Ownership

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has a lot on his plate, to say the least. And a new report from Wall Street investment firm Wells Fargo outlines just how many balls Stephenson has in the air as he works to integrate the Time Warner business, pay down a massive amount of debt, deploy 5G, stamp out a winning position in the video business, and build out fiber to millions of new locations. Indeed, the severity of the situation led the analysts at Wells Fargo to downgrade its rating on AT&T stock based on the company's top three major challenges:

The Federal Trade Commission will begin its Hearings Initiative with two full-day sessions, co-sponsored with and held at the Georgetown University Law Center, on Sept 13 and 14, 2018. The Georgetown event will be the first in a series of hearings that will examine whether broad-based changes in the economy, evolving business practices, new technologies, or international developments might require adjustments to competition and consumer protection enforcement priorities of the Commission.

T-Mobile, the nation’s third-largest wireless carrier, said that it had discovered a data breach potentially affecting some of its customers' account information. No financial data was stolen in the incident, the company said, but some personal details such as customer names, email addresses, phone numbers and account numbers may have been compromised. In a statement on its website, T-Mobile said it uncovered the hack on Aug 20. The company “promptly reported it to authorities” and shut down the attack.

Print isn’t dead. But the soaring cost of newsprint is contributing to the slow death of America’s newspapers. A months-long spike in the price of paper, driven by federal tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Canadian suppliers, is slamming newspapers at a time when the news about the news industry wasn’t very good to begin with.

A backlash against the app stores of Apple and Google is gaining steam, with a growing number of companies saying the tech giants are collecting too high a tax for connecting consumers to developers’ wares. Netflix and video game makers Epic Games and Valve are among companies that have recently tried to bypass the app stores or complained about the cost of the tolls Apple and Google charge. Grumbling about app store economics isn’t new.

The Federal Communications Commission has denied a request to stop the clock or extend the pleading cycle associated with the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint combination. The FCC denied the request by Public Knowledge, the Benton Foundation, and others to stop the review clock in order for operators to supplement their public interest statement with more specific information. In denying the request, the FCC said the the movants failed to establish any basis for granting the extension.

When Verizon proposed dozens of 5G small-cell antennas along streets in Doylestown Borough (PA), the reaction was a defiant no.

The News Media Alliance has told the Federal Trade Commission that it needs to take action to "rein in tech giants' anticompetitive conduct." That came in comments to the agency in advance of a planned series of public hearings over the next six months or so on competition and consumer protection policy in the digital age. It told the FTC that the Googles and Facebooks of the world did not get to be dominant in distribution and monetization on their merits alone.

Facebook has begun to assign its users a reputation score, predicting their trustworthiness on a scale from zero to 1. The previously unreported ratings system, which Facebook has developed over the past year, shows that the fight against the gaming of tech systems has evolved to include measuring the credibility of users to help identify malicious actors. Facebook developed its reputation assessments as part of its effort against fake news, Tessa Lyons, the product manager who is in charge of fighting misinformation, said in an interview.

Every year since 2004, Pew Research Center has issued an annual assessment of the state of the news media that tracks key audience and economic indicators for a variety of sectors within the US news media industry. Here are the key findings for 2017: