November 26, 2012 (Cyber Monday)
BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2012
This week’s agenda http://benton.org/calendar/2012-11-25--P1W/
EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS
FCC to Hold Field Hearings To Examine New Challenges to Resiliency of U.S. Communications Networks During Natural Disasters
After Hurricane Sandy, People Flock to Radio for Information
INTERNET/BROADBAND
Democrats troubled by Verizon's free speech argument in network neutrality case
Nations prepare to update treaty that could reshape the Internet
The UN's Internet Sneak Attack - editorial [links to web]
Retailers pressure Congress to tax next 'Cyber Monday' [links to web]
WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
FCC Chairman backs Dish Network plan to compete with wireless giants [links to web]
AT&T expands cellular FaceTime for more Apple device users [links to web]
Courts Divided Over Searches of Cellphones
Cell Phone Activities 2012 - research
New software blocks all ads on mobile [links to web]
PRIVACY
Courts Divided Over Searches of Cellphones
Judge Approves FTC’s $22.5 Million Fine of Google
Parents, Teens, and Online Privacy - research
Pilfered Wi-Fi Is No Shield From Prying Eyes of Police [links to web]
ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
Democrats push to redeploy Obama’s voter database
Campaigns’ use of supporters’ data worries privacy advocates [links to web]
Trying to Turn Obama Voters Into Tax Allies
Issue Ads to Go Into Overdrive [links to web]
The Final Days of the Media Campaign 2012 - research
Political ads brought Roanoke region's TV stations $27 million [links to web]
TELEVISION
Anchors Quit on Air, but Reason Is Unclear [links to web]
ESPN Wins 2015 College Football Playoffs [links to web]
Fox Closing Deal For Dodgers’ TV Rights [links to web]
OWNERSHIP
Tech activists alarmed by RSC retraction of copyright brief
An Abrupt End to San Diego’s Signature Newspaper Family [links to web]
POLICYMAKERS
Renata Hesse named acting chief of DOJ's Antitrust Division [links to web]
First Mover: Robert McDowell [links to web]
JOURNALISM
Using War as Cover to Target Journalists - analysis
AGENDA
FCC Announces Tentative Agenda For December Open Meeting
FCC to Hold Field Hearings To Examine New Challenges to Resiliency of U.S. Communications Networks During Natural Disasters
STORIES FROM ABROAD
Samsung reveals Chinese labor breaches [links to web]
EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS
POST-SUPERSTORM SANDY FIELD HEARINGS TO EXAMINE NEW CHALLENGES TO RESILIENCY OF US COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: Press release]
Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski announced plans to convene a series of field hearings in the coming months to examine new challenges to the nation’s communications networks in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, and help inform recommendations and action to improve network resiliency. The field hearings will focus on the unique challenges faced by communications service providers, state and local officials, emergency personnel, and consumers before, during and after Superstorm Sandy as well as other natural disasters. Beginning in early 2013, hearings will take place throughout the country in locations that have experienced major natural disasters, starting in New York. They will include businesses, public safety officials, engineering and academic experts, consumers and other stakeholders. The field hearings will inquire about a number of topics, based on the Commission’s current assessment of the U.S. communications infrastructure post-Superstorm Sandy. These inquiry topics and related questions include, but are not limited to, the following areas.
Sandy was an event for which communications providers had substantial advance notice.
There were several instances where communications providers worked together to share resources to improve communications performance during Sandy.
Our communications systems are increasingly reliant on electric power, both for the infrastructure and in homes and businesses: e.g., to power consumers’ mobile and home communications devices and equipment, communications companies’ central offices and cell sites, and broadcasters’ transmitters and studios.
In addition to back-up power, transport connectivity between cell sites and other network nodes failed, resulting in disruptions to wireless communications.
Emergency communications, particularly 9-1-1 communications networks, generally remained operational during Sandy.
Communications services took days to recover after Sandy. This not only includes service availability, but service availability at full performance.
