BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for FRIDAY, MAY 20, 2016
Digitizing America’s Infrastructure for the 21st Century Economy https://www.benton.org/calendar/2016-05-20
INTERNET/BROADBAND
How Municipal Broadband Railroads Due Process - Lawrence Spiwak op-ed
FCC Offers Guidance on Network Neutrality Transparency Rule [links to Federal Communications Commission]
Electric Cooperative Wi-Fi Deployment Aims to Support Home Broadband [links to Benton summary]
Netflix launches Fast.com to help customers check their Internet speed [links to CNN Money]
CABLE
Rutledge: Charter Will Overbuild Telcos, Not Cable [links to Benton summary]
Charter CEO: Now that we own TWC, we can use Verizon MVNO deal to offer nationwide wireless [links to Benton summary]
New York Delays Final Vote on Altice Takeover of Cablevision ‘til June 16 [links to Bloomberg]
The FCC’s chairman insists he’s a ‘happy Comcast subscriber’ [links to Benton summary]
Myths vs. Realities: Correcting the Record in the Set-Top Box Debate [links to Future of TV Coalition]
CONTENT
Glenn Beck on Facebook: 'Affirmative action for conservatives'
Larry Magid: Zuckerberg can use his powerful platform to expose people -- whether on the left, the right or center, to a more balanced diet of news, information and opinion [links to San Jose Mercury News]
Yahoo Suitors Expected to Bid $2 Billion to $3 Billion [links to Wall Street Journal]
Jonathan Taplin: Do You Love Music? Silicon Valley Doesn’t [links to New York Times]
PRIVACY
GOP Sens. Ask Wheeler to Extend Broadband Privacy Comments [links to Multichannel News]
ELECTION 2016
Senate Candidates Spending Big on TV Ads in the Year of Trump [links to Bloomberg]
Which topics do presidential candidates discuss on Facebook? [links to Brookings]
TELEVISION
Five Technologies Reshaping TV News [links to TVNewsCheck]
CBS Tells Ad Buyers That It’s “Essential” As Dollars Return To Broadcast [links to Deadline]
SPECTRUM/WIRELESS
Wells Fargo analysts: Don't forget the wildcard that is FirstNet [links to Fierce]
How can I ditch my carrier and just use Wi-Fi? [links to Revere Digital]
Changing legal and regulatory climate will be key for Android [links to Financial Times]
Google’s Android and Chrome Operating Systems Get Closer [links to Bloomberg]
GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
Senators introduce bill to block expansion of FBI hacking authority [links to Reuters]
Tor Ekeland: Americans should unite around Stopping Mass Hacking Act [links to Christian Science Monitor]
GOVERNMENT & TECHNOLOGY
House Subcommittee on Information Technology Chairman Hurd: Agencies Don’t Need Billions in New Funding to Upgrade Legacy IT [links to nextgov]
RESEARCH
Shared, Collaborative and On Demand: The New Digital Economy - Pew research
JOURNALISM
Morley Safer, Mainstay of ‘60 Minutes’
STORIES FROM ABROAD
G-7 Nations Race to Bolster Security Against Cyberattacks in Finance [links to Wall Street Journal]
Melinda Gates: The hard reality is that in too many areas, data doesn’t exist. What’s more — even where it does exist, it’s often sexist. [links to Medium]
Google takes right to be forgotten battle to France's highest court [links to Guardian, The]
INTERNET/BROADBAND
MUNICIPAL BROADBAND
[SOURCE: Bloomberg, AUTHOR: Lawrence Spiwak]
[Commentary] Over the last decade, there has been much debate over whether local governments should get into the broadband business by building their own networks. While most don't view municipal broadband as controversial in rural high-cost areas where it is too expensive for the private sector to enter profitably, it is a very different story when municipalities seek to overbuild in established metropolitan areas that are already served by multiple private sector providers. These government-owned networks (“GONs”) typically require massive injections of federal, state, and local tax dollars for their construction and operation. Some city governments have taken to raising taxes, shifting funds between other government services like a city electric utility, or just dipping straight into the city's coffers to cover seemingly perpetual financial shortfalls. The motivation for the private sector's distaste for such systems is plain enough. Taxpayer subsidies permit the GONs to charge below-cost rates—a type of predatory pricing that is both sanctioned and financed by the government. Competing under such conditions is difficult, at best, for unsubsidized private firms. Municipal entry could very well be a poison pill for private sector investment. Indeed, even the threat of municipal entry makes investors skittish about committing billions of their own money to build Internet networks that would have to compete with uneconomic pricing by a self-subsidized government network.
