Blog Archives
Mignon Clyburn to FCC: 2 down, 1 to go
By Kenneth Corbin | April 30, 2009With the nomination of Mignon Clyburn to the Federal Communications Commission, President Obama has moved one step closer to finalizing the makeup of the regulatory agency with broad jurisdiction over the telecom industry.
Clyburn, the daughter of House Majority Whip James Clyburn, has served on South Carolina's Public Service Commission since 1998. She currently heads the Washington arm of the National Association of Regulatory Commissioners.
The nomination of Clyburn, a Democrat, for commissioner leaves Obama with one Republican spot to fill on the five-person panel.
Obama has already tapped Julius Genachowski to chair the agency, but his nomination has yet to be considered by the Senate.
Two Republican commissioners, including Chairman Kevin Martin, recently stepped down, and Jonathan Adelstein, a Democrat, has been appointed to head the Rural Utilities Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture that is responsible for administering about a third of the money in the economic stimulus package allocated for broadband networks.
The FCC, currently under the interim chairmanship of Michael Copps, has been in limbo as it waits the Senate confirm of the permanent chairman. That confirmation hearing could be delayed until Obama produces a Republican nominee to round out the agency.
The agenda for the FCC's next meeting, scheduled for May 13, is relatively light. The most immediate task for the agency is the nationwide transition to digital television, scheduled for June 12. Down the road, the FCC is tasked with advising RUS and the National Teleommunications Information Administration in the dispersal of broadband stimulus money, and developing and reporting to Congress a national broadband strategy.
Google defends Book Search deal
By Kenneth Corbin | April 29, 2009After the Internet lit up with stories talking about how the Department of Justice has again trained its antitrust guns on Google, this time over its Books Search settlement with authors and publishers, the search giant is trying to convince the world that the deal is ardently pro-consumer.
First, Google's official statement on the DoJ inquiry:
"The Department of Justice has contacted us to learn more about the impact of the settlement, and we are happy to answer their questions. It's important to note that this agreement is non-exclusive and if approved by the court, stands to expand access to millions of books in the U.S."
A more exuberant defense can be found on the Google Public Policy blog, where Book Search Director Adam Smith lays out scenarios where people's only chance to find the books they're looking for is through the Google project:
"Let's say you're a second-generation American interested in reading books in your parents' native language, Greek. Try finding more than a few books in foreign languages in most town libraries or bookstores in the United States.
"Or you're a graduate student who has been doing research on your thesis for years. You think you've read every book there is to read on your topic, but then you type your query into Google Book Search, and you suddenly discover a new original book or monograph that you weren't even aware of before."
In October, Google reached a $125 million settlement with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers to end a copyright infringement lawsuit dating to 2005. The groups were claiming that Google's wholesale scanning operations of the collections of five major research libraries failed to compensate authors and publishers for their work.
Under the settlement, Google agreed to created a Book Rights Registry for authors and publishers to register and receive a share of the revenue Google will collect for subscriptions and sales.
But some groups have cried foul. They claim that the treatment of orphan works -- copyrighted books whose authors cannot be found -- is anticompetitive because it applies only to Google, meaning that if another firm wanted to create its own digital library it would be at a competitive disadvantage.
These concerns have caught the attention of some antitrust folks at the Justice Department, the same regulatory entity that [threatened suit against Google's ad deal](/government/article.php/3783346) with Yahoo last fall.
Earlier this week, in an apparently unrelated development, the New York judge overseeing the settlement agreement extended the deadline for authors of so-called orphaned works to decide whether to participate in the registry.
So Google again finds itself on the defensive, trying to prove that it's not engaging in patently anticompetitive behavior. And it does so amid a noisy chorus of critics and skeptics who take the opportunity to remind us (and the regulators) of a host of privacy concerns and other long-simmering grievances they have with the company. Why do I feel like this won't be the last time this pattern plays out?