Users of communications services appear to lack information about the performance of the services they pay for.
benton.org/node/139734 | Federal Communications Commission | The Hill
Recommend this Headline
back to top
RADIO AND EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Ben Sisario]
During the arrival and immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, those with power looked to television, the Web and social media for information. But large numbers of people, particularly those in the hardest-hit areas, also turned to the radio. Arbitron, the radio ratings service, will report on Monday that from 7 p.m. to midnight on Oct. 29, when the storm made landfall in New Jersey, an average of just more than a million people in the broader New York region were listening to the radio during any 15-minute period. That is up 70 percent from the same period the week before. (Besides the five boroughs of New York City, the metropolitan market includes five counties in New York, nine in New Jersey and part of one in Connecticut.) The audience skyrocketed in coastal areas.
benton.org/node/139733 | New York Times
Recommend this Headline
back to top
INTERNET/BROADBAND
FREE SPEECH AND NETWORK NEUTRALITY
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Brendan Sasso]
Three top Democrats on the House Commerce Committee wrote a letter to their colleagues, calling attention to a "troubling" constitutional argument Verizon has made in its bid to overturn network neutrality regulations. Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) warned that Congress's power to regulate the communications industry would be severely restricted if the court accepts Verizon's claim that the network neutrality regulations violate its First Amendment free speech rights. "Although this First Amendment issue is being raised by Verizon in the context of the Open Internet Order, there is no apparent limit to the company's claim," the lawmakers wrote. "If the court accepts Verizon's argument, the role of Congress in enacting communications policy through power granted by the Commerce Clause — including efforts to protect consumers and promote competition in contexts far removed from the Open Internet rules themselves — could be radically undermined." The Representatives warned that overturning the network neutrality rules could undermine the success of the Internet. "This incredible economic success story is made possible by the fact that the Internet has always been an open platform where anyone with a good idea can connect to consumers across the globe and compete on a level playing field for their business," they wrote. They pointed to a brief defense of the rules filed by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps and other former government officials. In that brief, the officials said Verizon's lawsuit fails to "state any valid or even seriously plausible constitutional claim."
benton.org/node/139725 | Hill, The
Recommend this Headline
back to top
ITU MEETING
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Jennifer Martinez]
Government officials from around the world will descend on Dubai next month to revise a treaty that could have a major effect on the future of the Internet. The 193 member countries of the United Nation's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will meet in Dubai to update the International Telecommunications Regulations treaty for the first time since 1988. The treaty governs how telephone calls and other communications traffic are exchanged internationally. A lot is at stake in the upcoming negotiations: Observers say some of the proposals put forward by countries for the treaty conference could threaten Internet freedom, encourage online censorship and expand a United Nations agency's authority over the Internet. The treaty negotiations run by the ITU will take place in Dubai over a two-week period from Dec. 3 to Dec. 14. Ambassador Terry Kramer, a former Vodafone executive, will lead the 95-person U.S. delegation during the conference. Members of the U.S. delegation include a mix of Obama administration officials and industry representatives from Google, Verizon, AT&T, Cisco, Microsoft and Facebook. Advocacy groups and trade organizations also have representatives on the delegation. In the run up to the Dubai conference, Kramer has made clear in a series of public appearances that the U.S. is committed to maintaining liberalized markets in the telecom industry and upholding human rights and free speech principles during the treaty negotiations.
benton.org/node/139728 | Hill, The | The Hill – Google
Recommend this Headline
back to top
WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
CELL PHONE ACTIVITIES
[SOURCE: Pew Internet & American Life Project, AUTHOR: Maeve Duggan, Lee Rainie]
Fully 85% of American adults own a cell phone and now use the devices to do much more than make phone calls. Cell phones have become a portal for an ever-growing list of activities. In nationally representative phone surveys in the spring and summer, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project obtained readings on some of the most popular activities including: 1) Taking pictures (82%), 2) Sending/receiving texts (80%), 3) Accessing the Internet (56%), and 4) Sending/receiving e-mail (50%).
benton.org/node/139721 | Pew Internet & American Life Project
Recommend this Headline
back to top
PRIVACY
CELLPHONE SEARCHES
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Somini Sengupta]
Judges and lawmakers across the country are wrangling over whether and when law enforcement authorities can peer into suspects’ cellphones, and the cornucopia of evidence they provide. The issue will attract attention on Nov 29 when a Senate committee considers limited changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that regulates how the government can monitor digital communications. Courts have used it to permit warrantless surveillance of certain kinds of cellphone data. A proposed amendment would require the police to obtain a warrant to search e-mail, no matter how old it was, updating a provision that currently allows warrantless searches of e-mails more than 180 days old. As technology races ahead of the law, courts and lawmakers are still trying to figure out how to think about the often intimate data that cellphones contain, said Peter P. Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University. Neither the 1986 statute nor the Constitution, he said, could have anticipated how much information cellphones may contain, including detailed records of people’s travels and diagrams of their friends.
