January 29, 2013 (The Web-Deprived Study at McDonald's)
BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2013
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GOVERNMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS
Protecting online freedom as the Internet turns 30 - op-ed
Google’s approach to government requests for user data - press release
Twitter Transparency Report v2 - press release [links to web]
Twitter’s Speech Problem: Hashtags and Hate
White House Drops First Names From We The People Petitions [links to web]
MORE ON PRIVACY
Consumers Fret About Privacy on Data Privacy Day
Facebook’s privacy payout: how you’ll get $10, $5 — or nothing [links to web]
Instagram Asking For Your Government Issued Photo IDs Now, Too [links to web]
Reps Markey, Barton Pledge to Keep Pushing on Privacy [links to web]
On Data Privacy Day, Chairmen Upton and Terry Remind Consumers to Be Vigilant with Personal Information Online - press release [links to web]
Disney strikes back at Rep Markey privacy concerns [links to web]
Facebook: Fear not on Graph Search privacy [links to web]
MORE ON INTERNET/BROADBAND
The Web-Deprived Study at McDonald's
AT&T: Beta Testing the Final Transition to IP Broadband - press release
TELEVISION
Dodgers, Time Warner Cable announce new channel: SportsNet LA
Time Warner Cable subscribers, brace for rate hikes - analysis [links to web]
Kagan Analyst: Sports Costs Not Only Reason for Burgeoning Bills
Could Cord Cutters One Day Get a Crack at HBO? [links to web]
Super Bowl Scores Nearly $4 Million Per Spot [links to web]
ACA Asks FCC to Scrap Proof of Performance Testing [links to web]
Is it finally prime time for TiVo? [links to web]
CONTENT
House panel demands briefing over prosecution of Web activist Swartz [links to web]
Antigua takes step to ignore U.S. copyrights in fight over online gaming
US warns Antigua against "government-authorized piracy" [links to web]
Copyright holders threaten to retaliate against Antigua over piracy [links to web]
Playing Whac-a-Mole With Piracy Sites [links to web]
For Many Digital Music Services, Free Is Not a Choice [links to web]
Hollywood's latest star: Silicon Valley
ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
GOP digital divide may take years to bridge
JOURNALISM
Media Firms Probed on Data Release
WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
As Developing World Goes Mobile, Can Apple Make The Sale? [links to web]
Apple could be losing control of wireless carriers, component suppliers [links to web]
Next in spectrum wars: Broadband for airplanes [links to web]
The Web-Deprived Study at McDonald's
HEALTH
MMTC Panel Offers Solutions for Accessible and Affordable Healthcare Powered by Broadband [links to web]
STORIES FROM ABROAD
Iranian Journalists Are Arrested and Accused of Links With Foreign News Media
Google sued in UK over Safari tracking [links to web]
A brief guide to tech lobbyists in Europe [links to web]
MORE ONLINE
Samsung’s lobbying grows with its market share [links to web]
GOVERNMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS
INTERNET FREEDOM
[SOURCE: Seattle Times, AUTHOR: Timothy Karr]
[Commentary] As the Internet enters its middle years, we users can no longer take it for granted. It’s more than a cloud. It’s people, technology and physical infrastructure. As with any infrastructure, the Internet needs protection and maintenance to survive; otherwise the wires and signals that send digital communications will cease to function. The online community also needs protections — to prevent our ideas from being blocked, our identities from being hijacked and our wallets from being picked. “Internet freedom” refers to every user’s right to connect openly with anyone and speak freely. Those who don’t think this right is under threat in America need only look at Verizon’s 2012 claim that the First Amendment gives it the authority to edit the Internet, entitled to pick and choose what content travels across its wires and what content does not. The concentration of gatekeeper power has very real, and very negative, consequences. Americans pay far more for far less than people in developed countries whose policymakers have promoted competition instead of profits. It’s time our leaders in Washington, D.C., did the same. Internet users are only now beginning to get organized to ensure that power over the network stays in our hands. It’s a movement that touches almost every aspect of modern life. If more people get involved in the fight to protect this open network, we can transform the lives of many for the better. [Karr is senior director of strategy for Free Press]
benton.org/node/144176 | Seattle Times
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GOOGLE AND GOVERNMENT REQUESTS FOR DATA
[SOURCE: Google, AUTHOR: David Drummond]
January 28, is Data Privacy Day, when the world recognizes the importance of preserving your online privacy and security. If it’s like most other days, Google—like many companies that provide online services to users—will receive dozens of letters, faxes and emails from government agencies and courts around the world requesting access to our users’ private account information. Typically this happens in connection with government investigations. It’s important for law enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe. We’re a law-abiding company, and we don’t want our services to be used in harmful ways. But it’s just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information. To strike this balance, we’re focused on three initiatives that I’d like to share, so you know what Google is doing to protect your privacy and security.
