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A Q&A with Rep Michael Honda (D-CA), who has been representing Silicon Valley for the past 12 years.
He recently submitted a bill asking for Congress to create and fund a new office at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which would be called the Office of Wireless Health. The office would be tasked with regulating the growing number of mobile, wireless health gadgets and applications, which have been proliferating wildly since the start of the smartphone craze. While tech investors and federal regulators often co-exist like dogs and cats, Rep. Honda insists a new FDA office could help and not obstruct innovation.
Rep. Mike Honda on Proposed FDA Office of Wireless Health
[Commentary] It’s been a strange and daunting decade for print journalism — it’s now an even stranger time for web journalism. We’ve become accustomed to reading headlines like BuzzFeed’s recent $19 million fund raising, followed by news of buyouts for veterans at the New York Times. This kind of zero sum flow of media resources from print old guard to the young online folks has started to feel inevitable — it’s not even clear that media reporters still care about the NYT. All of this would be more comforting if the media business were headed to some cushy new world. Evangelists have long held up the web as the savior of the news business, the future of TV and the ideal for the self-expression business. They could be right. But all that digital triumphalism ignores web media’s basic economic dilemma: we’re simply producing far too much of it than is economically justified. The dirty secret about the web media business is that there’s a massive oversupply problem.
Another blog post that won’t make any money
Scott Cleland, president of Precursor Group and chairman of Net Competition (members include the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and the American Cable Association and major wireless carriers), says that the problem with spectrum availability is government hoarding.
In a blog posting, Cleland used words like "scandalous," "mismanagement" and "dysfunction" to describe what he said was the government's "waste, fraud and abuse" of the precious resource of spectrum. He says the government has been wrongly pointing fingers at the wireless private sector for lack of competition, availability and affordability when the government is hoarding 85% of spectrum. Cleland also said the government's role as hoarders-in-chief had been ignored by industry, watchdog groups and Congress.
Cleland: Government Is Major Spectrum Hoarder
Nearly 65 percent of U.S. magazines now have a digital replica edition, but those editions make up just under three percent of overall circulation: That’s the latest news from the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations), which released its report on U.S. magazine circulation in the second half of 2012.
For some individual titles, digital growth was a lot more impressive — though in some cases that’s because they’re giving away the digital edition free. 289 U.S. magazines reported that they’d sold 7.9 million digital replica editions in the last six months of 2012. That’s 2.4 percent of total circulation — up from less than 1 percent in the second half of 2011, and up from 1.7 percent in the first six months of this year. (AAM’s definition of a digital replica is that it contains “the same editorial and photojournalism as the national print edition,” though that material can be arranged differently on a tablet; nearly all digital magazines fall into this category.) The growth looks more impressive on an individual title level, where some magazines made huge gains in digital copies.
Digital magazine sales still tiny overall, but titles like Reader’s Digest see huge growth
[Commentary] I have a hunch that Netflix's faith in binge television underappreciates the joy that can be derived from expectation. Television is the original social network. Consumers love great television, but they also love talking about television. Sharing with friends the thrill of the last episode, debating what will happen next, working to enlist friends to watch the same shows that you love. Giving consumers the choice of having it all in one big bite means different viewers are in many different places in the book, making it hard to discuss without spoiling the plot. The intervals between first-run programming provide a space for communion and that tantalizing sense of anticipation. "I can't wait for the next show to start" may not actually be a consumer complaint as much as an expression of the emotion that anticipation brings. Only time will tell. It's great to have Netflix add its support to original programming, but it's perilous to think this initial foray mean the death of icons like HBO (Game of Thrones), Showtime (Homeland), AMC (Breaking Bad and Mad Men). Making high quality programming is both hard and expensive. These brands have been in the business a long time. They have the experience, the writers, the talent pool, director relationships and budgets to continuously turn out great stories and get them distributed.
[Powell is CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association]
Netflix or Heinz Ketchup?
Apparently, President Barack Obama is close to choosing Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker, who led fundraising for his 2008 campaign, as his next commerce secretary. Pritzker, whose family built the Hyatt Hotels Corp. chain, would replace acting commerce secretary Rebecca Blank, an economist who took over for John Bryson after he resigned last June for health reasons.
Obama Is Said Nearing Choice of Pritzker for Commerce
When the White House unveiled its new privacy bill of rights, almost exactly one year ago, the event was heralded by one consumer advocate as “the clearest articulation of the right to privacy by a US president in history.” But attention quickly shifted to the bill’s limitations.
Users could opt out of targeted ads, but this alone wouldn’t end ad tracking. The bill relied too heavily on voluntary commitments by advertisers like Google and Facebook. And though the bill was strong on “rights,” it lacked details on implementation and enforcement. Now, one year later, as Europe reviews its own wide-ranging privacy legislation for implementation, Silicon Valley is sending hordes of lobbyists across the Atlantic. Two requirements in the proposed EU laws stick like thorns in the side of the American data collection industry: one, that tech firms receive prior approval (i.e., informed consent) from users before collecting their personal data, and two, that the refusal of data tracking be an accessible and irreversible option. Silicon Valley, which has built a thriving global business around targeted ads and data brokering, is understandably antsy. Jeff Chester, who directs the Center for Digital Democracy, argued recently that the Obama Administration is “working to protect the US data lobby.” He told Quartz, “One of the US’s few growth areas is stealing people’s data. So the US is arguing that the EU should not enact strong baseline rules requiring citizens to provide affirmative consent for such critical uses as profiling and [instead] adopt its weak, industry-friendly approach based primarily on self-regulation.”
Is Big Data to Barack Obama what Big Oil was to George W. Bush?
[Commentary] There has been something of a data backlash happening lately, and I think I’ve figured out why: Data for the sake of data has a tendency to sanitize experiences we’d rather leave a little bit dirty. But there’s a big, meaningful difference that’s worth knowing between big data and just plain data.
Why big data matters and data-ism doesn’t
Twenty-first century technology makes cyberattacks a primary threat to U.S. national security and because of this future military attacks against the United States will include a cyber element, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said.
Noting that the developments that have taken place in the cyber arena have been "incredible" over the past decade, Panetta told Georgetown University students during a question and answer session following a presentation on leadership and government that cyberattacks have now become a routine part of military engagement. “There is no question, in my mind, that part and parcel of any attack on this country in the future, by any enemy, is going to include a cyber element,” he said.
All future attacks on US will include cyber element, says Sec Panetta
Malware attacks have taken on new meaning over the last few years. Businesses and consumers are more or less used to the day-in and day-out of Trojans, phishing scams, and such, but a new breed of much more complex and sophisticated threats has changed the game. The Stuxnet and Duqu worms, as well as Flame, Gauss, and Red October malware all appear to have been developed by nation states or well-organized terrorist groups. Each has had specific goals and precise targets. Unless you're specifically in the crosshairs of one of these cyber espionage attacks, you have nothing to worry about, right? Not exactly. There are three ways anyone will feel the consequences of cyber espionage or cyber warfare threats, even if they're not the intended target: 1) Critical infrastructure. 2) Collateral damage. 3) Reverse engineering
Why you should care about cyber espionage