The South Dakota Broadband Initiative revised the terms of its federal grant money and budget, the South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications said in a blog post Wednesday (http://bit.ly/12j8WAa). “The funding shifts allow for a 50 percent expansion in grant-equipment offerings to Community Anchor Institutions, additional opportunities to travel and carry on the digital dialog and more technical assistance and planning for anchor institutions,” it said. The bureau has sought to make these changes for nearly a year, it added.
House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., asked the Government Accountability Office in a letter to study the impact of usage-based broadband pricing. “I'm concerned that usage-based pricing, particularly when applied discriminatorily or at arbitrarily low levels, could discourage the innovation, competition and consumer choice that have been the hallmark of the Internet’s success to date,” the letter said. Eshoo specifically asked the agency to determine how much data the average consumer uses each month, how broadband providers notify consumers about their data usage, whether it’s more expensive for a broadband provider to serve a customer who consumes more data, and determine the rationale behind using broadband data caps, among other questions.
Five energy companies asked the FCC to move forward on a long-stalled item and assign various spectrum licenses to them from Maritime Communications/Land Mobile so they can provide “private, internal applications, in furtherance of their provision of safe and efficient energy services to the American public.” The filing was signed by Atlas Pipeline Mid-Continent, Dixie Electric Membership Corp., Enbridge Energy, Encana Oil & Gas and Jackson County Rural Electric Membership Corp. “Years ago, twelve Critical Infrastructure Companies -- four oil and gas companies, seven electric utilities, and one railroad -- entered into separate deals with Maritime because they needed spectrum,” said Jack Richards of Keller and Heckman, who represents the applicants on the matter. “They did nothing wrong, but the FCC has refused to process their applications pending an investigation of Maritime’s alleged misconduct eight years ago.” Four of the 12 withdrew their applications, Richards said. “The rest of them are hopeful this … filing will allow the FCC to provide long overdue relief. It’s up to the FCC.”
The most frequent digital infringers generally consume more legal files, and spend more on legitimate content, than other infringers, a report for the U.K. Office of Communications found. The report (http://xrl.us/bo2hpy) analyzed combined data from Ofcom’s first two online copyright infringement tracking studies to try to figure out the “complex relationship between general consumption, infringement, attitudes, and spending” across six key content types. It found that the top 10 percent of infringers accounted for just 1.6 percent of the over-12s Internet user population but were responsible for 79 percent of infringed content. The top 20 percent of infringers accounted for 88 percent of unauthorized uses, it said. Infringers were mostly males aged 16-34. But despite their high levels of infringement, the top 20 percent group also accounted for 11 percent of the legal content consumed, and they also spent much more over the six-month period analyzed for all content types on average (168 pounds, or $261) than either the bottom 80 percent of infringers (105 pounds) or non-infringing consumers (54 pounds), it said. The report divided infringers by their reasons for accessing protected content. Justifying infringers, with the highest levels of unauthorized access, felt they had already spent enough on content, a sentiment confirmed by their high total offline spend. This group generally liked to try before they bought, and appeared to be most receptive to good, well-priced legal offers, the report said. Digital transgressors were the youngest group of infringers, with the highest levels of downloading behavior and greater consumption and films and TV programs than justifying infringers. This group “showed the least remorse” but was most afraid of getting caught. These infringers appear to be most receptive to getting letters from ISPs alleging infringement, the report said. Free infringers formed the largest group, which was mainly defined by the fact that its members infringed because it was free. They were responsible for the great majority of illegal consumption of videogames and computer software. Ambiguous infringers had the lowest levels of digital consumption and the highest proportion of paid and legal content. They generally offered fewer justifications for accessing unauthorized content and for stopping infringing. “Infringers generally consumed more paid and legal content than the non-infringing segments, although this formed a lower proportion of their total consumption than it did for non-infringers,” the report said. The study also divided consumers who downloaded or streamed legal content only into four segments: (1) Simple streamers, who only streamed content and didn’t download anything. (2) Simple downloaders, who only downloaded and didn’t stream. (3) Paying consumers, who paid for most of the content they consumed and also spent a lot on offline content. (4) Free opportunists, who claimed to download because it’s free, and who consumed a higher volume of free content than any of the other non-infringing segments. The report found that 62 percent of people infringed only one type of content, mostly music or films. Where there was infringement of more than one kind of content, it generally included combinations of music, films and TV shows; in addition, infringement of computer software and videogames was more likely among those who infringed four or more kinds of content. Further analysis looked at the relationship between infringement and spending on content to see if unauthorized consumption could be converted to legal users. The data generally showed that as people accessed more infringing files they also consumed more legal content and spent more on it, the report said. The optimum price that infringers were willing to pay for single tracks or particular premium subscriptions generally rose as the volume of infringed content increased. This suggests that better legal alternatives could possibly convert some music infringers to paying customers for content if the price is right, the report said. “However, the relationship between infringement and spend[ing] is complex and the claims people make when asked questions about their likely future behaviours given changes to their options do not always closely reflect their real-life behaviour."