First, for several years we have advocated for updating laws like the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents. We’ll continue this effort strongly in 2013 through our membership in the Digital Due Process coalition and other initiatives.
Second, we’ll continue our long-standing strict process for handling these kinds of requests. When government agencies ask for our users’ personal information—like what you provide when you sign up for a Google Account, or the contents of an email—our team does several things:
We scrutinize the request carefully to make sure it satisfies the law and our policies. For us to consider complying, it generally must be made in writing, signed by an authorized official of the requesting agency and issued under an appropriate law.
We evaluate the scope of the request. If it’s overly broad, we may refuse to provide the information or seek to narrow the request. We do this frequently.
We notify users about legal demands when appropriate so that they can contact the entity requesting it or consult a lawyer. Sometimes we can’t, either because we’re legally prohibited (in which case we sometimes seek to lift gag orders or unseal search warrants) or we don’t have their verified contact information.
We require that government agencies conducting criminal investigations use a search warrant to compel us to provide a user’s search query information and private content stored in a Google Account—such as Gmail messages, documents, photos and YouTube videos. We believe a warrant is required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure and overrides conflicting provisions in ECPA.
And third, we work hard to provide you with information about government requests.
benton.org/node/144174 | Google | New York Times | The Hill | GigaOm
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TWITTER’S SPEECH PROBLEM: HASHTAGS AND HATE
[SOURCE: New Yorker, AUTHOR: Emily Greenhouse]
Most of Twitter’s two hundred million users tweet from outside of the United States, and so the company bumps, uncomfortably and unavoidably, into other countries’ free-speech laws. Last January, Twitter announced a new “country-withheld content” policy, under which it will block an account at the request of a government, but only within that country’s borders, so the tweet could still be seen elsewhere around the world—an attempt to find a Bay Area–sunny middle ground between freedom of speech and compliance with local law. But free speech means something very different abroad—even in friendly, seemingly similar-to-us countries like France. (This is true particularly when it comes to the kind of speech that just happens to be in question: anti-Semitic speech.) When Twitter instated its “country-withheld content” policy, it broke open the floodgates.
benton.org/node/144175 | New Yorker
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MORE ON PRIVACY
DATA PRIVACY DAY
[SOURCE: AdWeek, AUTHOR: Katy Bachman]
It's a sign of the times that we now have a Data Privacy Day, recognized not just in the United States, but also in Canada and 27 other countries. Lawmakers in the U.S. have promoted the day as a time for increased awareness on the part of consumers regarding safeguarding privacy and data online and on mobile devices. Numerous studies on this topic indicate that consumers increasingly mistrust companies' use of their data. Truste found that 72 percent of smartphone users are more concerned than they were a year about their privacy. In fact, many consumers feel they have little control over the personal information companies gather about them from the Web or other online services, including photo-sharing and gaming, according to a survey from Microsoft. Only 40 percent feel they mostly or totally understand how to protect their online privacy.