Schmidt, Mundie named to Obama's tech council
By Kenneth Corbin | April 27, 2009President Obama today named his choices for the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), tapping tech industry luminaries such as Google's Eric Schmidt and Microsoft's Craig Mundie to serve on the 20-person body.
PCAST is designed to give the White House a pipeline to some of the leading voices in science, engineering and technology as the administration crafts policies in those areas.
The choice of Schmidt is hardly a surprise, as the Google CEO served as an economic advisor to then-candidate Obama, and represented him as a surrogate on the campaign trail.
Obama also stopped in at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., while campaigning, famously pledging to take a backseat to no one on Net neutrality, the issue he chose to headline his tech policy agenda.
Mundie is currently serving as Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, where he directs the company's long-term vision and oversees the health, education, robotics and energy businesses.
Mundie also brings extensive public policy experience, having served on the Council on Foreign Relations since 2002 and holding several other advisory roles throughout his career.
At PCAST, Schmidt and Mundie will serve alongside leading academics and researchers from a broad range of scientific fields, such as climate change, medicine and computer science.
Van Natta named MySpace chief
By Kenneth Corbin | April 24, 2009Just one day after announcing the departure of CEO and cofounder Chris DeWolfe, MySpace today named Owen Van Natta to the social network's top spot.
Van Natta, whose appointment was widely expected, brings a wealth of social networking experience. Previously the chief revenue officer for Facebook, Van Natta helped engineer the $240 million investment from Microsoft in MySpace's chief rival.
That investment gave Facebook a sky-high valuation of $15 billion, a figure that has since come down considerably.
Van Natta is also a veteran of Amazon, and most recently served as chief executive of Playlist, Inc., an online music-sharing company.
At MySpace, he will be tasked with remaining competitive with Facebook, which is on its way to eclipsing MySpace in terms of U.S. users, after soaring past it globally last June.
Tom Anderson, MySpace's president and the site's other co-founder, is set to step down from his current role for another position in the company.
MySpace is owned by News Corp. and administered in the company's Fox Interactive Media division. Van Natta will report to Jonathan Miller, News Corp.'s CEO of digital media.
Vanity URLs a perfect fit for Facebook
By Kenneth Corbin | April 24, 2009Facebook is offering some users the chance to buy a short vanity URL for their profiles, according to AllFacebook.com.
That means that instead of a URL with a long string of user ID characters, a public profile page would simply read Facebook.com/Oprah, say, or Facebook.com/Eminem, or whatever.
This makes sense from a company still bolting together a business plan and scrounging for new sources of revenue.
Advertising, weak across the board in this woeful economic climate, is particularly troublesome on Facebook, where inventory is plentiful and CPMs are famously low.
Facebook has also been tinkering with other revenue sources like virtual gifts, though it's hard to think of them as little more than a novelty.
Facebook does tell us that it plans to be cash-flow positive next year, and has enjoyed five straight quarters of profitability.
And so vanity URLs might be a sidelight on its balance sheet, which might be public record soon enough, if the company makes good on it plans for an IPO. But the idea is very much in step with the times.
In an online world where we build elaborate digital monuments to ourselves and amass as many friend and follows as we can (what Wired's Chris Anderson splendidly refers to as an "arms race"), all efforts to turn Internet status into a commodity should be encouraged, right?
It's a branding opportunity, if nothing else -- for both Facebook and the companies it would be marketing to. It's really just an extension of the lengths people go to acquire domain names on the Web.
The value of user names on social networks was borne out in CNN's recent efforts to acquire the handle @CNNBRK from a British developer as the news network raced Ashton Kutcher to 1 million followers. What a fun news cycle that was!
Online taxes aren't new taxes
By Kenneth Corbin | April 20, 2009As we brace for another policy fight over collecting sales taxes on online shopping, let's get one thing straight: this would not be a new tax.