[Spiwak is the President of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies]
benton.org/headlines/how-municipal-broadband-railroads-due-process | Bloomberg
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CONTENT
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR CONSERVATIVES
[SOURCE: USAToday, AUTHOR: Jessica Guynn]
Radio host Glenn Beck derided fellow conservatives for engaging in "affirmative action" during a meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over charges of political bias. Beck said conservatives failed to show any evidence of political bias yet asked Facebook to hire more conservative employees and train current employees on conservative values and even called on the Silicon Valley company to employ more Mormons. "When did conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less people from Ivy League Colleges. I sat there, looking around the room at ‘our side’ wondering, ‘Who are we?’ Who am I?" Beck wrote on his website. "I want to be very clear — I am not referring to every person in the room. There were probably 25-30 people and a number of them, I believe, felt like I did. But the overall tenor, to me, felt like the Salem Witch Trial: ‘Facebook, you must admit that you are screwing us, because if not, it proves you are screwing us.’"
benton.org/headlines/glenn-beck-facebook-affirmative-action-conservatives | USAToday | The Verge
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RESEARCH
THE NEW DIGITAL ECONOMY
[SOURCE: Science and Technology, AUTHOR: Aaron Smith]
The sharing economy and on-demand services are weaving their way into the lives of (some) Americans, raising difficult issues around jobs, regulation and the potential emergence of a new digital divide. A number of new commercial online services have emerged in recent years, each promising to reshape some aspect of the way Americans go about their lives. Some of these services offer on-demand access to goods or services with the click of a mouse or swipe of a smartphone app. Others promote the commercialized sharing of products or expertise, while still others seek to connect communities of interest and solve problems using open, collaborative platforms. These services have sparked a wide-ranging cultural and political debate on issues such as how they should be regulated, their impact on the changing nature of jobs and their overall influence on users’ day-to-day lives. At the same time, around one-quarter of Americans (28%) say they have not used any major shared or on-demand platforms, and many are wholly unfamiliar with the tools and vocabulary of the new digital economy.
61% of Americans have never heard of the term “crowdfunding.”
73% are not familiar with the term “sharing economy.”
89% are not familiar with the term “gig economy.”
benton.org/headlines/shared-collaborative-and-demand-new-digital-economy | Pew Internet Science and Tech | more from Pew
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JOURNALISM
MORLEY SAFER
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Robert McFadden]
Morley Safer, a CBS television correspondent who brought the horrors of the Vietnam War into the living rooms of America in the 1960s and was a mainstay of the network’s newsmagazine “60 Minutes” for almost five decades, died at his home in Manhattan. He was 84. Safer was one of television’s most celebrated journalists, a durable reporter familiar to millions on “60 Minutes,” the Sunday night staple whose signature was a relentlessly ticking stopwatch. By the time CBS announced his retirement on May 11, Mr. Safer had broadcast 919 “60 Minutes” reports, profiling international heroes and villains, exposing frauds and corruption, giving voice to whistle-blowers and chronicling the trends of an ever-changing America. Safer joined the program, created by Don Hewitt, in 1970, two years after its inception. His tenure eventually outlasted those of his colleagues Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, Harry Reasoner, Ed Bradley and Andy Rooney, as he became the senior star of a new repertory group of reporters on what has endured for decades as the most popular and profitable news program on television. But to an earlier generation of Americans, and to many colleagues and competitors, he was regarded as the best television journalist of the Vietnam era, an adventurer whose vivid reports exposed the nation to the hard realities of what the writer Michael J. Arlen, in the title of his 1969 book, called the “Living-Room War.”
benton.org/headlines/morley-safer-mainstay-60-minutes | New York Times
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