Correction: CMRS is the type of provider Phoenix Center President Lawrence Spiwak said needs more spectrum (CD May 6 p3).
The FCC should clarify that Internet Protocol interconnection with ILECs for managed VoIP service is governed by Section 251 of the Communications Act, Cablevision and Charter Communications told agency officials Monday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/ZQdlMm). ILECs are “unwilling to provide IP interconnection on commercially reasonable terms (if at all),” the cable companies said. As ILECs remain the dominant providers of fixed voice services in “all or virtually all markets in the country,” the commission should clarify their IP interconnection obligations “expeditiously,” the operators said.
Time Warner Cable petitioned to be excluded from municipal rate-setting for basic-video and some other prices in 26 communities in New York this week, said filings posted in FCC docket 12-1. The petition cited video competition from DirecTV and Dish Network. The proposed deregulation would affect around 21,000 households in communities including Clayton, Norfolk and Hounsfield (http://bit.ly/YuXamV).
Collecting data on rural call completion isn’t enough, by itself, to resolve the problem, NARUC told the FCC Wednesday in docket 13-39. The commission should take additional measures, NARUC said, including requiring the industry to track and report the reasons for call completion failure, requiring a timed message alerting callers that their call is being routed and requiring call path entities to register with the FCC. NARUC also wants the commission to eliminate any “safe harbors” for collection and retention of call completion data. The NPRM’s proposal to allow a carrier safe harbor if its “answer rates” on calls to rural areas are within 2 percent of calls to non-rural areas “suggests that 2 percent is an acceptable call completion performance differential,” NARUC said. “There is no evidence or rationale cited in the NPRM to justify this performance differential.” NARUC also wants states to get access to intrastate call data to help with call completion enforcement.
International Launch Services plans to launch the EUTELSAT 3D satellite Tuesday from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, ILS said in a news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/18ZzQ25). The satellite will be placed at 3 degrees east until the 2014 launch of Eutelsat 3B “that will further extend coverage to South America,” ILS said. “It will subsequently continue services at 7 degrees east.” Eutelsat 3D will serve customers in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, it added.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said he’s concerned U.S. legislators and investigative agencies aren’t doing enough to prosecute hackers who are stealing money and intellectual property from American companies and consumers. Whitehouse’s comments came Wednesday during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime hearing which he chaired. Despite recent high-profile arrests of hackers from organizations like Anonymous, AntiSec and LulzSec, the Justice Department and FBI must do more to stop foreign governments from hacking the U.S., he said. “It is all well and good to complain about such threats through diplomatic channels, but at some point you have to stop complaining and start indicting.” Despite the administration’s call for additional cyberfunding in the 2014 federal budget, Whitehouse said he thought federal agencies are understaffed and underresourced to address the threat. “My impression is that they are working so hard to figure out who is coming through the windows … that there hasn’t been the capability to turn that information into a prosecution … and put someone on the business end of an indictment,” he said. Both Whitehouse and Subcommittee Ranking Member Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the Chinese government is to blame for much of the cybertheft and cyberespionage against U.S. businesses. “Our Chinese friends seem hell-bent on stealing anything they can get their hands on in America,” Graham said. He said the most “practical solution” to protect U.S. cyberassets is to get the private sector to harden its defenses through voluntary cybersecurity incentives. The government needs to “up our game” and reshape its approach to prosecuting cybercrimes, much like the way Eliot Ness enforced prohibition rules in the 1930s, Graham said. “To me, we seem to have a new emerging crime wave here."