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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that the following items will be on the tentative agenda for the next open meeting scheduled for Friday, September 28, 2012:
- Comprehensive Review of Licensing and Operating Rules for Satellite Services: Advancing the Commission’s regulatory reform efforts, the Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to update, streamline, or eliminate earth and space station licensing requirements, reducing regulatory burdens on licensees and accelerating delivery of new satellite services to consumers.
- Expanding the Economic and Innovation Opportunities of Spectrum through Incentive Auctions: The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to implement an incentive auction of broadcast television spectrum.
- A Review of Policies Regarding Mobile Spectrum Holdings: The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that initiates a review of its policies governing mobile spectrum holdings.
FCC Announces Tentative Agenda For September Open Meeting Statement Of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski On Incentive Auction Proposal (Chairman Genachowski) Genachowski Urges Broad Participation in Auction (B&C) FCC Eyes Rules for Airwaves Auctions (Wall Street Journal) FCC to vote on spectrum auction plans (FT)
There is a long regulatory process ahead at the Federal Communications Commission to get the auction up and running and then make those airwaves available to winners. Understanding the marathon ahead, trade groups from the consumer electronics industry, rural carriers and tech organizations praised the FCC’s proposal, which is expected to be finalized as an order in mid-2013.
Guggenheim analyst Paul Gallant made some key projections:
1) The FCC will probably succeed in getting broadcasters to voluntarily sell spectrum. “The FCC will have some flexibility on repacking that can help carve out enough spectrum,” Gallant wrote. “We are more than optimistic than most that the FCC will indeed assemble the hoped-for 60-80 MHz of spectrum to auction to wireless operators.”
2) But it will be years before any airwaves will be used to run your future smartphone, experts say.
FCC kick-starts auction plan, but airwaves won’t hit your smartphone for years
In this Report and Order, the Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (Bureau) acts to implement clear directives of Congress set forth in the Public Safety Spectrum Act.
The Bureau reallocates the D Block for “public safety services” and deletes FCC rules that are plainly inconsistent with this revised allocation. It also deletes the FCC rules establishing, providing license authority with respect to, and governing operations under the Public Safety Broadband License in the existing public safety broadband spectrum. The Bureau replaces these with rules implementing the clear mandate of the Public Safety Spectrum Act to grant a license for this spectrum and the D Block to FirstNet. The rule changes adopted by the Bureau in this order are strictly limited to aspects of that mandate that leave no room for agency discretion, and thus fall within the Bureau’s delegated authority and are consistent with the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. By eliminating any confusion or uncertainty about the new regulatory framework applicable to the public safety broadband network, the FCC action facilitates the transition of this spectrum to FirstNet, the prospective licensee established by the Act.
A Nationwide, Broadband, Interoperable Public Safety Network in the 700 MHz Band
With Google’s promise last year to wire homes, schools, libraries and other public institutions in Kansas City with the nation’s fastest Internet connection, community leaders on the long forlorn, predominantly black east side were excited, seeing a potentially uplifting force. They anticipated new educational opportunities for their children and an incentive for developers to build in their communities. But in July, Google announced a process in which only those areas where enough residents preregistered and paid a $10 deposit would get the service, Google Fiber.
While nearly all of the affluent, mostly white neighborhoods here quickly got enough registrants, a broad swath of black communities lagged. The deadline to sign up was midnight Sunday. The specter that many blacks in this city might not get access to this technology has inflamed the long racial divide here, stoking concern that it could deepen. “This is just one more example of people that are lower income, sometimes not higher educated people, being left behind,” said Margaret May, the executive director of the neighborhood council in Ivanhoe, where the poverty rate was more than 46 percent in 2009. “It makes me very sad.
In One City, Signing Up for Internet Becomes a Civic Cause
Reshaped and renamed by generations of developers and gentrifiers, the borders of New York City’s neighborhoods are often hazy at best.
