August 2015

CBS CEO Les Moonves tells analysts it will top $1 billion in retrans by 2017 and pass $2 billion by 2020. And if he remains bullish on broadcast, his enthusiasm bubbles over when it comes to digital. "Broadband offerings will continue to drive growth." Moonves and Joe Ianniello, COO, both touted the growth of Showtime over-the-top and CBS All Access. "Every million subs (for Showtime OTT) equals $100 million of profit," Ianniello said. The executives sidestepped giving specifics about CBS All Access but thanks to recent deals with stations groups including Sinclair and Nexstar, CBS appears to be on track to hit 1 million CBS All Access subscribers before year end. "Relations with affiliates remain very strong," Moonves said. "Basically, we're going to have the entire country before too long."

Nonetheless, CBS will pursue distribution opportunities that don't necessarily include affiliates. Despite the lackluster broadcast advertising environment, Moonves remains upbeat. "Proof of purchase by the Internet is not yet there as it is on broadcast," he said. "Most industries will not veer away from broadcast. "We still feel very bullish. There's a reason year after year our CPMs go up -- broadcast is in better shape than cable."

As the global elite gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2014, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and four other executives from the Internet search giant were meeting in a conference room at the newly opened InterContinental, a golden, egg-shaped structure nestled incongruously in the snowcapped Swiss Alps. They hoped to finalize a settlement with Joaquín Almunia, the European Union’s powerful competition czar and Google’s primary legal adversary for the previous four years. Google’s long-running antitrust ordeal in Europe, it seemed, was finally over. At Google’s headquarters in Mountain View (CA) the Almunia settlement with the EU was seen as such a fait accompli that staff assigned to the case started to work on other things. It turned out to be a huge miscalculation. Almunia couldn’t muster the political support inside the European Commission to ratify the deal. It never even came up for a vote.

On April 15, 2015, Almunia’s successor, Margrethe Vestager, a 47-year-old former finance minister from Denmark, approached the same Berlaymont podium in the same auditorium. “Dominant companies can’t abuse their dominant position to create advantage in related markets,” she said bluntly, formally accusing Google of exploiting its supremacy in general search to dominate the market for online product searches -- the equivalent of an indictment, the very move that Almunia had sought to avoid through the private settlement at Davos. That wasn’t all. Vestager (pronounced Vestayer) announced a new investigation into whether Google had abused its dominant position with the Android operating system for smartphones. She suggested other cases were possible, too -- regarding Google’s expansion into the markets for local search, maps, images, travel, etc. For Google, this was a nightmare portending years of scrutiny, a fine of up to $6 billion, and edicts that could forever limit the effectiveness of its products. The company must file a response to Vestager’s “statement of objections” by Aug. 17. In the span of just 15 months, Google somehow lost Europe.

A new report from the Pew Research Center explores the new contours of friendship in the digital age. For today’s teens, friendships can start digitally: 57 percent of teens have met a new friend online. Social media and online gameplay are the most common digital venues for meeting friends. Text messaging is a key component of day-to-day friend interactions: 55 percent of teens spend time every day texting with friends. Video games play a critical role in the development and maintenance of boys’ friendships. Overall, 72 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 play video games on a computer, game console or portable device. Fully 84 percent of boys play video games, significantly higher than the 59 percent of girls who play games.

Teen friendships are strengthened and challenged within social media environments. Social media also plays a critical role in introducing teens to new friends and connecting them to their existing friend networks. Girls are more likely to unfriend, unfollow and block former friends When friendships end, many teens take steps to cut the digital web that connects them to their former friend. Girls who use social media or cellphones are more likely to prune old content and connections:
58 percent of teens who use social media or cellphones have unfriended or unfollowed someone they used to be friends with, and 45 percent of teens have blocked an ex-friend.
63 percent of girls who use social media or cellphones have unfriended or unfollowed an ex-friend, compared with 53 percent of boys.

The report found that phone calls are less common early in a friendship, but are an important way that teens talk with their closest friends.

The Federal Communications Commission assertion of common carrier authority over Internet service is a statutory construction train wreck, TechFreedom suggests, with at least three strikes against it:

1. The FCC presumes that Congress delegated to the FCC "unilaterally" the decision on a question of "utmost" political and economic significance, despite express statutory authority and "subsequent legislative history" signaling Congress did not intend for the FCC to regulate the Internet period, much less under Title II regulations written for a 19th century railroad network.
2. The FCC's reinterpretation of statute required it to extensively forbear from Title II regulations, which the brief points out the FCC calls tailoring and the brief suggests is a clear sign the FCC took the "wrong interpretive turn."
3. By claiming the regulatory power without demonstrating the necessity to prevent significant and actual risks to the public, the FCC is asserting the kind of sweeping delegation of power the Supreme Court has told agencies to avoid.

And even if the statutory language were "merely" ambiguous, TechFreedom et al. argue that the court should not accord the FCC Chevron deference (the legal theory of deferring to an agency that has subject matter expertise when it comes to statutory interpretation where the statute is not clear).