Before you read one more article that leads, "The free ride might be over for tax-free online shopping," remember that purchases made on the Internet are subject to taxes now, whether the online merchant charges the tax at the time of the sale or if it's left to the consumer to report on his state income tax return.
This is called a use tax, but it is rarely collected. In either case, the tax is owed (unless you live in one of the five states with no sales tax).
I felt it's worth mentioning because, possibly as early as this week, twin bills could be introduced in the House and Senate that would require e-commerce companies like Amazon and eBay and Overstock to start collecting sales taxes on purchases shipped to states where they don't have operations.
Efforts of this sort tend to bring out the pitchforks and torches, as angry consumers begin fuming about politicians scheming to contrive new ways to bleed taxpayers out of their hard-earned money. As a result, the debate in populist circles is broadly drawn as a fight against taxing the Internet.
That characterization is unfair.
Time Warner Cable cancels usage-based pricing trials
By Kenneth Corbin | April 16, 2009Today brought another splendid reminder of how [loudly the broadband vanguard can roar](/infra/article.php/3815591/Time+Warner+Cable+Broadband+Pricing+Fight+Rages.htm) when service providers start messing with the Internet.
Bowing to a groundswell of populist outrage, Time Warner Cable has dropped plans to expand trials of a usage-based pricing plan for its Internet service.
The company put out a press release today charmingly announcing that it was "shelving the trials while the customer education process continues."
That misunderstanding had manifested in some pretty ugly forms, with allegations of price gouging and monopolistic behavior.
Time Warner Cable claimed the steps were necessary to shoulder the bandwidth costs associated with providing service to an increasing number of insatiable data gluttons who spend their days downloading movies and playing massive multiplayer games.
The problem was that the data caps (1 GB on the low end) seemed too small, while the fees (maximum $150 per month for exorbitant data usage) appeared extravagant. The talking point became that the pricing change could more than triple the cost of an unlimited data plan. While in practice that would have only been the case for a very small portion of subscribers, the sticker shock was bound to raise some eyebrows.
And it certainly did. Free Press jumped on the case with a petition drive that as of this morning I was told had registered about 15,000 angry consumers calling for Congress to investigate.
One congressman, Eric Massa of New York, didn't need any convincing. Before Free Press' petition drive really got rolling, Massa said he was planning to introduce a bill to eliminate broadband caps. Massa put out a statement today praising the grass-roots movement that pressured Time Warner Cable into dropping its plans, but said he still intended to go ahead with the legislation.
It seems that Time Warner Cable made two mistakes here. The first is the rather dramatic increase in the rates that some consumers would have to pay unless they significantly altered their Web habits. At a time when the administration and dozens of members of Congress are proselytizing for policies that will encourage the deployment and usage of broadband for noble but data-intensive applications like telemedicine and distance learning, this seems a little out of step with the times.
Second, the company failed to provide the faintest of indications of how much of a financial hit it's taking from increasing data usage. Bandwidth isn't free, we know that. But when a company floats a plan to dramatically raise rates -- in a recession, and only in markets where it operates with minimal competition -- it might help its public image if it was a little more forthcoming with the rationale behind the proposed rates.
None of this is to say that usage-based pricing can't work or shouldn't be considered by ISPs (unless Massa gets his way and it becomes illegal). But by God, give some thought to how it's going to play with the Internet watchdogs. They're a vocal group, and a lot of people listen to them, particularly in the new policy regime in Washington.
StumbleUpon breaks away from eBay
By Kenneth Corbin | April 13, 2009[StumbleUpon](http://www.stumbleupon.com/), an online recommendation and content-discovery engine, has broken away from eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) nearly two years after its acquisition, announcing today that it is once again a standalone company.
"We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths," StumbleUpon cofounder George Camp said in a statement. "This change makes it possible for StumbleUpon to continue to innovate and focus on becoming the Web's largest recommendation service."
Camp will serve as CEO of the company, which is once again an investor-backed startup following its $75 million sale to eBay.