Yesterday’s Chinatown is today’s east TriBeCa; a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant may, after some real estate alchemy, morph into a citizen of Clinton Hill. These distinctions, with status, self-identity and resale values at stake, can often lead to heated disputes, so much so that a state assemblyman, Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, introduced a bill, the Neighborhood Integrity Act, in 2011 to tamp down the tension. (The bill failed.) And City Hall offers little help: the city has never codified neighborhood boundaries, leaving profit-hungry brokers and civic activists to fight it out. But now, thanks to the democratizing force of the Internet, dozens of amateur cartographers are reshaping these lines themselves, taking advantage of malleable Web sites — including Google Maps and Wikipedia — to provide their own definitions for where, for instance, Park Slope ends and Gowanus begins. Their judgments are far-reaching.
Amateur Mapmakers Redraw Boundaries, Working Online
[Commentary] Journalism has a shortage of many things: capital, advertisers and, in some instances, readers. But certainly its most precious commodity is innovation. Again and again, the business struggles to get out of the rut that put it on a road to ruin in the first place. Setting aside the issue of whether foundations should finance profit-making organizations, it is worth noting that many promising journalistic operations have foundered on the regulatory shoals of the Internal Revenue Service, with its bizarre standards for deciding whether an organization qualifies for nonprofit status. A broader question lurks as well. Shouldn’t financing meant for journalistic innovation go to the green shoots and not be used to fertilize giant dead-tree media?
Innovation in Journalism Goes Begging for Support
Whether you are looking to buy a power tool or neon jeans online, chances are you start your search on Google or Amazon. But which one? Behind the scenes, the two companies are waging a war to become the pre-eminent online mall.
And e-commerce sites large and small are caught in the cross-fire. As for consumers, the question is whether they will see a full range of products available online. Google is a search engine, not a store, but it is increasingly inching into e-commerce with products like its comparison-shopping service, Google Shopping. At the same time, more people are using Amazon, a retailer, as a search engine to look for what they want to buy.
Google Struggles to Unseat Amazon as the Web’s Most Popular Mall
This fall, Mercer University, a 179-year-old former Baptist school, is starting an ambitious $5.6 million project to try to save local journalism by inviting both the Macon newspaper and a Georgia Public Radio station onto its campus.
Reporters and editors for the 186-year-old paper The Telegraph and the radio station will work out of the campus’s new journalism center, alongside students whom the university expects will do legwork for newspaper and public radio reports, with guidance from their professors and working journalists. It’s a plan born in part of desperation. Like many newspapers, The Telegraph has lost circulation and advertising revenue in the last decade, and the public radio station was forced to trim down to one staff member during the recession.
On Campus, an Experiment to Save Local News
Amazon, in an apparent switch in its pricing policy, said over the weekend that it would allow buyers of its new Kindle Fire tablet to pay $15 extra to turn off advertisements that are built into the devices.
The change came after Amazon unveiled larger Kindle Fire tablets, priced from $159 to $599, to challenge Apple’s dominant iPad on price and additional digital content. Amazon had said the tablets would come with ads known as “special offers” that appear when screens are locked and in the corner of the home screen, helping to keep prices down. But criticism of the company mounted in online forums after reports that Amazon would not allow buyers to pay to block the ads as it had done with earlier tablets.
Amazon to Allow Kindle Fire Users to Pay to Block Ads
The stretch run for the November elections has begun, and local television stations in swing states are already assured they will come out winners.
Ad rates in most contested areas are sharply higher, compared with last year, while states firmly in the red or blue camp generally aren't seeing as much change. Political parties and outside groups will pay an extra-heavy tab in October and early November because of heated competition for limited commercial slots. Wells Fargo media analyst Marci Ryvicker raised her estimate on all political ad spending to $5.2 billion, up $300 million from a previous forecast, after spending in August on political ads on local TV stations jumped 77% from July. That compares to $4.2 billion in 2008, the last presidential election year.
Swing-State Stations Are Election Winners