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To the delight of American satellite makers, communications satellites — which orbit Earth to relay phone calls, link ships to shore and broadcast television programs — will become legal for civilian export under legislation that President Obama signed into law.
Although the United States founded the industry, manufacturers were forced to pull back from international markets after a 1999 law categorized the satellites as weapons and restricted their export. At the time, Congress was fearful that selling satellites abroad could allow technology secrets to fall into the wrong hands. The defense bill that President Obama signed will undo that step and let American companies sell communications satellites as civilian technology rather than as deadly arms. Among the beneficiaries will be companies like Boeing, Hughes and Space Systems/Loral.
Communications Satellites Made Legal for Export
Al Gore’s Current TV was never popular with viewers, but it was a hit where it counted: with cable and satellite providers.
When he co-founded the channel in 2005, Gore managed to get the channel piped into tens of millions of households — a huge number for an untested network — through a combination of personal lobbying and arm-twisting of industry giants. He called on those skills again after deciding in December to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera for $500 million. To preserve the deal — and the estimated $100 million he would personally receive — he went to some of those same distributors, who were looking for an excuse to drop the low-rated channel, and reminded them that their contracts with Current TV called it a news channel. Were the distributors going to say that an American version of Al Jazeera didn’t qualify, possibly invoking ugly stereotypes of the Middle Eastern news giant? The deal completed an eight-year odyssey for Gore and for Current TV that confirmed one of the realities of show business: it can be a lot easier to profit from a channel than to come up with must-see TV for viewers.
Gore Went to Bat for Al Jazeera, and Himself, in Current Deal http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/gore-went-to-bat-for-al-jazeera-and-himself/?ref=todayspaper
[Commentary] It is a battle between you and the government—like Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy comic, but it's gSpy vs. iSpy. There are thousands of toll booths at bridges and turnpikes across America recording your license plate. There are 4,214 red-light cameras and 761 speed-trap cameras around the country. Add 494,151 cell towers and 400,000 ATMs that record video of your transactions. New York City alone has 2,400 official surveillance cameras and recently hired Microsoft to monitor real-time feeds as part of the Orwellian-named Domain Awareness System. And that is nothing compared with England, where over four million surveillance cameras record the average Londoner 300 times a day. Popular Mechanics magazine estimates that there are some 30 million commercial surveillance cameras in the U.S. logging billions of hours of video a week. I guarantee that you're in hundreds if not thousands of these. In the year 1984, we only had lame amber-screened PCs running Lotus 123. Now, 64 years after George Orwell sent "1984" to his publisher, we have cheap video cams and wireless links and terabyte drives and Big Brother is finally watching. So gSpy is winning, right? Not so fast. We are watching back. I know the precise number of red-light cameras because a website (poi-factory.com) crowdsources their locations and updates them daily for download to GPS devices. And 30 million surveillance cameras are a pittance compared with the 327 million cellphones in use across America, almost all of them with video cameras built in.
In the Privacy Wars, It's iSpy vs. gSpy
The e-reader era just arrived, but now it may be ending. Dedicated devices for reading e-books have been a hot category for the past half-dozen years, but the shrinking sizes and falling prices of full-featured tablet computers are raising questions about the fate of reading-only gadgets like Amazon's original Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s first Nooks.
Market-researcher IDC recently estimated 2012 global e-reader shipments at 19.9 million units, down 28% from 27.7 million units in 2011. By contrast, IDC's 2012 tablet forecast is 122.3 million units. IHS iSuppli comes up with different totals, but it sees a similar trend. It estimates that shipments of dedicated e-readers peaked in 2011 and predicts that 2012 shipments slid to 14.9 million units, down 36% from a year earlier. By 2015, it expects unit sales of dedicated e-readers to be just 7.8 million. One problem is that some users who bought e-readers see no particular urgency to buy another.
The E-Reader Revolution: Over Just as It Has Begun?
The latest smartphone figures show Apple and Android phones have taken nearly complete control of the U.S. smartphone market, with almost 90% combined market share.
A report by comScore shows that as of November, Apple and Android devices accounted for a combined 88.7% share of the U.S. smartphone market. Individually, the Google-owned Android operating system leads the way with 53.7% of the market, up 1.1% from August. Apple, meanwhile, accounted for 35%, which was a 1.4% increase from August. Left in the dust were Research In Motion and Microsoft, whose operating systems accounted for 7.3% and 3% of the market, respectively. Samsung was the leading manufacturer of cellphones, with 26.9% of the market -- up 1.2% from August. Apple came in second with 18.5% of the market, up 1.4%. Not far behind Apple was LG, which held on to 17.5% of the cellphone market but was down 0.7% from the previous period. Also down for the period were Motorola and HTC, which saw their shares fall 0.8% and 0.4%, respectively. Motorola had a 10.4% cellphone market share while HTC's slice of the pie fell to 5.9%.
