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You may be forgiven if you’ve all but forgotten about webOS, the mobile operating system that Hewlett-Packard picked up with its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010. Today HP announced that South Korean electronics giant LG Electronics has acquired the rights to use the operating system in forthcoming smart TV products. The deal will include the source code, documentation, a license to all the associated patents (HP won’t be letting those go) and the remaining user experience team. People associated with the cloud services infrastructure that had been part of the webOS operations will stay with HP.
What LG Will Do With webOS
Sometime this year, the world will cross a threshold: There will be more mobile device connections than there are humans.
That doesn’t mean every soul on the planet will have a cell phone. But data released Monday by GSMA, an association of cell operators whose Mobile World Congress just opened for a four-day run in Barcelona, shows the total number of mobile connections surging to 7.4 billion this year, up from 6.8 billion in 2012. The world population sits at about 7.1 billion, and is growing far more slowly. Part of the rise in mobile connections results from customers having more than one at a time. The average user of mobile services — there were 3.2 billion worldwide last year — had at least two connections. For some customers, using more than one mobile service is a way to chase better prices as carriers compete. Elsewhere, the rise in connections reflects the exploding popularity of different types of wireless devices. Many people have both a cell phone and a tablet or e-reader — each with its own wireless connection — adding to the global total.
Mobile device connections growing quickly
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Chris Murphy (D-CT), along with Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-CT) sent a letter to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg requesting he “remove pages that have been used to harass or exploit the families of Newtown victims.”
They have been in contact with “grieving Newtown families” whose personal requests to Facebook have gone unanswered. The letter cites over 100 tribute pages the lawmakers say could be used to harass victims’ families or profit financially from the tragedy. “Many give the appearance they were created by loved ones in the names of the victims. Unfortunately, many of these pages have become vehicles for harassment, intimidation and possibly financial fraud,” the letter reads in part. “Pages providing platforms for people to violate the privacy of families as they grieve, or seek financial gain through soliciting donations under false pretenses, or generating Facebook ‘likes’ for marketing purposes, should not be given quarter in the Facebook community.”
Lawmakers ask Facebook to remove pages ‘exploiting Newtown victims’
Following a public comment period, the Federal Trade Commission has approved a final order settling charges that Compete, Inc. violated the Federal Trade Commission Act by using its web-tracking software that collected personal information without disclosing the extent of the information it was collecting through its products and third party web tools.
The FTC complaint alleged that the company also took steps that placed consumers at risk, as well as misrepresented that it would protect the personal data it collected. The final settlement order requires Compete, Inc. to obtain consumers’ express consent before collecting any data from its software downloaded onto consumers’ computers, delete or anonymize the use of the consumer data it already has collected and provide directions to consumers for uninstalling its software. In addition, the settlement bars misrepresentations about the company’s privacy and data security practices and requires that it implement a comprehensive information security program with independent third-party audits every two years for 20 years.
FTC Approves Final Order Settling Charges Against Compete Inc
[Commentary] Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard and a former advisor to President Obama, was not a fan of Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal. In fact, Crawford was so appalled by the transaction that she made the fight over the merger the focus of her book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. But Crawford's beef isn't only with Comcast. She sees the cable giant's growing size as a symptom of much larger problems with the telecommunications, media, and technology sectors.
In her view, these communications industries fester with monopolies, collusion, and consumer-hostile business practices. A few big companies—AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, Apple, Google, and Microsoft—"tacitly cooperate by carving out their separate areas of expertise," leaving customers with low quality and high prices. Crawford's skepticism of the Comcast deal is well-founded, but her broader critique of the modern media landscape misses the mark. The sorry state of the residential broadband market is a genuine problem that calls for creative policy solutions, but the wireless, media, and online sectors of the economy are more competitive—and more consumer-friendly—than she admits. Crawford's over-diagnosis of what's wrong with the modern communications sector leads her to go overboard with her policy proposals. Rather than advocating a focus on constraining the power of broadband duopolists, she calls for a broad increase in government involvement in the communications industry. That approach didn't work very well the last time we tried it in the mid-20th Century. And it would likely work even worse today.
Former Obama advisor argues Comcast is a threat to the open Internet
[Commentary] On Feb. 25, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will hear oral arguments in Comcast Cable Communications v. Federal Communications Commission.