benton.org/node/139749 | New York Times
Recommend this Headline
back to top
JUDGE APPROVES FTC'S $22.5M FINE OF GOOGLE
[SOURCE: Associated Press, AUTHOR: Michael Liedtke]
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston has approved a $22.5 million fine to penalize Google for an alleged privacy breach, rejecting a consumer-rights group's plea for tougher punishment. She made her ruling a few hours after a hearing in San Francisco for final arguments about a fine that's the cornerstone a settlement reached three months ago between the Federal Trade Commission and Google. The rebuke resolves around allegations that Google duped millions of Web surfers using the Safari browser into believing their online activities couldn't be tracked by the company as long as they didn't change the browser's privacy settings. That assurance was posted on Google's website earlier this year, even as the Internet search leader was inserting computer coding that bypassed Safari's automatic settings and enabled the company to peer into the online lives of the browser's users.
benton.org/node/139724 | Associated Press | FTC
Recommend this Headline
back to top
PARENTS, TEENS, AND ONLINE PRIVACY
[SOURCE: Pew Internet & American Life Project, AUTHOR: Mary Madden, Sandra Cortesi, Urs Gasser, Amanda Lenhart, Maeve Duggan]
Most parents of teenagers are concerned about what their teenage children do online and how their behavior could be monitored by others. Some parents are taking steps to observe, discuss, and check up on their children’s digital footprints, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
81% of parents of online teens say they are concerned about how much information advertisers can learn about their child’s online behavior, with some 46% being “very” concerned.
72% of parents of online teens are concerned about how their child interacts online with people they do not know, with some 53% of parents being “very” concerned.
69% of parents of online teens are concerned about how their child’s online activity might affect their future academic or employment opportunities, with some 44% being “very” concerned about that.
69% of parents of online teens are concerned about how their child manages his or her reputation online, with some 49% being “very” concerned about that.
Some of these expressions of concern are particularly acute for the parents of younger teens; 63% of parents of teens ages 12-13 say they are “very” concerned about their child’s interactions with people they do not know online and 57% say they are “very” concerned about how their child manages his or her reputation online.
benton.org/node/139720 | Pew Internet & American Life Project
Recommend this Headline
back to top
ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
OBAMA’S DATABASE
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Craig Timberg, Amy Gardner]
If you voted this election season, President Obama almost certainly has a file on you. His vast campaign database includes information on voters’ magazine subscriptions, car registrations, housing values and hunting licenses, along with scores estimating how likely they were to cast ballots for his reelection. And although the election is over, Obama’s database is just getting started. The database consists of voting records and political donation histories bolstered by vast amounts of personal but publicly available consumer data, say campaign officials and others familiar with the operation. It could record hundreds of pieces of information for each voter. Democrats are pressing to expand and redeploy the most sophisticated voter list in history, beginning with next year’s gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and extending to campaigns for years to come. The prospect already has some Republicans worried.
benton.org/node/139731 | Washington Post
Recommend this Headline
back to top
MOBILIZING VOTERS AFTER THE ELECTION
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Michael Shear]
When Tea Party activists swamped town hall-style meetings about health care in the summer of 2009, President Obama’s army of campaign volunteers largely stayed away, seemingly less interested in fighting for legislation than they had been in electing the nation’s first African-American president. Now, President Obama is seizing a second chance to keep his election-year supporters animated. Already, supporters are being asked to record YouTube videos of themselves talking about the importance of raising taxes on the rich. Aides said those videos would be shared on Facebook and Twitter and would be forwarded to centrist Democrats, as well as to mainstream Republicans, who they hope will break with their Tea Party colleagues. An e-mail last week urged activists to share with their friends a graphic explaining the president’s tax argument. And Mr. Obama’s campaign manager sent an e-mail appeal asking supporters to fill out a survey about issues they would like to stay involved in.
