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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.
The Web-Deprived Study at McDonald's
In-flight Internet access, once considered a passenger luxury, has turned into a customer requirement. And technology companies are brawling in Washington over who gets to lay claim.
As marketplace opportunities increase, a bandwidth battle once limited to the ground has shifted to the air. “It’s kind of the sky’s the limit on a lot of the options you can provide,” said Travis Christ, chief marketing and sales officer for Row 44, a California-based firm that offers passengers access to live baseball games, CNBC and a host of other networks. The Federal Communications Commission agreed last month to streamline regulations for satellite-based systems, a next frontier in broadband development. But ground-based companies with plans for further advancements want a slice of the shrinking spectrum pie.
Next in spectrum wars: Broadband for airplanes
Over the years, the fight against online piracy has led to countless lawsuits by media companies and to escalating levels of law enforcement, all with mixed results. Lately, though, new attention has turned to an aspect of online commerce that critics say finances online piracy: advertising. Prodding from the White House and a recent academic report have put pressure on the online advertising industry to prevent ads — for jeans, say, or car insurance — from appearing on a page offering a free download of Season 2 of “Game of Thrones.” Yet these efforts have also been slow to produce results, in part because of the complexity of the online ad system.
Playing Whac-a-Mole With Piracy Sites
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.
Media Firms Probed on Data Release
[Commentary] Just as Time Warner Cable has cut a deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers for a new baseball channel, which could add $5 to customers' bills regardless of whether they watch the channel, the company is jacking up rates for nearly all its other TV services.
The latest rate hikes also come amid ongoing losses in the number of TV subscribers — as opposed to, say, high-speed Internet customers — throughout the cable industry. Cable companies are thus squeezing more money from fewer TV viewers. "These are outrageous increases," said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, a Santa Monica advocacy group. "Cable and satellite companies get away with raising rates because they know that customers have nowhere else to turn." But that could change. At some point, possibly soon, the cable and the satellite industries will go a rate hike too far, prompting even more customers to pull the plug and turn instead to online services such as Netflix.
Time Warner Cable subscribers, brace for rate hikes
While Apple's iPhones, iPads and Macs remain gold standards, signs the company is losing some of its edge in the smartphone market suggest its clout with business partners could wane.
Recent comments from executives at phone carriers and component suppliers show they see room for at least some shift in the balance of power. In particular, a move by No. 4 US mobile service provider T-Mobile to stop subsidizing smartphones around the time it starts selling the iPhone in three months’ time may put pressure on Apple, especially if other carriers follow the example. U.S. phone companies mostly subsidize handsets in return for two-year contracts. If customers start paying the full price for an iPhone, they might look for cheaper alternatives. Asked whether carriers are now in a better position to negotiate lower prices with smartphone makers such as Apple, Fran Shammo, chief financial officer of Verizon Communications, said having four strong platforms -- Apple, Android, Windows and BlackBerry -- is leading to more competitive pricing. "The more operating systems we have to compete in this area the better the competition," he said.
Apple could be losing control of wireless carriers, component suppliers
The top lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee demanded a briefing from Justice Department officials about the prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who killed himself earlier this month. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said there are "many questions" about how prosecutors handled the case. They demanded a briefing from DOJ officials by Monday, Feb. 4.
House panel demands briefing over prosecution of Web activist Swartz
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.
Iranian Journalists Are Arrested and Accused of Links With Foreign News Media
A British law firm says that about a dozen Apple customers are suing Internet search leader Google in the UK over its alleged secret tracking of their Internet browsing habits. London-based law firm Olswang said that 12 Apple users were taking the Internet search leader to court over small pieces of tracking code -- known as cookies -- surreptitiously installed on computers and smartphones.
Google sued in UK over Safari tracking
The competition among streaming music services is going global. It is also increasingly going free. As CD and download sales cool, the music industry is looking to subscription services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Deezer to provide an attractive alternative to pirated content. But the growth of these companies has been relatively slow, and to compete against one another, more of them are opening free tiers — a move that gets attention, but has always caused worries that it could undermine the value of music.
For Many Digital Music Services, Free Is Not a Choice As Music Streaming Grows, Royalties Slow to a Trickle (NYTimes)