benton.org/node/144173 | AdWeek
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MORE ON INTERNET/BROADBAND
WEB-DEPRIVED
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Anton Troianovski]
Cheap smartphones and tablets have put Web-ready technology into more hands than ever. But the price of Internet connectivity hasn't come down nearly as quickly. And in many rural areas, high-speed Internet through traditional phone lines simply isn't available at any price. The result is a divide between families that have broadband constantly available on their home computers and phones, and those that have to plan their days around visits to free sources of Internet access. That divide is becoming a bigger problem now that a fast Internet connection has evolved into an essential tool for completing many assignments at public schools. Federal regulators identified the gap in home Internet access as a key challenge for education in a report in 2010. Access to the Web has expanded since then, but roughly a third of households with income of less than $30,000 a year and teens living at home still don't have broadband access there, according to the Pew Research Center. Moving faster would be expensive. The Federal Communications Commission assesses a fee averaging $2.50 per household a month on phone bills to pay $4.5 billion a year for building broadband in rural areas and more than $2 billion a year to pay for better connectivity in schools and libraries. The commission says it can make broadband available to all Americans by spending $45 billion over 10 years. Some are wary of deeper government intervention, arguing that many telecommunications companies are already fast expanding broadband access on their own.
benton.org/node/144228 | Wall Street Journal
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AT&T POTS-TO-IP COMMENTS
[SOURCE: AT&T, AUTHOR: Bob Quinn]
AT&T filed comments reaffirming its request to have the Federal Communications Commission conduct geographic trials to oversee the final transition away from the legacy plain old telephone service (POTS) infrastructure that has served this country for more than 100 years. I say the “final transition” because the reality is that the vast majority of consumers have already made this transition. As US Telecom ably documented in its Switched Voice Non-Dominance Petition, the number of consumers who connect to the POTS infrastructure and the use of that infrastructure have plummeted in the last decade. Consumer access lines and minutes of use (MOUs) are down +70% from peak totals as more and more consumers switch to VoIP alternatives (offered by companies who have physical networks as well as over-the-top virtual network service providers), wireless services and other forms of digital communications.
benton.org/node/144185 | AT&T
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TELEVISION
SPORTSNET LA
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Bill Shaikin]
The name for the Dodgers' new television channel: SportsNet LA. The Dodgers and Time Warner Cable officially announced their television contract, with the team-owned channel starting in 2014. The deal, pending the approval of Major League Baseball, covers 25 years and is believed to be worth between $7 billion and $8 billion to the team. The Dodgers are to remain on Fox Sports through the 2013 season, but the team decided it wanted its own channel thereafter and negotiated with Fox and Time Warner Cable. "We concluded last year that the best way to give our fans what they want -- more content and more Dodger baseball -- was to launch our own network," Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter said in a statement. The Dodgers -- not Time Warner Cable -- will program the new channel. In an interview, executives of the company said they believed the SportsNet LA name would be distinctive enough from the Time Warner Cable Sportsnet name given to the new Lakers channel. The Lakers and Time Warner Cable also launched a Spanish-language channel. The Dodgers deal does not include a separate Spanish-language channel from Time Warner Cable. The company charges other distributors close to $4 per month to carry the Lakers channel -- fees that are passed on to consumers in some way -- and the new Dodgers channel is expected to be sold at close to $5 per month.
benton.org/node/144169 | Los Angeles Times | The Wrap | B&C | NYTimes
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SPORTS AND CABLE BILLS
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
SNL Kagan analyst Derek Baine argued that sports costs are not the only reason for rising cable bills. Baine predicts that by 2018, retransmission payments cable operators pay to carry local TV stations will have ballooned to almost $5 per sub per month, or about what they pay now for ESPN, the poster-channel for escalating sports rights costs. The average cost of a sports channel over the last decade has increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR)of 3.5%, he says, compared to 2.9% for all channels. CAGR is actually smaller than the average over the past five years, however, due to the launch of lower-priced channels like the NHL Network.