Apple, Android combine for almost 90% of U.S. smartphone market
The Federal Communications Commission announced that Jan. 28 and Feb. 11 will be the comment and reply comment deadlines for its proposal to modify phase I of its Connect America Universal Service Fund reform.
In November, the FCC proposed changing the rules on its first phase of the Connect America Fund to make it more attractive to the price cap telcos it wants to build out broadband to hard-to-serve, primarily rural, areas. The FCC, which is migrating phone subsidies in the Universal Service Fund from telecom to broadband, announced in July that $115 million would be invested by companies in 37 states. But that leaves most of the money -- $185 million -- in the first round of funding unallocated.
FCC Sets Comment Deadlines for Connect America Reforms
A survey of a wide-ranging mix of U.S.-based arts organizations shows that the internet, social media, and mobile connectivity now permeate their operations and have changed the way they stage performances, mount and showcase their exhibits, engage their audiences, sell tickets, and raise funds. These organizations are even finding that technology has changed the very definition of art: 77% of respondents agree with the statement that the internet has “played a major role in broadening the boundaries of what is considered art.”
“For most of these organizations, technology suffuses their operations and their engagement activities with their communities,” noted Kristen Purcell, research director at the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, and a co-author of the report. “They are using the technologies to expand their offerings, grow and diversify their audiences, and bring technology users into the act of creating art itself.”
Tied to this embrace of technology is a widespread sense among arts group leaders that digital technologies are critical to the spread of the arts:
- 81% of the organizations in this survey say the internet and digital technologies are “very important” for promoting the arts
- 78% say these technologies are “very important” for increasing audience engagement
- 50% “strongly agree” with the statement that the internet “has increased engagement in the arts by providing a public platform through which more people can share their work”
- 65% say digital technologies are “very important” for fundraising
- A majority of these organizations also agree that the internet is “very important” in increasing organizational efficiency (63%), and for their engaging in arts advocacy (55%)
Arts Organizations and Digital Technologies
Congressional investigators are wrapping up an inquiry into the accounting practices of Apple and other technology companies that allocate revenue and intellectual property offshore to lower the taxes they pay in the United States.
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations inquiry now drawing to a close began more than a year ago and involves at least a half dozen technology companies, according to people with firsthand knowledge of it, who declined to be identified. Those people said the subcommittee had subpoenaed or otherwise asked the companies to explain methods they used to avoid domestic taxes. They said Apple had become a focus of the inquiry and was cooperating with the subcommittee, which is expected to issue wide-ranging recommendations that are likely to play a significant role in Congressional tax code negotiations. It is unclear how broadly Senate investigators are looking into the technology industry, if any laws are thought to have been broken and how many companies are involved. The subcommittee is also known to be looking at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and firms in such fields as biotechnology.
Inquiry Into Tech Giants’ Tax Strategies Nears End
While the Federal Trade Commission this week mostly let Google off the hook on search competition, it did get the company to sign a binding consent order over how it uses standards-essential patents. Standard-essential patents — which cover basic technology shared in an industry — have become a key issue as smartphone competitors fight over intellectual property. Having been lumped into the long-running FTC antitrust investigation of Google over the past couple of months, patents weren’t originally an issue, but they emerged as an area where regulators could find fault and make a deal. So what does this mean for the larger standards-essential patent fights?
A few things — with a mix of winners and losers.
- The FTC is now on record saying that Google acted unfairly. That’s big.
- Google doesn’t have to drop its existing appeals of SEP cases, according to clarifying comments by FTC spokesman Peter Kaplan. However, Google can’t obtain or enforce any SEP exclusion orders or injunctions.
- Google’s agreement with the FTC is binding. But it is not necessarily as strong as what Apple and Microsoft already committed to voluntarily when the Department of Justice and other agencies in Europe were looking into the matter. They both said that they won’t seek injunctive relief based on SEPs, ever.
What Happens Now on Standards-Essential Patents?
Taking over his agency four years ago, Jon Leibowitz was at the head of a group of Obama appointees seeking a tougher line on antitrust violations. But the action by the Federal Trade Commission against Google is the latest example of how enforcement has generally remained cautious and within the mainstream of antitrust law.
The administration has caused some pain for large corporations including AT&T, which abandoned its bid for rival cellphone provider T-Mobile USA after a Justice Department lawsuit. That case and others like it, though, relied on time-honored antitrust principles about avoiding excess concentration in an industry. "Being aggressive on antitrust enforcement is a lot harder in practice than it looks," said David Wales, a former antitrust regulator now at the law firm Jones Day, in part because regulators must ultimately win their cases in courts that have proved skeptical of expansive interpretations of antitrust law. The FTC was once eager for the Google probe, successfully pushing for jurisdiction over the Justice Department, with which it shares antitrust enforcement duties. As the investigation picked up steam, the agency enlisted high-profile corporate litigator Beth Wilkinson to help lead the effort. But even with three Obama nominees on the five-member commission, the FTC ultimately decided against moving ahead with a case.
Administration's Tough Talk Belies Cautious Approach on Antitrust