In a [blog post](http://www.stumbleupon.com/sublog/stumbleupon_is_a_start_up_again/), Camp said that there would be some internal changes at StumbleUpon, but that the "stumbling experience" would not be affected.
The news comes as the rumor has been swirling around that VoIP provider Skype may also try to buy back its independence from eBay. Skype, a much pricier buy than the Digg-like StumbleUpon, has [long been viewed as a strategic misstep for eBay](/bus-news/article.php/3809921/eBay+We+Are+Done+Apologizing+for+Skype.htm).
Since [John Donahoe took the helm at eBay](/bus-news/article.php/3723521) a little over a year ago, he has moved to recenter the company around its core e-commerce business. He has put into place policies that (to the great dismay of eBay sellers) have aimed to make the marketplace friendlier and more secure for buyers.
At eBay's investor day in March, Donahoe described PayPal as the jewel of the company's portfolio, predicting ambitious growth revenue growth for the payement services business amidst a crowded auction market and steep competition from Amazon.
At the same presentation, Donahoe gave new life to the long-simmering rumors that eBay might be looking to divest itself of Skype. "We thought Skype would enhance the connection between buyers and sellers," he said. "But we were wrong."
It's easy to group StumbleUpon in that same category of illusive synergies, making it a sensible divestiture at a time when eBay is getting back to the basics of e-commerce. The StumbleUpon acquisition came about a year after eBay had embarked on something like a Web 2.0 makeover, launching blogs, a wiki and other [community-oriented features](http://hub.ebay.com/community).
The idea of applying StumbleUpon's technology, where users can vote good content up and bad content down, may have seemed like a good match for eBay's marketplace at the time. But that conversion never took hold, and StumbleUpon remains primarily used for helping users discover the best Web content and share it with their friends.
As a standalone company, StumbleUpon is now backed by Camp and cofounder Geoff Smith, as well as investors from Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital.
Newspapers need Google, not a fruitless legal war
By Kenneth Corbin | April 09, 2009The news industry, understandably frustrated at the enviable growth rates news aggregators and search engines are enjoying, is reviving talk about trying to lean on the Googles of the world to recoup some of the revenue news outlets feel they are losing to the online portals.
First, Rupert Murdoch raised some eyebrows when he quipped that newspapers need to stop Google and the rest of the Web set from stealing their copyrights.
But maybe that was just Rupert being Rupert. Potentially more serious was the not-to-thinly-veiled threat from the AP that it would sue Web portals and aggregators who didn't pay the freight when publishing its content and that of its member newspapers. That could set the scene for some precedent-setting fights over fair use, but litigation isn't going to get at the root of the news industry's trouble.
The Web-side reaction to the latest round of talk about how newspapers can charge for their content of has run along predictable lines. It's as dismissive as the recent flare-up over micropayments, only far more hostile.
So much venom has crept into the debate. At times, it's gotten downright toxic, like when a newspaper executive says something disparaging about the quality or originality of the content on the Web, and a thousand bloggers and commenters roar back with delight over the demise of the arrogant old-media tyranny.
In both sides there is some truth. Newspapermen, as a tribe, are fond of envisioning theirs as a noble calling, styling themselves as crusaders for the truth when really a lot of what they're doing exercises the same skill sets as the best bloggers -- knowing a beat inside and out, cultivating and talking to sources, combing through stores of information and staying with a story. And it's true that newspapers have been slow to warm up to the changing ways that people like to see information presented (stronger voice, more conversational, pithier, etc.), as Sarah Lacy points out in her shamefully self-indulgent rant.
But it's also true that the best reporting still comes out of newsrooms, and no blogger or industry executive has so far offered a satisfactory model for how the Internet will shoulder the costs of the finest investigative reporting that a handful of papers still produce.
