Washington Post

Wireless industry lobbying group CTIA named Meredith Attwell Baker as its new president, another remarkable appointment for the former member of the Federal Communications Commission who has quickly climbed the ranks of a private sector she once regulated.

Baker will begin her new job June 2, after nearly three years as a high-level lobbyist for Comcast, where she promoted issues favorable for the cable giant. Public interest groups had criticized her move from the FCC to Comcast soon after she voted in favor of the cable company's merger with NBC Universal.

Critics said that Baker's move to the cable firm highlighted a revolving door between the FCC and the companies they regulate and raised potential conflicts of interests. Former FCC chairman Michael Powell now heads the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

At the CTIA, Baker will head the vast lobbying organization for wireless firms ahead of a historic auction of public airwaves in 2015. The group's biggest members -- AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Sprint -- represent the fastest-growing segments of the telecom industry.

Baker will replace Steve Largent, who reportedly had a salary of about $2.7 million in 2013.

[Commentary] Depending on the outcome of the Aereo case, the battle could either solidify TV networks' grip over their content or throw the doors open to a future where consumers will be able to get traditional, over-the-air programming over the Internet instead.

Either way, the case promises to have huge implications for the way we watch TV. So here's a quick primer to get up to speed.

• What is Aereo? Based in New York City, Aereo uses tiny antennas to grab TV signals out of the air. Those antennas feed the broadcast programming to a DVR, which then plays the programming back to you on your PC, tablet or phone on demand. The technology is cloud-based, meaning it works a lot like Dropbox or Google Drive: The TV shows are stored online, then served to you over the Internet.
• Why is it so controversial? At issue is whether Aereo should have to pay money to TV broadcasters for their content. Right now, Aereo pays nothing -- it gets the TV signals for free just as you or I might with our own televisions. But unlike us, Aereo gets to make money off of relaying those transmissions over the Web. Broadcasters have challenged Aereo on that around the country, accusing it in court of stealing their work and infringing their copyright. They'd much prefer Aereo do what cable companies do, which is to pay "retransmission" fees for the right to carry broadcast content on cable.
• What's really at stake here? If Aereo is allowed to avoid paying retransmission fees, and more people start watching TV on Aereo instead of their cable subscriptions, that's money the broadcasters are losing out on.
• Suppose Aereo wins at the Supreme Court. Then what? Aereo would still need to prove that it's a viable business. With more and more people turning to Internet video, the commercial odds appear to be in its favor. That could change, however, if the broadcasters themselves start getting into Internet-enabled, or "over-the-top" TV.

[Commentary] Tens of thousands of software engineers are currently suing Apple, Google and a host of other companies for a shot at reclaiming wages they say the tech firms stole from them.

How? The engineers say Apple's Steve Jobs, Google's Eric Schmidt and other top Silicon Valley executives secretly agreed not to hire away valuable employees from each other. The resulting industry-wide moratorium on talent poaching allegedly resulted in suppressed wages as people who would've been offered higher salaries to work elsewhere never got the opportunity.

The particulars of the case are rather well-trodden at this point, but a settlement is said to be near; going to trial would mean the tech companies could face as much as a $9 billion penalty.

It's interesting to think about Apple and its rivals secretly colluding to keep the price of labor down. But the case is also taking place against the backdrop of several other economic trends. And in some respects, this class-action suit over wage theft actually cuts against the grain.

• Inequality. Silicon Valley is beset by a reputation -- earned or otherwise -- for egotism, a growing wealth gap and a lack of self-awareness that the rest of the country mistrusts. Software engineers tend to be extremely well-compensated -- particularly the highest performers -- compared to the rest of us. Driving their wages up even higher would likely have made places such as San Francisco even less livable.
• Youth. Silicon Valley has an obsession with youthfulness. The fascination with youth is also somewhat cultural. Thanks to Facebook and Google -- two of what might be dozens of tech companies with compelling coming-of-age stories -- we now find it normal, if not desirable, that college kids build the next great economic empire with a few lines of code.
• Immigration. The informal agreement not to poach each other's workers artificially restricts the labor pool and "forces" companies to look elsewhere for talent.

[Commentary] The Washington Post’s editorial on Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable [“Cable merger,” April 15] served up a rather tepid endorsement of the mega-deal, saying the government should okay the merger, but “keep a close eye” on the new company.

Considering the poor track record of these two cable and Internet giants and the power they would wield as a single company, this merger should be flatly rejected.

The editorial correctly raised concerns about the conflicts of interest that could lead Comcast to give preference to its own products on the wires it owns. But it dismissed the very real prospect that a bigger Comcast could discriminate heavily in negotiations with content creators, which would likely be passed on to consumers in the form of even higher prices.

[Derakhshani is policy counsel with Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports]

Ever since the DC Circuit court ruled that the government can't ban Internet providers from blocking or prioritizing Web traffic, the Federal Communications Commission has been looking for a way to get around the ruling.

