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  2. December 2016

December 2016

A new type of cord-cutting: Snipping broadband

When you think of cord cutting, you undoubtedly think of people giving up their subscriptions to pay TV in order to save money. But it may be time to broaden that definition. There’s new evidence that people are cutting the cord on something else as well – broadband Internet.

The finding comes in a new report from Ovum, a media and telecom research firm, which notes that several companies have seen more than one quarter of decline in broadband. It notes that most US telecom providers have been losing landline or cable subscribers for years. But now that’s expanded to include broadband. “Cord-cutting started in landlines and gave way to cord-cutting in pay TV in the US. We are now entering the realm of triple cord-cutting,” says Kristin Paulin, a senior analyst at Ovum. During third quarter, AT&T and Windstream saw declines in all three services they offer (broadband, cable and landlines), while Frontier suffered losses in phone and Internet. Still, Ovum forecasts that broadband decreases will increase over the next few years.

An Inconvenient Truth About Silicon Valley and Donald Trump

[Commentary] In classic Silicon Valley fashion, Peter Thiel made a contrarian bet that the ideas Donald Trump espoused — primarily, that many Americans weren’t being served by the current establishment, and a massive disruption could unleash the change they needed — would be embraced. He was right.

The danger is that Thiel’s stab at remaking the administration under President-elect Trump will turn out as misguided as his attempt to build a program to replace college — instead of introducing the change that will make all of America great again, it will simply make a lot of rich white men (and a few women) even richer and more entrenched than they already are.

CBS and Viacom’s parent company doesn’t want them to merge, after all

The parent company of CBS and Viacom is urging the two companies not to merge, reversing course on a major proposal that had been portrayed as a potential boon to both companies. In a letter to the boards of CBS and Viacom on Dec 12, National Amusements — a privately held entertainment firm that owns controlling shares of both subsidiaries — said that now was “not the right time” to merge the companies.

Pointing to recent changes in Viacom's management, NAI said it was convinced that the struggling cable and film company boasted “forward-looking thinking” and had a compelling strategic plan. Since 2014, Viacom's stock has fallen roughly 60 percent, while shares of CBS are at about the same level they were two years ago. “CBS continues to perform exceptionally well under Les Moonves,” NAI's letter read, “and we have every reason to believe that momentum will continue on a stand-alone basis.”

The next stage of US communications policy: The emerging embedded infosphere

The United States needs to reimagine the basic principles of its telecommunications and information policy to fit an emerging society in which networking and intelligence are embedded into an increasing number of everyday things which constantly monitor and measure our lives. This emerging environment is an always-on, ubiquitous, integrated system comprised of the Internet of Things, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence/Intelligent Systems and the Intercloud, which act together as a single system, referred to here as the “Embedded Infosphere” (EI). This development is driving the latest stage – the third – in the evolution of U.S. communications policy. Each of the components of the EI presents unique challenges, but the greater concern is all of them acting in concert. These developments bring into focus many topics that have been outside the traditional communications policy envelope, and exceed the portfolios of existing agencies and institutions.

This article envisions a new “EI policy space,” grounded in established societal values, and built on the experience of the previous stages. There are appropriate policy responses to each of the challenges, but these responses need to be seen in a holistic perspective, as they are all interconnected. Many of the issues such as privacy, security, consumer protection, and data stewardship are common across several elements. The larger goal is to establish a framework for an integrated policy structure which can address unpredictable emergent conditions, while allowing markets to flourish without unduly burdensome regulations, restrictions or uncertainties.

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