And you don't have to look too far to understand how Google CEO Eric Schmidt arrives at his conclusion about the overall quality of the content on the Web. "It's a sewer out there," he said in a speech at the annual conference of the Newspaper Association of America earlier this week.
At that same conference, newspaper publishers seemed to be strategizing with each other for the coming war against misappropriation of their content on the Web. Schmidt correctly pointed that the meaning of the term "fair use" varies depending on which lawyer you ask.
What they need to do is avoid an ugly legal showdown that's going to dredge up more bile toward the newspaper industry when that's the least productive part of this excruciating debate. Newspapers need aggregators like Google and Yahoo. Not only do they direct traffic to their sites, they also have rich ad partnerships (Yahoo more than Google) that help news sites better monetize their content.
But the worst thing that the news industry could do to itself at this point is embark on an RIAA-style litigation war against copyright infringement.
Schmidt hit on an essential economic truth when he observed that the rules of scarcity no longer apply to information in the Internet age. It's abundant. It may be of wildly varying quality and accuracy, but boy, is there plenty of it.
Schmidt encouraged news organizations to pursue a system of micropayments, but their real hope for sustainable revenue is, as it always has been, advertising. Better targeting, more interactive creative, more personal. Schmidt, ever the technologist, promises that it can happen. But if the problems Google is having selling ads on YouTube are any indication, the ad-supported digital newsroom might just be on the wrong side of the rainbow.
Schmidt a fitting keynote for newspaper convention
By Kenneth Corbin | April 08, 2009Giving the CEO of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) the last word at the newspaper convention seems a fitting end-cap to the ailing industry's annual show.
Eric Schmidt closed down the Newspaper Association of America's show in San Diego with a keynote address urging his audience to come to grips with the irreversible trend of user-generated content and social media, to meet consumer demand rather than try to dictate it and, above all, to innovate.
"We have an opportunity to redo the way information is processed in our society," Schmidt said. "My point is that the notion of this sort of community-generated information is already in aggregate more than professionally produced information and is likely to become more important, so when you build products, when you think about how your users consume things, you'll discover that it's really in both places."
I say fitting because to many, Schmidt's company has done more than any other to hasten the demise of the printed product and the legacy business model it carries. To lay the death of newspapers at his feet would be unfair and a gross oversimplification of an extremely complicated issue. Just the same, he would be as appropriate a man as any to deliver their eulogy.
But Schmidt came to praise the newspaper industry, not to bury it. He began his talk by telling his audience just how much he thought of the work they do, and that reporters would be a necessary and enduring part of our society for centuries to come.
But consumer habits being what they are -- fickle -- Schmidt counseled that newspapers develop ways to live alongside user-generated content like Wikipedia and blogs. If there is one lesson to be pulled from phenomena like Facebook and Twitter, it's that people don't want to be alone with whatever they're reading or watching or looking at anymore. Communities can be built on top of any content-consuming (to invoke the vernacular) experience. Schmidt imagines a movie theater where the spectators are Twittering away throughout the screening. It's not too far-fetched -- it's already become a trade show at media and technology conferences (and presumably those of other industries I'm less involved with).
"All of us now live in this mixed world of user-generated content and professional content," Schmidt said.
The one-to-many media model that newspapers were born into has been in a stage of deepening discredit for some time. Newspapers get that. What they don't get is how to make money off their expensive-to-produce content in the always-on era.
For Schmidt, the answer is still advertising. Admitting he has a bias (given that Google's revenue is 98 percent ad-driven), Schmidt nonetheless held out hope that newspapers could do a better job of tapping into their data about what types of stories readers are interested in to serve more relevant ads. Sound familiar? It should -- that same data has been the cow that keeps on milking for Google.
Better ad tech could allow newspapers not only to serve more engaging, meaningful ads tailored to the stories person likes to read or the videos they like to watch, but it could also do a better job of customizing the online news experience. If you read this story yesterday, odds are you'll be interested in reading this follow-up today, essentially.
