December 2014

The New York Public Library, as well as the Queens Library and the Brooklyn Public Library, will begin renting out 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots to residents. The New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries will rent out the hotspots for six months to a year to residents who don't have broadband and who are enrolled in library programs and adult learning programs. The Queens Library will lend the mobile hotspots from five of its libraries to anyone with a library card. The hotspots will be provided by Sprint. Funding for the program came from a $500,000 donation from a coalition of nonprofits, as well as a $1 million donation from Google.

Preston Padden, head of the Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition, says new regulations expected to be proposed by the Federal Communications Commission on Dec 11 could put a damper on the payouts to broadcasters during the agency’s incentive auction, discouraging their participation.

“Instead of trying to limit the prices paid to broadcasters, they [the FCC] ought to be encouraging broadcaster participation,” he said. Under one of the proposals of concern to the coalition, the agency would essentially limit the price that broadcasters could get for their channels during the auction by setting individual price caps for stations based largely on the populations the stations serve, Padden said. The proposal would give bigger stations more financial reward for participating in the auction than the smaller stations in the same market or adjacent markets, he added. new

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explains his decision to purchase the Washington Post, saying, “I went through a few gates before deciding to buy The Post. Is it hopeless? I didn’t want to do it if it was,” he said.

"The Internet has radically disrupted traditional newspapers. The world is completely changed, and advertisers have tons of options on how to reach people in local areas.” But Bezos was ultimately convinced that The Post, which he called a national institution, can be brought into the digital age by leveraging the technical expertise and knowledge that he has gained over his decades spent building Amazon into a global technology company. “I didn’t know anything about the newspaper business, but I did know something about the Internet,” Bezos said. “That, combined with the financial runway that I can provide, is the reason why I bought The Post.” Ultimately, Bezos’ goal is to rework The Post into something that expands beyond the local daily newspaper, into one that reaches across borders.

Satellite operators have told the Federal Communications Commission that it would be wrong to charge them a per-subscriber regulatory fee along the lines of that charged for cable operators. The FCC supports itself entirely through those fees, which it charges based on how much employee time is taken up with filings, applications and other work related to a particular service. DBS operators currently pay per satellite license rather than per subscriber.