GigaOm

Faced with difficult questions about his company’s pending takeover of Time Warner Cable -- which would combine the two largest cable Internet providers in the US into a company consumers will likely hate twice as much -- Comcast CEO Brian Roberts made one thing very clear: his company is determined to sit directly in the middle of the tech world.

Roberts said Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once told him that Comcast “should be the best dumb pipe,” a common sentiment in the tech industry that Internet service providers should get out of the way of the content and device industries and just provide reliable broadband service. But avoiding that low-margin fate has been a telecommunications vow for decades, and Roberts made it very clear that Comcast wants to be “the best pipe.” That means it wants to preserve a gatekeeper role.

In a series of analogies, Roberts likened his company’s role to that of a postmaster, pointing out that Netflix pays hundreds of millions of dollars to mail DVDs to its customers but now expects to be able to deliver the same content over the Internet for free.

[Commentary] The Justice Department filed its response to Apple’s appeal of a 2013 price-fixing verdict that found the iPhone maker had brokered a conspiracy among book publishers to fix the price of e-books.

The government brief is 117 pages long and recounts familiar allegations: that Apple helped big publishers create a new pricing scheme in 2012 in order to get books on its new iPad device, and to wrest the e-book market from Amazon.

The new brief contains rhetorical flourishes such as “publishers fear and loathe $9.99 E-book pricing,” and also makes the unlikely assertion that Apple organized the conspiracy because it “cared about iBookstore profits” and about earning a 30 percent commission (unlikely since e-book revenues are chickenfeed to a company that sells hundreds of millions of iPhones).

The most interesting part of the brief, however, may be the Justice Department’s descriptions of Amazon. Even though Amazon is cast as one of the victims of the conspiracy, the brief reveals the immense power the retail giant held over the publishing world in 2011.

This begs the question of why the Justice Department continues to train all of its antitrust fire on Apple, which continues to be an also-ran in the e-book market with a market share reportedly around 10 percent for most publishers. Why not investigate Amazon instead? Section 2 of the Sherman Act holds that a company violates antitrust law if it has monopoly power and uses that power in improper ways.

Amazon responded to the ongoing controversy over its decision to limit availability of Hachette titles as the companies try to negotiate a new contract.

[Commentary] Apple’s iPad line now qualifies for educational discounts for the first time. The company has long discounted its Mac computers for educators and students, but the tablet, which debuted in 2010, was never part of that promotion.

Both the full-sized iPad and iPad mini qualify for $20 to $30 price cuts for eligible purchases according to Mac Rumors.

I have to wonder: Has Apple decided to stem the growing tide of Chromebooks in schools with this pricing promotion?

The growing number of Chromebooks making their way into the classroom, combined with iPad sales that are still rising overall but at a slower rate, make Apple’s decision to reduce iPad prices intriguing. Let’s see if Apple puts even more emphasis on education at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC); if so, that would be telling.

Microsoft Research has developed a new framework for automatically figuring out which lines of code inside massive systems might conflict with corporate privacy policies.

It’s an important goal in today’s technology world where ever-present threats of data breaches and lawsuits, as well as the specter of looming government regulation, have smart companies preparing for whatever might come their way. The really novel thing about Microsoft’s framework is that it was designed to bring together teams of personnel that might never interact directly otherwise, so that the compliance process is faster and less prone to errors.

The system involves a high-level language called Legalease, which lets lawyers and policy employees encode corporate privacy policies into a machine-readable format, and a tool called Grok that inventories big data systems and checks them against those policies. “Ultimately, the truth about what’s happening with this data is in the code,” researcher Saikat Guha explained.

But with millions of lines of code (a fair amount of which changes daily) in a product such as Bing -- on which the Microsoft Research project was prototyped -- it can be difficult to figure out what data is being stored where, how it’s being used as part of any given job and whether that usage complies with privacy rules.

Guha and his team hope the new framework though will speed the process and make it more accurate by letting all of these steps occur in parallel.

[Commentary] Forget fast lanes and slow lanes. Viacom has headed straight for the off-ramp from Phoenix-based cable operator Cable One’s broadband platform. The MTV and Comedy Central parent confirmed that it is blocking online access to its content by Cable One broadband subscribers as part of a pay-TV carriage dispute with the operator that has led to Viacom channels going dark on the system.

“Cable One has chosen to no longer carry Viacom programming and, as a result, it is no longer available to Cable One customers in any form,” Viacom said.