This is the case in which the FCC, with commissioners Robert McDowell and Ajit Pai dissenting, held that Comcast unlawfully discriminated against the Tennis Channel by refusing to accede to Tennis’ request — right in the middle of a contract term — that it be moved to a program tier with broader distribution than the one on which it was carried. After all is said and done, the court should call the FCC for a clear double fault. First, based on the facts of the case, the FCC should not have found that Comcast committed a statutory violation. Even granting that the “discrimination” standard — with its competing “fairly” and “unreasonably” restraint language — is inherently somewhat vague and malleable, under the facts of this case the finding of discrimination on the basis of affiliation is unsupportable. Second, if the constitutional claim is argued, the court should find that the FCC’s decision violates Comcast’s First Amendment rights.
The Court Should Call a Double Fault
Aereo, a service that lets users watch live TV on their iPhones, tablets and computers, has expanded from New York City to 29 counties across New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
The company is also kicking off a major billboard campaign in the New York area. The list of counties that can now tune into Aereo include: New York’s Bronx, Kings, Queens, Richmond, Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Putnam, Rockland, Ulster, Sullivan, Orange, Dutchess; Connecticut’s Fairfield County; Pennsylvania’s Pike County; New Jersey’s Bergen, Warren, Union, Sussex, Somerset, Passaic, Ocean, Morris, Monmouth, Middlesex, Hunterdon, Hudson, and Essex.
Aereo expands TV on-the-go service to 3 more states, launches first big ad campaign
Online retailers soon could lose one of their biggest selling points: no sales taxes.
An intense fight is brewing over a new, more politically savvy version of federal legislation that would force all but the smallest online retailers to collect state sales taxes nationwide. It's an especially big deal for Illinois: The cash-strapped state loses an estimated $212 million a year from online purchases by its residents and businesses. And the state's efforts to collect the tax had the unintended effect of driving thousands of small Web-based businesses out of state after big Internet retailers pulled their advertising campaigns to avoid having to collect sales tax on purchases made in Illinois. Traditional retailers here and elsewhere such as Sears Holdings Corp. of Hoffman Estates and Glenview-based Abt Electronics have been fighting for years to get Congress to reverse a Supreme Court decision that said retailers don't have to collect sales taxes in states where they don't have a physical presence.
“It's early in the legislative year, but I think we're finally at the tipping point where this can become law,” says David Blum, a tax partner at Chicago law firm Levenfeld Pearlstein LLC, who represents both online and brick-and-mortar retailers. “The legislation has come a long way to be more palatable.”
Will online retailers be required to collect sales tax?
February 25 marks the beginning of the implementation phase of the Copyright Alert System (CAS).
Implementation marks the culmination of many months of work on this groundbreaking and collaborative effort to curb online piracy and promote the lawful use of digital music, movies and TV shows. The CAS marks a new way to reach consumers who may be engaging in peer-to-peer (P2P) piracy and I am excited that our new website features information on the CAS, the Independent Review Process, copyright, P2P networks, and numerous consumer oriented legal sources for music, movies and television shows. We hope this cooperative, multi-stakeholder approach will serve as a model for addressing important issues facing all who participate in the digital entertainment ecosystem. From content creators and owners to distributors to consumers, we all benefit from a better understanding of the choices available and the rights and responsibilities that come with using digital content, thereby helping to drive investment in content creation and innovative services that offer exciting ways to enjoy music, video and all digital content. Over the course of the next several days our participating ISPs will begin rolling out the system. Practically speaking, this means our content partners will begin sending notices of alleged P2P copyright infringement to ISPs, and the ISPs will begin forwarding those notices in the form of Copyright Alerts to consumers. Most consumers will never receive Alerts under the program. Consumers whose accounts have been used to share copyrighted content over P2P networks illegally (or without authority) will receive Alerts that are meant to educate rather than punish, and direct them to legal alternatives. And for those consumers who believe they received Alerts in error, an easy to use process will be in place for them to seek independent review of the Alerts they received.
Copyright Alert System Set to Begin Internet providers launch controversial Copyright Alert System, promise 'education' over lawsuits (The Verge) Crackdown on illegal file sharing begins (The Hill)
The Federal Communications Commission may have taken the first steps – baby steps carefully cloaked from public view, perhaps, but steps nonetheless – toward addressing its hopeless backlog of broadcast complaints. In a series of super-low-key actions in recent weeks, the FCC’s Media Bureau has quietly cancelled a number of previously assessed forfeitures. The actions have been reflected in terse letters that provide no explanation for the cancellations. But based on the answers we got to some informal inquiries, we figure that these cancellations could be the harbinger of considerably more dramatic developments on the complaints front.
The Five-Year Enforcement Shot Clock: Has the FCC Finally Begun to Acknowledge It?