For network neutrality advocates, the few proposals that have emerged so far aren't satisfying; they're all a little risky, and they aren't guaranteed to produce the results that the FCC wants. Now a new recommendation has federal regulators sitting up. Under the proposal, regulators would surgically apply new rules on Internet providers that otherwise could only be imposed on phone companies. And with that, the FCC could solve some of the thorniest issues surrounding net neutrality, according to a paper co-written by Columbia Law scholars Tim Wu (who coined the term "net neutrality") and Tejas Narechania.

They argue that the FCC should selectively be able to apply more stringent, telecommunications-type regulations to certain aspects of an industry that tends to escape easy definition. From Wu and Narechania's perspective, this describes exactly what phone companies do: Establish the connection between a caller and a responder for the purposes of a transaction. And this telecommunications function is increasingly what we pay Internet providers to do -- unlike before, when they offered telecommunications as one of a bundle of features that together added up to an "information service."

Under these conditions, the authors say, the FCC would be completely justified in applying Title II of the Communications Act -- the part of the FCC's congressional charter that lets it apply blanket restrictions on phone companies -- to broadband companies, which are currently regulated lightly as Title I businesses.

If “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory were a guest on his own show, he knows the kinds of questions he’d be asked.

Why have your ratings been falling? Is the show in trouble? Is your job in trouble?

During the first three months of 2014, the NBC program finished behind perennial rivals “Face the Nation” on CBS and “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, despite being helped by two weeks of Winter Olympics hoopla. In the final quarter of 2013, viewing among people ages 25 to 54, the preferred group for TV news advertisers, fell to its lowest level ever.

The good news for all these news shows is that they remain among the most durable on TV, if perhaps less influential than they once were. Even as everything else on TV has lost viewers over time, the Big Three have held steady and even gained viewers. Collectively, about 9.6 million people watched them each week during the first three months of 2014, about the same number that watched Russert in 2005. This doesn’t count the audience for innumerable Sunday-morning competitors, from Fox News Sunday (hosted by former “Meet the Press” moderator Chris Wallace) to “Al Punto” on Univision. The shows can occasionally make news, too, if the interview subject is big enough.

Privacy advocates are warning that the legal gray area in a key court case may make it easier for the government to spy on Americans illegally.

By using what's called a pen trap order -- a type of judicially approved surveillance mechanism that's only supposed to capture metadata about electronic communications -- it appears that the government has the theoretical ability to capture the content of those communications as well. The case involves Lavabit, the secure e-mail service used by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

Broadly, the case is about whether the government can force an Internet company like Lavabit to hand over its encryption keys. In a ruling, a federal appeals court sided with law enforcement. But a closer look at just how the government can obtain the keys has civil liberties scholars very worried. If the government can use an order that's restricted to metadata to obtain keys it could then use to decrypt content, then a nefarious actor could gain access to content without jumping through the judicial hoops necessary for demanding content.

China has unfurled a vigorous new campaign to clean up the Internet, to purge it of everything from pornography to “rumors” that might undermine Communist Party rule, a crusade that critics say is a renewed attempt to silence grass-roots voices and stifle dissent.

Censorship of the media and Internet is routine in China, but the new campaign appears to represent a significant tightening of the screws, a bid to bend the Web to the will and values of the Communist Party -- to ensure, in the words of blogger Zhang Jialong, that “party organs, and not the Chinese grass roots, have the loudest voice on the country’s Internet.”

The drive, to “sweep out porn, strike at rumors,” will run from mid-April until November, the party’s news portal Seeking Truth declared that part of the stiffer controls on freedom of expression and the Internet that have been imposed since President Xi Jinping took power in 2013.

With buzz building about Google's newest project, the build-it-yourself smartphone known as "Project Ara," it's worth noting that some company observers are concerned about what Google's side projects are doing to its profit margins.

The tech giant is set to report earnings for the first quarter of 2014, and while analysts expect that it will post solid revenue, a growing number of voices are asking whether the company is spending its money wisely.

Google is, primarily, a search and advertising company. But it's clearly happy to invest in a variety of other projects that aim to tackle big problems and new challenges. These, in turn, offer Google new ways to make money -- something that's particularly important as the average cost of an online ad drops, and Web users shift more heavily to mobile devices, where the ads aren't as lucrative.

The average American household connects to the Internet at a rate of 10 megabits per second. Not bad, but also not fantastic -- by way of comparison, a single HD Netflix stream takes up 5.8 Mbps of bandwidth.

Now with that as our baseline, consider the speeds of the country's fastest Internet connections today: 1 Gbps, or a gigabit per second. That's equivalent to 1,000 Mbps, or roughly 100 times faster than the national average.

But if you thought that was fast, wait until you hear about a new Wi-Fi router, from Quantenna, that's coming in 2015. It's capable of 10 Gbps -- 10 gigabits per second. That's a thousand times the rate of the average American broadband connection. It's mindboggling. You could theoretically stream 1,724 Netflix movies, all in HD, all at the same time and not see any lag.

But since the average household Web connection is still lagging at 10 Mbps, it'll be hard for most people to take advantage of the 10-gig router right away. They simply don't consume enough data to need the giant pipes provided by this new technology.