Fear of fast lanes (FOFL) comes in two primary flavors. Some fear that allowing paid prioritization will enable the biggest content providers -- Netflix, YouTube, the NFL ---- to pay for exclusive fast lanes, relegating everyone else inevitably to slow internet lanes. The other type of FOFL, expressed primarily by large content providers like Netflix and YouTube but echoed by others, is that permitting paid prioritization, particularly if coupled with unregulated peering policies, will leave them vulnerable to extortion by last mile ISPs. That is the essence of Netflix’s complaints about Comcast and Verizon: They shook us down for “interconnection” fees because they could. Given legal cover by the FCC, they fear, the shake downs will only become more common and more onerous. Those two propositions are not quite mutually exclusive. But they strongly suggest we’re not all talking about the same thing when we talk about fast lanes and slow lanes. In the former, it is Netflix we the rest of us need to fear; in the latter, Netflix is imagined to be powerless against ISPs.

But to see the danger of premature rule-setting you need look no further than the broadcast retransmission regime, which, as established by Congress and given full regulatory heft by the FCC. Those rules, as currently written, heavily favor broadcasters over pay-TV provider, leading to absurdly one-sided “negotiations” over retransmission fees that lead to ever-higher prices for consumers. As CBS made plain with its blackout of TWC broadband subscribers, in fact, broadcasters are more than happy to try to stretch their legally sanctified leverage in the pay-TV market into the nominally unregulated online market.

[Sweeting is Principal, Concurrent Media Strategies]

[Commentary] For consumers staring at their screen wondering why “House of Cards” is not streaming in HD or why the live season finale of “True Detective” on HBO GO is displaying a “buffering, please standby” message, there are often more questions than answers and a slew of potential culprits.

As frustrating as things can be now, there are some future scenarios where the situation could get worse.

Since launching Qwilt in 2011, I’ve seen online video grow to be one of the hardest challenges network operators face today. We’ve reached the point in the evolution of online streaming where more open and transparent interaction among ecosystem members is in order. To this end, an industry forum may be a suitable vehicle to allow all members of the ecosystem, regardless of their size and role, to have a seat at the table.

This forum, a video streaming alliance, would be charged with creating an open architecture for interconnection so members can know what to expect from each other in terms of operations, quality, security and privacy. Mutual goals of transparency, open architecture and quality of service will almost certainly emerge as themes to get the industry alliance off the ground.

[Maor is CEO of Qwilt]

Counterpoint Technology Market Research reported that T-Mobile was the third-largest US purchaser of smartphones in the first quarter, overtaking Sprint.

T-Mobile bought 6 million smartphones for itself and its mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) during the period, according to Counterpoint analyst Neil Shah, outpacing Sprint’s 5 million units. T-Mobile recently posted its best quarter ever, adding 2.4 million subscribers to claim the lion’s share of the US market’s core subscriber growth.

T-Mobile has made big strides with its infrastructure lately, too: it launched voice-over-LTE in Seattle on three handsets, and has been using a technology dubbed 4×2 MIMO to improve signal strength and connection speeds on its LTE network.

Google is working with Wi-Fi equipment maker Ruckus Wireless to build a large-scale Wi-Fi network in the cloud off of which any business could hang its wireless routers, according to a source familiar with the project who asked not to be named.

Google has been working closely with Ruckus, trialing a new software-based wireless controller that virtualizes the management functions of the Wi-Fi network in the cloud, according to a source. The end result would be a nationwide -- or even global -- network that any business could join and any Google customer could access. The source also confirmed earlier reports that:

• Google will offer the service to businesses for free as long as they agree to join its public network, though businesses will have to supply their own broadband connections.
• Hotspot 2.0 will have a big role to play in the network, connecting smartphones and tablets automatically and securely to any Google-powered access point, much like they would connect to their mobile carrier’s 3G of 4G network.
• Google will be able to provide analytics to businesses about consumers that use networks, separating out location-specific information from the data collected by the virtual network as a whole.

For long-time web users, the layoffs announcement from Metafilter -- a pioneering online community that has been around since 1999 -- was a little like hearing that an old friend is in hospital with a fatal illness: founder Matt Haughey said that due to a dramatic decline in traffic and related advertising revenue, the site has had to lay off several of its moderators and is essentially on financial life-support.

And the name at the center of this drama likely won’t come as much of a surprise: Google. Haughey describes how traffic to the site suddenly cratered in mid-2012, with visits falling by more than 40 percent. At around the same time, Google was rolling out an update to its indexing algorithm -- an update known as Panda -- which was designed to promote high-quality content and down-grade spam sites, as well as those using a variety of search-engine optimization or SEO tricks.

As with most things involving Google and its algorithms, what happened to Metafilter is almost impossible to diagnose, because the search giant’s methods -- and the motivation for any changes -- are a black box. Haughey theorizes that the change occurred around the Panda update and was exacerbated by subsequent updates, but Search Engine Land founder and Google expert Danny Sullivan pointed out that the dramatic drop-off in traffic doesn’t really line up with any of the company’s major algorithm tweaks.