But more sophisticated ad targeting, though doubtless exciting for news executives (and troubling for privacy watchdogs), is hardly an immediate solution for an industry that will likely be much smaller when it reconvenes for its conference next year. At the moment, the debate is dominated by the idea of trying to resurrect some kind of payment system where (gasp!) users would be asked to pay for the content they consume.
Monetization schemes vary based on the size of the audience, Schmidt said. If you're Google, say, and you're looking at a global audience in excess of a billion people, advertising is the ticket. "If you're building a business with a couple million readers, maybe you should use the to-be invented micropayments systems. It's obvious that you'll need those sorts of things."
He suggested that the technology was evolving to the point where micropayments, historically a better idea in theory than practice, could actually work, so a reader would pay a penny or two for access to a really good article.
The notion of leaning on Web portals and aggregators -- Google being exhibit A -- to recoup some of the ad dollars they leach off of the content producers. News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch broached the idea at a cable conference last week in Washington. Then on Monday, the Associated Press announced its intention to go after the Web sites that won't pay freight in court.
To many, that meant Google. To enough, in fact, that the search giant put up a blog post trying to explain that the relationship between Google and the news industry was happy and symbiotic.
Schmidt took up the issue in his speech on Tuesday, reminding the audience that Google ahs a multimillion dollar deal with the Associated Press not only to distribute their content, but also to host it at our servers, so I was a little confused about all the excitement in the news in the last 24 hours."
He added, "We have a very, very successful deal with the AP, and hopefully that will continue for several years."
Of course, there has been widespread speculation that the AP will try to drive a harder bargain from Google when it comes time to renew that deal, but such was not the topic for Schmidt's closing keynote.
Instead, he cautioned against "partially-thought-out" conceptions of fair use, the legal term for the limited reuse of proprietary content. Ask a lawyer to define the term and you'll get different answers depending on what law school he attended, Schmidt said. The important thing, he said, is to stay away from destructive legal wars that could ultimately alienate the lifeline of the business -- the customer.
"Think about it in terms of what your reader wants," Schmidt told his audience. "These are ultimately consumer businesses, and if you piss enough of them off, you won't have any."
Berman planning international fight against piracy
By Kenneth Corbin | April 07, 2009Rep. Howard Berman took advantage of the two-week recess in Congress to hold a field hearing on copyright in the digital age on his home turf in Van Nuys, Calif.
With Hollywood as his constituency, Berman has a keen interest in attaching his name to legislative efforts to curb digital piracy by shoring up the country's intellectual property laws.
Berman, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, announced the launch of new campaign at Monday's hearing, pledging to partner with foreign policymakers to develop a coordinated strategy to take the fight against piracy global.
Hard numbers are difficult to come by when trying to measure the impact of digital theft, and critics of the often heavy-handed tactics of the entertainment industry in its effort to defend its intellectual property call them overstated.
Nevertheless, Berman floated figures from several groups, including the representatives of the movie and music industries quantifying the losses. In 2007, copyright infringement is blamed for $18.3 billion in trade losses, while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce tallies 750,000 jobs lost each year due to the counterfeit trade.
"The United States and its trading partners rely heavily on investments in intellectual property to drive our economies," Berman said in a statement. "Unfortunately, the incentives and profits for engaging in piracy are high, and the risks of being apprehended and sanctioned are low in many countries around the world. Piracy of copyrighted materials is not a victimless crime and its global repercussions must be addressed."
Berman promised to introduce legislation he said would help enhance the profile of intellectual-property protections overseas.
Digital-rights groups like Public Knowledge, an outspoken advocate for an update of the country's copyright laws, warn against overly aggressive copyright enforcement tactics. Techniques such as deep-packet inspection that copyright holders could use to protect their content have troubling implications for consumer privacy and the ideal of a nondiscriminatory Internet, Public Knowledge has said. The group also argues that the copyright precedent established in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act has failed to keep up with a Web 2.0 world of mash-ups and user-generated content.