benton.org/node/144189 | Broadcasting&Cable
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CONTENT
ANTIGUA, ONLINE GAMBLING AND COPYRIGHT
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Julian Pecquet]
Antigua threatened to ignore U.S. copyrights in retaliation for an online gaming ban that the tiny Caribbean nation says has “devastated” its economy. The country sought and received the World Trade Organization's authorization to set up a website to sell materials that infringe on U.S. copyrights without paying the American copyright holders. The decision could rekindle congressional concerns about subjugating U.S. policy to international law and complicate President Obama’s second-term trade agenda. The Antiguan government said, however, that it still hopes to reach a deal with the United States and avoid the retaliation.
benton.org/node/144170 | Hill, The
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HOLLYWOOD AND SILICON VALLEY
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Jessica Meyers]
Hollywood’s relationship with Silicon Valley has gone from devout adversary to grudging admirer. Blame it on the narrative. Technology and its icons have transfixed American culture and transformed cinematic production. As a bout of recent films indicates, a field that has been connected with oversized nerds and luckless date nights has become a nuanced world to question and explore. “It’s changing our lives,” said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and consulting professor at Stanford University. “That’s a hell of a good story and catnip for Hollywood.”
benton.org/node/144212 | Politico
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
THE GOP AND THE DIGITAL GROUND GAME
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Steve Friess]
Republicans are running a 1.0 digital ground game operation in a 3.0 world — and they know it. At their recent leadership retreat, Chairman Reince Priebus and others sounded the bell for closing the vast technological divide that made all the difference for Democrats in getting out the vote last fall in numbers that stunned the pundit class. “Let’s host Skype-based training sessions and Google hangouts on campaign strategy, fundraising, door-to-door advocacy, and digital tools,” Priebus urged at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in Charlotte (NC). “We need to give the next generation of organizers access to the brightest experts.” He went on: “And in the digital space, we don’t want just to keep up. We want to seize the lead.” That’s easier said than done, and insiders aren’t heartened that the most specific he got was references to well-worn online video conferencing tools. Simply put, the Democratic National Committee has nearly a decade’s jump — and counting — thanks to innovative software for gathering detailed voter information that includes input from Democratic campaigns at every level of the ballot.
benton.org/node/144211 | Politico
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JOURNALISM
Media Firms Probed on Data Release
MEDIA PROBE
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Brody Mullins, Delvin Barrett]
Law-enforcement authorities have conducted a wide-ranging investigation into whether media companies facilitated insider trading on Wall Street by prematurely releasing market-moving government data, according to people familiar with the probe. The federal investigation examined whether news organizations used high-speed transmission systems to give some investors access to economic data a fraction of a second before the official release time, according to officials familiar with the probe. Among the media companies investigated were Bloomberg LP, Thomson Reuters and the Dow Jones & Co. unit of News Corp, which are the leading conduits of federal economic data to traders right after release, though not the sole ones. Investigators recently decided not to file any criminal charges, said people familiar with the matter. Investigators had launched the probe after spotting trading patterns suggesting some traders received data slightly before the release time; the investigators decided against filing charges because they couldn't link the pattern to specific actions by media companies, people familiar with the probe said.
benton.org/node/144225 | Wall Street Journal
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STORIES FROM ABROAD
IRANIAN JOURNALISTS ARRESTED
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Rick Gladstone]
Security forces in Iran have arrested journalists from at least four Iranian newspapers and one news agency over the past few days and accused them of consorting with hostile foreign news media, the state-run press reported. Iranian rights advocates called the arrests part of a broader campaign of intimidation to forestall political unrest before the presidential election in June. The official accounts did not clarify how many journalists had been arrested, the precise nature of the accusations against them or when they might be formally charged. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a media advocacy group based in New York, said at least 11 journalists had been seized, calling the crackdown the largest on Iranian news media since the unrest that swept the country four years ago.
benton.org/node/144221 | New York Times
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