be? Definitely.

Who’s the new guy running the NSA?

Admiral Michael Rogers, the relatively new head of the National Security Agency, has been on the job for about three months, and he’s been exceedingly diplomatic and measured.

n addition to serving as the face of public relations for the Defense Department's "silent service," Admiral Rogers has taken on two formal roles that come bundled with the NSA director position: head of the Central Security Service, another arm of the US’ 17-tentacled intelligence apparatus, and commander of US Cyber Command, the hub of the military’s cyber efforts. That means one man is in charge of the NSA’s domestic and foreign surveillance, along with defending US government networks, coordinating cyberattacks against enemies, and supervising what is essentially the security IT department for the rest of the Defense Department. So, who is he?

The Military Doesn't Want You to Quit Facebook and Twitter

Cornell University said the Facebook emotion study received no external funding, but it turns out that the university is currently receiving Defense Department money for some extremely similar-sounding research -- the analysis of social network posts for “sentiment,” i.e. how people are feeling, in the hopes of identifying social “tipping points.”

It’s the sort of work that the US military has been funding for years, most famously via the open-source indicators program, an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) program that looked at Twitter to predict social unrest.

Defense One recently caught up with Lt Gen Michael Flynn, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who said the US military has “completely revamped” the way it collects intelligence around the existence of large, openly available data sources and especially social media like Facebook.

“The information that we’re able to extract form social media -- it’s giving us insights that frankly we never had before,” he said. In other words, the head of one of the biggest US military intelligence agencies needs you on Facebook.

Feds push electronic records that make fraud easier

The federal government is rewarding doctors and hospitals for moving to electronic health records -- and will soon punish them if they don't -- even though these records currently make it easier for health care providers to defraud government-paid health programs, fraud experts say.

The Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general charged in December that the basic auditing safeguards that also help to prevent fraud for electronic health records (EHRs) weren't in place in many hospitals, or they were being used, but vulnerable to corruption. Yet the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services still doesn't require health care providers to keep their audit systems on.

Reed Gelzer, a former primary care doctor who is now an EHR consultant to the federal government and private groups, says that means the health records that are maintained electronically can be easily falsified, altered or otherwise misrepresented.

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