benton.org/node/139747 | New York Times
Recommend this Headline
back to top
THE FINAL DAYS OF THE MEDIA CAMPAIGN 2012
[SOURCE: Project for Excellence in Journalism, AUTHOR:]
In the final week of the 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama enjoyed his most positive run of news coverage in months, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Only during the week of his nominating convention was the treatment in the press more favorable. Much of that surge in positive coverage, the data suggest, was tied to Obama's strategic position, including improving opinion polls and electoral math, rather than directly to positive assessments of Obama's response to Superstorm Sandy. The storm, however, appeared to reduce the amount of attention focused on Mitt Romney and may well have influenced public attitudes about the president. During this final week, from October 29 to November 5, positive stories about Obama (29%) outnumbered negative ones (19%) by 10 points. A week earlier, negative coverage of Obama had exceeded positive by 13 points. The final week of the campaign marked only the second time in which positive stories about Obama outnumbered negative dating back to late August.
benton.org/node/139742 | Project for Excellence in Journalism
Recommend this Headline
back to top
OWNERSHIP
COPYRIGHT BRIED RETRACTED
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Eliza Krigman]
The Republican Study Committee delighted the netroots community on November 16 when it issued a policy brief on copyright law that was friendly to their views. Fast forward 24 hours. The conservative group retracted the report on November 17, setting off a firestorm on tech blogs. “These are very odd circumstances,” said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a public policy group. The paper, authored by RSC staffer Derek Khanna, suggested that copyright law is too tilted toward protecting content owners, and should be changed to allow for greater flexibility in sharing, shorten copyright terms and punish false claims. The tech community hailed the brief from the conservative policy shop, which is not known for backing such proposals. “The Republican Study Committee released a report on Friday that is so brilliant and visionary it's difficult for me to believe it was written by Republicans,” a Daily Kos blogger wrote. The retraction sparked an equal measure of consternation. “Why did the RSC retract it’s awesome paper on copyright?” tweeted Patrick Ruffini, a Republican political consultant who helped lead the battle against online piracy legislation. An RSC spokesman said November 18 the brief was retracted because it did not balance various views on copyright law. Sohn and other tech activists suspect that the entertainment industry weighed in on the report after it was published, though no one from the industry has said anything publicly about it.
benton.org/node/139722 | Politico | Public Knowledge
Recommend this Headline
back to top
JOURNALISM
TARGETING JOURNALISTS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: David Carr]
[Commentary] In many parts of the globe, journalism is under murderous assault. Journalists who dig into murky and dangerous corners of the world have become accustomed to being threatened and sometimes hunted by drug lords and gangsters, but now some governments have decided shooting the messenger is a viable option. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that government officials and their allies are now suspected of being responsible for more than a third of the murders of journalists, a higher proportion than killings attributed to terrorist groups or criminal enterprises. Three employees of news organizations were killed in Gaza by Israeli missiles. Rather than suggesting it was a mistake, or denying responsibility, an Israeli Defense Forces spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, told The Associated Press, “The targets are people who have relevance to terror activity.” So it has come to this: killing members of the news media can be justified by a phrase as amorphous as “relevance to terror activity.”
benton.org/node/139748 | New York Times
Recommend this Headline
back to top
AGENDA
FCC ANNOUNCES TENTATIVE AGENDA FOR DECEMBER OPEN MEETING
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: Press release]
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that the following items will be on the tentative agenda for the next open meeting scheduled for Wednesday, December 12, 2012:
Enabling Spectrum Sharing and Small Cell Wireless Broadband Services in the 3.5 GHz Band: The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to broaden its initiatives in unleashing broadband spectrum, promoting technological innovation, and encouraging investment via the creation of a shared access broadband service in the 3550-3650 MHz band for small cell use.
Facilitating the Deployment of Text-to-911 and Other Next Generation 911 Initiatives: The Commission will consider a Report, Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on developing the capability for Americans to contact 911 emergency services via text messaging. This would be a first step toward additional next generation services offering wider access to 911 responders.
Reforming Rural Health Care Support: The Commission will consider a Report and Order on reforming the FCC’s universal service support programs for healthcare that would expand healthcare providers’ access to broadband, especially in rural areas, while increasing overall efficiency and accountability in the programs.
benton.org/node/139723 | Federal Communications Commission
Recommend this Headline
back to top