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The man who was charged with crafting a plan to bring broadband to all Americans isn’t happy about the way that plan is being implemented.
Currently with the Aspen Institute, Blair Levin said, “The FCC is becoming more of a political institution and less an expert agency.” Like other DC political institutions, he said, the commission is “increasingly caught up in a one-note narrative . . . of self-praise rather than focusing on providing the expertise and analytic agility necessary to adjust programs to provide bandwidth abundance to constituencies it is meant to serve.”
It was up to the FCC to implement the ideas recommended in the National Broadband Plan – and the way Levin sees it, much of that work has been left undone. One of the most important pieces of information to emerge out of the NBP was that the majority of the homes that can’t get broadband are in areas served by the nation’s largest price cap carriers – and that hasn’t changed much. Although he noted that CenturyLink is doing some upgrades, he said “AT&T is doing zero, and Verizon sold some lines to Frontier but they’re not doing anything with what they held on to.” Levin also argued in his recent speech that the FCC essentially “punted” on “the critical issue of contribution reform.”
In other words, the FCC’s new broadband-focused Universal Service program appears to be doomed to be funded as a percentage of carriers’ long-distance voice revenues – a methodology that is becoming increasingly unsustainable as long-distance voice revenues decline.
Catch-Up Talk with Blair Levin Yields Some Surprises
[Commentary] Can Tom Wheeler make good on the President’s early promises to make the U.S. a 21st Century digital nation that reflects the diversity of our country?
The Federal Communications Commission is the key federal agency for our digital age. It regulates all wired and wireless communications service, including how all of us get Google and Facebook and everything else we call the Internet. Founded during the early progressive era, it is tasked with getting the powerful corporate interests that dominate the media and telecommunications industries to act in the public interest. Since the Reagan administration, determining just what is in the public interest has too often been confused with finding the middle ground between competing business interests. Many of us in the progressive community hoped President Obama would establish an FCC that would advance vigorous local competition, hold accountable local broadcasting and telecommunications companies, and promote both the diversity of local voices and greater ownership opportunities for women and minorities. The Genachowski FCC promised to pursue these goals; like other federal agencies led by Obama appointees, it was going to be data-driven. Instead, progressive regulation has stalled or regressed over the past four years. In juggling the competing interests of industry groups—the NCTA, the CTIA, and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)—the FCC has failed to advance media diversity and to enforce net neutrality. Chairman Genachowski failed, in other words, to keep candidate Obama’s two key promises.
Cleaning Up the Airwaves
Lobbyists for the technology industry, having gained much of their wish list in the immigration bill drafted in the Senate, are now pushing to modify language they consider onerous.
The Senate bill, which is scheduled for markup in the Judiciary Committee on Thursday, would allow Silicon Valley companies to bring in many more foreign computer specialists on temporary work visas through a program known as H-1B. The bill also places restrictions on how companies can hire and fire employees, which the industry’s representatives in Washington are trying to massage. For one, the industry is worried about a provision, inserted by some Senate Democrats, that would allow companies to hire a foreigner only if “an equally qualified American” is not available. The draft allows the Department of Labor to scrutinize hiring decisions, which the industry calls undue interference. The bill also contains language that compels companies to promise not to lay off American workers within three months of hiring foreign guest workers. Additionally, if a company like I.B.M. places a foreign worker at a client company’s site — say, a bank — for a short-term project, the bill also requires the bank to prove it did not displace an American worker in the process.
Tech Lobby Pushes for Tweaks to Immigration Bill
The parallels between TV stations today and newspapers in 2005 should be heeded by local TV executives.
The trends are equally troubling and there is much they can learn from newspapers’ experience and response. Clearly, audience and advertisers are moving to digital platforms. But TV stations confront the same challenges as newspapers: digital is returning significantly less revenue than the core product and advertisers don’t yet know how to effectively buy across media channels.
Newspapers: A Cautionary Tale for Local TV
At a computer in her office at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, epidemiologist Caroline Buckee points to a dot on a map of Kenya’s western highlands, representing one of the nation’s thousands of cell-phone towers. In the fight against malaria, Buckee explains, the data transmitted from this tower near the town of Kericho has been epidemiological gold.
