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May 2016

The funny way the media asks Donald Trump questions

[Commentary] It's the media's job to vet presidential candidates, so journalists often serve as critics, pointing out inconsistencies and potential weaknesses voters should know about. But with Donald Trump, they also play another role, according to CNN's Chris Cuomo: counselors.

Discussing media coverage on Trump with former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, Cuomo observed what he called "the dynamic of kind of counseling [Trump] through interviews." Cuomo offered a generic example of the kinds questions he's talking about: "Like, when you say this, you know, so you mean like you would just kind of do it this way?" Cuomo's observation is that his fellow interviewers do Trump's job for him — suggesting what he must have really meant, instead of asking wide-open questions that force the presumptive Republican nominee to clarify all on his own. A review of Trump interviews on controversial subjects suggests Cuomo has a point. Whether they mean to or not, journalists often nudge the billionaire toward safer ground when he ventures down what looks like a politically dangerous path. Trump, of course, doesn't always take the hint or doesn't care. And it's possible — or perhaps even likely — that reporters aren't so much trying to protect him as simply reacting with disbelief to the often-unprecedented and surprising things he's saying. Whatever the cause, the result is that questions to Trump often come with the "right" answer built in. And this habit of throwing him a line could help explain why some voters believe the media have been too soft on the real estate magnate.

CTIA’s Annual Wireless Industry Survey

Americans used 9.6 trillion megabytes (MB) of data in 2015, three times the 3.2 trillion MB in 2013. This is the equivalent of consumers streaming 59,219 videos every minute or roughly 18 million MB. Smartphones are the number one wireless device in the US and still growing:

  • There were more than 228 million smartphones, which was up almost 10 percent from 2014. 70 percent of the population now owns a smartphone.
  • There were more than 41 million tablets on wireless networks, up 16 percent from 2014.
  • Smartphones are the number one wireless device in the U.S. and still growing
  • Americans talked more than 2.8 trillion minutes on their mobile phones, up more than 17 percent from 2014.
  • Americans exchanged more than 2.1 trillion texts, videos and photo messages, or more than four million every minute.

To handle the increase in devices and usage, America’s wireless carriers invested almost $32 billion in 2015, including adding almost 10,000 new cell sites. Since 2010, carriers have invested more than $177 billion to improve their coverage and capacity to better serve all Americans.

Want Unlicensed? Tell It To The Hill

[Commentary] If you have your eye on some spectrum for a particular use, you’d likely go to the Federal Communications Commission and participate in a rulemaking proceeding, or perhaps initiate one, proposing that the rules be revised to specify that your preferred spectrum could be used for your preferred use. Maybe others would object, maybe they wouldn’t. (Who are we kidding? Someone most certainly would.) But in the end, the FCC would determine whether, and how, to modify its spectrum allocations.

Increasingly, however, the FCC’s ability to do this is shaped by Congress. Now, while the FCC may have more than 75 years of experience with spectrum allocations, in our overall governmental organization Congress out-ranks the FCC. So if Congress wants to tell the FCC which spectrum can be put to which uses, the FCC must comply with Congress’s dictates. For entrepreneurs looking to stake their claim to certain spectrum, that means that Congress, rather than the FCC, may be the place to go.

Mobile Zero Rating: The Economics and Innovation Behind Free Data

Zero rating offers a number of benefits.

  • First, it is good economics to help advance innovation in information technology markets. Where both content or “edge” firms as well as network operators make large investments in establishing platforms that have relatively low marginal costs, and gain value with each additional user, zero rating can help bring new customers into a firm’s customer base, enhancing the value of the product, and providing additional revenues to defray the investment for additional innovation.
  • Second, zero rating is an important tool to expand access to information, particularly in developing countries. As of 2015, mobile broadband networks covered about 78 percent of the world’s population, but only 43 percent were actually using the Internet. That 35 percent—some 2.5 billion people—who have access to mobile networks, but choose not to subscribe, could be given the opportunity, with zero-rating programs, to connect at a relatively low cost.
  • Third, zero rating is generally pro-competitive. There is little difference between zero rating and common-place discounts that sellers provide through middlemen that everyone accepts as normal, like toll-free 800 numbers. Zero rating allows for differentiation of company offerings, both at the application layer and between competing carriers. This ability to differentiate services tends to most benefit maverick firms that change the terms on which firms compete, and allows new applications a foothold to get discovered.
  • Fourth, consumers enjoy zero rating plans, and appreciate the ability to use zero-rated apps without having to worry about their data limits. We should celebrate when competitive markets work to provide consumers more of what they want. Critics argue that zero rating is against the public interest, but the bar for arguing that the public interest directly contravenes consumer preference should be a high one.
  • Fifth, zero rating programs can lead to more efficient use of networks if they zero-rated services use fewer bits than a non-zero rated version while having essentially no diminution of quality and customer experience.
  • Lastly, zero rating can help facilitate more efficient advertising, leading to more transactions online, boosting economic growth and adding fuel to continued growth in the advertising supported Internet.

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