AP fighting to reclaim revenue from Web portals
By Kenneth Corbin | April 06, 2009At its annual meeting today, Associated Press board of directors outlined plans to fight back against online portals and news aggregators that post news content without paying licensing fees to the AP and its member newspapers.
"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," AP Chairman Dean Singleton said at the group's meeting in San Diego. "We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more."
In a practical sense, this is the AP taking a stand for the old-line industry against the onslaught of the Web. Online portals like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) have played an important role in hollowing out the revenue model of the traditional news industry. News aggregators like the Drudge Report and Huffington post have done their share, as well.
The reality is that the online advertising economy has treated the aggregators pretty well, while the newspaper industry has been leaking money like a sieve.
So the AP, a cooperative owned collectively by its roughly 1,500 newspaper members, is fighting back. The board, whose members include prominent newspaper executives like the chief executives of Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, said it plans file suit against Web sites that publish AP content without proper licensing fees. Without naming Google or any others by name, Singleton said that the AP plans to work with portals and aggregators who legally license its content, and "to seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't."
The AP's move comes amidst considerable [hand-wringing](/commentary/article.php/3806816/If+Paid+Web+Content+Is+Dead+Are+Newspapers.htm) over what is to be done to preserve the journalism industry. Defenders of the traditional media outlets point out that most of the online journalism practiced today still rides on the back of newspapers, where professionals with the luxury of the time to stay with a story investigate and break news that is then summarized, analyzed and debated across the Web.
Just last week, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch told his audience at an event in Washington that "people are getting used to getting everything on the Net for free. That's going to have to change."
Murdoch gave voice to what's been on the mind of executives throughout the industry when he suggested that news organizations insist on some kind of revenue-sharing model before making their content available to the search engines, news portals and aggregators.
"The question is should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" Murdoch said in a characteristic bit of rhetorical flourish.
Four days later, in an industry rallying cry that bore more than a passing resemblance to some of the dispatches from the RIAA, the AP announced that it is developing a system to ferret out unlawful use of its content around the Internet.
Commerce chief Locke christens 'Broadband Nation'
By Kenneth Corbin | April 01, 2009Gary Locke seems a fitting choice for a ribbon cutting ceremony at an exhibit called "Broadband Nation."
Here at the cable show, an annual event hosted by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the newly minted Commerce Secretary presided over the christening of the 20,000 square-foot pavilion on the show's exhibit floor. There, the cable folks have erected an elaborate tribute to their role in delivering broadband and its many benefits to the country in these dark times.
So it seems appropriate for Obama's (third) choice to head Commerce to cut the ribbon, given the administration's evident commitment to expand broadband access and adoption, most clearly seen in the billions of dollars allocated to that end in the economic stimulus bill.
"We know that the money is not enough to serve the entire nation," Locke said. "But clearly this is a down payment on the vision of the president of advanced telecommunications at the fingertips of every single individual throughout America -- broadband telecommunications."
Indeed, NCTA head Kyle McSlarrow and company were lucky to have Locke on hand. One of his handlers told InternetNews.com that his attendance was only locked down this week, and that he had to dash off to a more pressing engagement immediately following the photo opp.
Count D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton among the no-show politicos on this first day of the show.
Before the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Locke was given a VIP tour of the pavilion, where a few select exhibitors got to show off broadband-enabled technologies like an interactive virtual classroom from Discovery.
Clearly they had a receptive audience.
"It's impossible for an elementary school or a middle school or a high school to offer a teacher in every single subject mater that a student may be interested in," Locke said in his remarks after the tour. "But through the power of technology -- the Internet, and of course the incredible speeds offered by cable -- those students can be taking courses ... in a subject matter that's not offered in the school. There's really no reason why they can't be sitting in on lectures at M.I.T. or Harvard or Stanford."
And with that, the exhibit floor was officially open.
