November 2016

Sprint wants majority stake in Kroger's i-wireless

Sprint could soon be the majority owner of Newport (KY)-based prepaid cell phone service provider i-wireless. The Overland Park (KS)-based company is in the final stages of regulatory review on a deal where Sprint would acquire a 70 percent stake in the business. Kroger and Genie Global Inc., which jointly own i-wireless, would each retain a 15 percent stake in the company. Sprint initially announced the deal in May. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sprint has had a partnership with i-wireless for several years, serving as its network provider. I-wireless serves customers in 42 states and Washington (DC).

Sprint needs the blessing of federal regulators to merge its Assurance Wireless business and i-wireless' Access Wireless into one company. I-wireless Founder and CEO Paul McAleese would continue to run the new company. Both businesses are participants in the federal Lifeline program, which was established more than 30 years ago to ensure low-income consumers could have affordable access to phone service. Sprint also told regulators that i-wireless customers who receive 250 minutes on their Lifeline service plan would be upgraded to the Assurance Wireless plan, which offers existing subscribers 350 minutes per month.

Low Marks for Major Players in 2016 Election – Including the Winner

When voters are asked to grade the candidates, parties and press on how they conducted themselves during the presidential campaign, they award the lowest grades for nearly all involved since the quadrennial post-election surveys began in 1988. A 57% majority of voters say news organizations had too much influence on the outcome of 2016’s presidential election, while 13% say the press had too little influence and 27% say the press had the right amount of influence.

The share saying news organizations had too much influence on the outcome of the presidential election is the highest it has been since 2000, while the share of those saying the press had about the right amount of influence is the lowest in Pew Research Center polling going back to 1992. About four-in-ten voters (39%) say the press was too tough in the way it covered Donald Trump’s campaign, while 32% say it was fair and 27% say it was too easy. Overall, voters were more likely to say the press was too easy on Hillary Clinton: 45% say this, while 21% say it was too tough on her and 33% say it was fair. That the press is viewed by voters as having been easier on Clinton and harder on Trump is largely the result of higher levels of press criticism among Trump voters than Clinton voters: About three-quarters of Trump voters say both that the press was too tough on him (74%) and too easy on her (78%). By contrast, Clinton voters are roughly as likely to say the press treated Trump fairly as they are to say it was too easy on him (49% vs. 44%). And while 37% of Clinton voters say the press was too tough on their candidate, half (50%) say she was treated fairly.

President-elect Trump taps economists, investors for transition team

President-elect Donald Trump designated a dozen transition officials, campaign supporters, scholars and former administration officials to bridge the gap at key federal finance and business agencies. President-elect Trump’s transition team announced 12 men and women from various sectors and industries — including several early campaign supporters — to serve on “landing teams.” The teams will help Trump staff his new administration, though members of the teams won’t necessarily be nominated or hired. Jeffrey Eisenach, director of the fiscally conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy, and Mark Jamison, director of the University of Florida’s Public Utilities Research Center, will lead the Federal Communications Commission team.

President-elect Trump to meet with news executives

President-elect Donald Trump will meet with anchors and executives from the country's five biggest television networks Nov 21 at Trump Tower. The top five networks from a ratings perspective are NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News and CNN. MSNBC, the cable news arm of NBC News, will also attend. The meeting was arranged by Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, who also served as Trump's campaign manager for the final few months of the White House race. The conversation has been deemed off the record.

President Barack Obama held similar meetings with television executives and anchors in 2008 before and after the election, including one two months before his victory with then-Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes and 21st Century Fox Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

FEC questions President-elect Trump donations worth $1.3 Million

The Federal Election Commission may have found more than a thousand mistakes in the latest financial filing by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, according to a new report. The FEC determined that Trump’s campaign accepted about 1,100 donations — totaling approximately $1.3 million — that may be in violation of various campaign finance laws. The commission sent Timothy Jost, the campaign's treasurer, a letter seeking clarification of Oct's financial filings.

The FEC’s message focused on two main concerns: whether Trump’s campaign accepted contributions from organizations not properly registered with the commission and whether donors giving to the Republican’s campaign exceeded legal donation limits. “If any apparently prohibited contribution in question was incompletely or incorrectly disclosed, you should amend your original report with clarifying information,” it states. "In addition, please clarify whether the contribution(s) received from the referenced organization(s) is permissible. If any apparently excessive contribution in question was incompletely or incorrectly disclosed, you must amend your original report with the clarifying information.”

