[Commentary] The next version of Google search could be a cost-per-action engine that would give companies like Amazon some serious competition.
[Narendra Reddy is the chief product officer for the enterprise collaboration software maker Synovel.]
[Commentary] Networks like CBS have all invested a lot of money into TV Everywhere products, which let consumers catch up on shows as long as they have a pay TV subscription. TV Everywhere has been riddled with problems since the beginning, leaving many customers frustrated as they scramble to find their cable password before a big game begins. To their credit, networks and their technology providers have been making some progress on making TV Everywhere easier to use, but it’s still far from being a mainstream product. At the beginning of the year, only 17 percent of consumers even knew what TV Everywhere was. TV Everywhere may have struggled to get traction, but there is no denying that consumers are moving towards online services, and a lot faster than many had predicted. Consumers could collectively decide to drop cable tomorrow, but it is pointing towards a world where online services are simply more attractive, and more used, than traditional networks. TV executives aren’t blind to these changes and we have seen some of them start to react.
A $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation -- awarded to the Hawaii Center for Advanced Communications (HCAC) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's College of Engineering -- will allow scientists to pursue solutions that would bring improved radio signals to remote and rural areas.
[Commentary] Silicon Valley is putting its foreign Internet franchise at risk by imagining what happens in Washington DC stays in DC.
Silicon Valley’s net neutrality tunnel vision in America blinds it to the disastrous international policy repercussions of promoting a protectionist industrial policy for Silicon Valley at the Federal Communications Commission, exactly when most other nations are looking for any pretext to justify imposing their own protectionist policies in response to Edward Snowden’s revelations of National Security Agency spying.
[Scott Cleland is Chairman, NetCompetition, and President, Precursor]
[Commentary] We often talk about the power of cable lobbying in the context of big proceedings like network neutrality. But where the real power comes, and where consumers routinely get screwed the most, happens off-screen. Because people hardly ever know what is happening, cable lobbyists play an outsized role in working their magic and making it legal to find new ways to screw over subscribers. Nothing illustrates this better than the fight over the Satellite Television Access and Viewers Rights Act (STAVRA).
AT&T may be the largest landline voice provider in the United States, but it said that as this once lucrative service continues to decline, the Federal Communications Commission's Connect America Funds part II (CAF-II) funds should focus solely on broadband and not voice. In a recent letter to the FCC, AT&T outlined how in both Illinois and Louisiana, there was a high amount of consumers that did not have a subscription to a POTS service plan.
[Commentary] Even if Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, is in his heart of hearts a villain devoted to driving every mom-and-pop store in the world out of business, the company he's built is very much a force for good.
It is a force for good not just because it keeps the my household stocked with paper towels, dish soap, rolling ball pens, map tacks, and lots and lots of cheap books, but because it points American capitalism in a better, healthier direction. We've all heard of Adam Smith's “invisible hand” that guides the free market. The invisible foot is the invisible hand's brutish older brother. It is the force that sees to it that capital gets reallocated from firms that aren’t doing their jobs to firms that are by putting the former out of business. The invisible foot has seen better days. In sector after sector—banking, broadband, and utilities come to mind—large incumbent firms have found new ways to protect themselves from competition, whether through coziness with regulators of sweetheart subsidy deals with politicians on the make to a pathetic lack of imagination among entrepreneurs who refuse to take on the toughest challenges. The sectors that Amazon takes on are the big exception. Instead of damning Amazon, we need to be asking why we don't have more companies like it.
The US telecoms sector looks much as it did two years ago. Verizon and AT&T have 190 million wireless retail connections between them, dwarfing the 85 million shared by Sprint and T-Mobile. While the consolidation efforts of Iliad and Softbank may have amounted to nothing, the US telecoms sector is unlikely to return to the status quo ante.
There is another potential dealmaker in the shadows: Charlie Ergen, chairman of Dish, the US satellite TV group. As Jennifer Fritzsche, an analyst at Wells Fargo, puts it, the question on everyone’s lips is: “What is Charlie up to?” Regulators are expected to look more favourably on a tie-up between a wireless player and a satellite company, a combination that is also being pursued by AT&T and DirectTV.
China claimed the US has derailed cybersecurity cooperation between the two countries and that it doesn’t tolerate hacking. The statement came a day after Yang Jiechi, a state councilor who deals with foreign affairs, held discussions in Boston with US Secretary of State John Kerry on topics that included cybersecurity. “Dialogue and cooperation between China and the US in the field of cybersecurity is faced with difficulty due to the wrong actions taken by the American side,” according to a statement from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Neelie Kroes hasn’t given a public opinion about zero-rated mobile content and apps, but her office has told anti-zero-rating advocates that it’s a competition issue rather than a network neutrality issue. It’s up to her successor, Andrus Ansip, to clear things up.
© 1994-2026 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.