When she and her colleagues studied the data, she found that people making calls or sending text messages originating at the Kericho tower were making 16 times more trips away from the area than the regional average. What’s more, they were three times more likely to visit a region northeast of Lake Victoria that records from the health ministry identified as a malaria hot spot. The tower’s signal radius thus covered a significant waypoint for transmission of malaria, which can jump from human to human via mosquitoes. Satellite images revealed the likely culprit: a busy tea plantation that was probably full of migrant workers. The implication was clear, Buckee says. “There will be a ton of infected [people] there.” This work is now feeding into a new set of predictive models she is building.
Big Data from Cheap Phones
If you want to watch video on your phone or tablet, you’ll find that many networks can’t always serve up the data fast enough. So your choices are either to find a Wi-Fi hotspot, take your chances on congestion and high data charges on a cellular network, or plug in a special dongle that picks up TV broadcasts. Early next year, an emerging wireless technology known as LTE Broadcast could change all that, essentially making it possible for carriers to put a TV-like broadcast stream within LTE cellular signals.
Putting data in broadcast mode reduces congestion but makes the most sense in situations where everyone is watching the same newscast, sports match, or other special piece of content at the same time. In such situations, using LTE Broadcast mode, a carriers’ transmitter needs to just send a signal out over one channel rather than separate ones for each mobile device. That’s how the traditional TV broadcast works: it doesn’t matter if 100 or a million people are watching, because the content is out there for the taking. The software in a carrier’s base station can tweak the LTE signal to include one or more channels that work in broadcast mode–enabling multiple users to receive the same content at the same time.
Broadcast Video Will Soon Be Packed into Smartphone Signals
Within the next five years, Google’s YouTube could generate $15 billion or more in annual revenue — which would make it about the same size as CBS or Viacom, a Wall Street analyst predicts.
“We think the odds are extremely high that YouTube will be a large, profitable and highly consequential business” in the next few years, Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Carlos Kirjner wrote in a research. “It is becoming an attractive and important medium for brand advertisers, and we think it will increasingly compete (with traditional media companies) for the incremental video-delivered brand advertising dollars.” The vidsite now streams 6 billion hours of video to more than 1 billion unique users per month across the globe. In the U.S., YouTube now reaches a bigger audience of adults 18-34 than any single TV network, global head of content Robert Kyncl said.
Could YouTube Become as Big as CBS or Viacom?
As Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association (LISTA) continues to combat injustice in the telecom and media space, we have seen that these industries do not represent the nation’s demographics, nor have there been meaningful discussions about how the Latinos’ lack of representation in these industries is undemocratic and morally wrong.
Currently, there are over 51 million Latinos in the U.S. (both native and foreign born). Latinos are the nation’s largest minority group, representing 16.4% of the U.S. population . Yet minority radio, television and cable ownership continue to spiral toward zero. LISTA research shows that as of 2009, only approximately 7.24% of commercial radio stations were minority-owned, and that only about 3% and 5% of full power television stations are owned by minorities and women, respectively. Moreover, Spanish language broadcasters are continuing to exit broadcasting due to a lack of capital investment. Thus many markets with high Latino populations have no Latino -owned stations. And that has consequences: many Spanish-only-speaking consumers could be deprived of emergency information regarding natural disasters, catastrophic events, virulent diseases and epidemics–putting the public safety, health and welfare at risk.
Minorities Face Extinction in Broadcast Ownership. Will FCC Turn a Blind Eye or Level the Playing Field?
[Commentary] President Obama can do better than his choice of a former industry lobbyist to head the Federal Communications Commission.
President Obama must start fresh with a nomination that invokes values that helped elect him: “As we look toward the future, we must ensure that all voices in our diverse nation have the opportunity to be heard. One important way to do this is to expand the ownership stake of women-owned, minority-owned and small businesses in our media outlets.” Live up to those words.
President Obama should find a better FCC chair
Anna M. Gomez, who recently left the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), has joined Wiley Rein, the law and lobbying firm.
She will work in the firm's Washington office as a partner in its communications practice. The firm lobbied for AT&T, Verizon, CBS, the National Association of Broadcasters and others in the most recent disclosure period. Gomez had served as the second highest-ranking official at NTIA since 2009. As the deputy assistant secretary for communications and information, she helped oversee the federal government's use of the airwaves, advocated administration policies before state and local governments and advised the White House on telecommunications issues. She worked on the digital television transition and on the planning of the $7 billion nationwide wireless network for first responders.
Former NTIA official Gomez joins Wiley Rein Anna Gomez Joins Wiley Rein (B&C)