Comcast Bumps Broadband Speeds in Several Markets

Comcast said it is rolling out a free speed upgrade in several markets that will raise the max download of its “Performance Pro” tier to 100 Mbps (from 75 Mbps), and “Blast Pro” to 200 Mbps (from 150 Mbps). Comcast said it’s deploying the speed boost in Washington state, Colorado, Utah, Tucson, parts of New Mexico, Houston, Oregon/Southwest Washington, Minnesota, and the Kansas City area. The company said most new customers in those areas should get the new speeds immediately when they sign up, and existing customers can expect to see the new speeds before December 1. Those speed tiers also include free access to more than 15 million Xfinity WiFi hotspots.

DC Circuit Vacates FCC OTT VoIP Order on End Office Access Charges

A recent DC Circuit Court decision concerns access charges billed by over-the-top VoIP carriers. In 2015 the Federal Communications Commission issued a declaratory ruling regarding the classification of end office local switching when Internet service providers (“ISPs”) collaborate with over-the-top VoIP providers to complete interexchange calls. AT&T didn’t like what the FCC came up with and asked the DC Circuit to weigh in.

The court has now vacated and remanded the declaratory order so the Commission might clear up its “muddled treatment” of the term “functional equivalence”. The court decision reduces the revenue that over-the-top VoIP service providers receive from long distance carriers like AT&T when the VoIP carrier completes a long distance call for the long distance carrier. Instead of receiving payment of an end office switching rate, over-the-top VoIP service providers will receive payment of a tandem switching rate, which is generally much lower. After applying the FCC’s functionally equivalent test, the court held that the FCC had failed to identify functions performed by the VoIP carriers that were functionally different from tandem switching and unique to end office switching. In vacating the FCC decision allowing VoIP carriers to charge for end office switching, the court has limited over-the-top VoIP carriers to billing for tandem switching instead.

America's fake news problem predates Facebook

[Commentary] The legacies of a right-wing broadcasting bubble have profoundly shaped our current political moment, and Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm is only one small piece of the puzzle. Even before Facebook became a primary source for political news, liberals and conservatives were getting their news from vastly different sources. as opponents of President-elect Donald Trump’s candidacy and eventual presidency rally to avoid “normalizing” his ideas and approach, the mainstreaming of conservative fake news is a clear case of the dangers of such normalization. As we increasingly accept inaccurate peddlers of politicized misinformation as “news,” we allow our citizenry to be horrifically misinformed as part of this new normal.

[Jason Mittell is a professor of film and media culture and American studies at Middlebury College. Chuck Tryon is an associate professor of English at Fayetteville State University.]

Are technology and globalization destined to drive up inequality?

Over the past several years, concerns that technology and globalization lead to ever greater inequality have reached fever pitch in the US and beyond. To understand what’s behind this anxiety, three distinctions are useful.

First is to distinguish global inequality and its two components: inequality within countries and inequality between countries. Distinction two: inequality in developed versus developing economies. In the former, the trend is clear—nearly all developed economies have seen inequality rise over the past generation. Distinction three is between inequality in market income and disposable income. Until now we have described the inequality of disposable income, net of the effects of government taxes and benefits, which serve to reduce the inequality of market outcomes

Skills in the digital age—How should education systems evolve?

The world needs to urgently rethink the way education is done, how it is delivered, and what skills children will need in a digital age to become healthy and productive members of society. The case can be made that children are not learning the skills they need, at least in part because the conventional approaches to delivering education are not effective for fostering breadth of skills.

One central aspect of this debate is how best to apply technology to learning and practice. Increased connectivity is changing how knowledge is transmitted. Libraries are being digitized. Classes and course materials once accessible only to the rich or well-connected are now within reach via a smartphone. Yet in schools, technology has largely failed to systematically transform the teaching and learning environment. While low-cost devices like mobile phones have reached many, today almost 2 billion people remain untouched by digital technology, making it clear that connectivity is neither a panacea for solving the global learning challenge, nor should it be a top education priority.

Benton

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