Legislation
  • Media Access Project Expresses Support for Reform of FCC Retransmission Consent Process

    WASHINGTON — Andrew Jay Schwartzman, President and CEO of Media Access Project (MAP), issued the following statement regarding the petition being filed today with the Federal Communications Commission by cable operators and other groups, asking the agency to reform its retransmission consent process:

    “The system is out of balance. Increasingly, broadcasters are demanding that the public pay them for access to their TV channels, even though they receive free use of public airwaves. People are tired of paying ever more for the same thing. Viewers should not be used as pawns in contract negotiations, but that is what the broadcasters are doing.

  • Citizens Groups Ask FCC to Address Diversity in Telecom, Media Ownership and Programming

    A coalition of public interest organizations sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski yesterday, calling on the Commission to make increased diversity in the media and broadband communications landscape a top priority. The groups issued the following joint statement:

    “Historically marginalized communities still face countless barriers to their own members’ provision and ownership of communications services. The Communications Act instructs the Commission to examine these barriers and take steps to eliminate them. This Commission has taken strides in this area, yet much work remains to be done to address persistent and growing digital divides.

    Read the letter here.

  • Why Ad Blocking is Devastating to the Sites You Love

    Several of MAP’s staffers have installed ad blockers on their Internet browsers, and many readers of RoadMAP have probably done so as well. Here comes the Editor In Chief of RoadMAP’s favorite tech site, Ars Technica, begging all of us not to use our ad blockers because it threatens to kill off free content on the Internet. (By the way, Ars is hardly a hand-to-mouth startup. It is owned by Conde Nast, which also owns The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and other major magazines. This plea has forced RoadMAP to rethink its practice.

    Why Ad Blocking is Devastating to the Sites You Love

    Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I’m going to explain why.

    There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don’t pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising. (Although a few thousand of you are subscribers, and we thank you all very, very much!)

    MORE:
    Ars Technica

  • Getting Older Without Getting Old

    Here is an interesting real-life discussion of the impact of Metcalfe’s Law.

    Getting Older Without Getting Old

    Facebook now has more than 400 million active users, up from only 50 million as recently as 2007. If social networking still resembled a young, hip downtown nightclub scene – one day a site is hot, the next it’s not – we might expect the crowds to decamp soon. Facebook would become another Friendster, still around but ghostly, forgotten by most.

    Facebook, however, isn’t likely to have such a fate. For one thing, it has attracted many “olds,” and they tend to stay put. (Consider AOL.) More than 50 percent of Facebook’s members in the United States are 35 or older, and only 26.8 percent are 24 or under, according to an analysis of December visitors by comScore Media Metrix.

    More than demographic stability favors Facebook. The site has shrewdly emulated the “network effects” strategy used by another brand that has long held a dominant position in the computer industry: Microsoft Windows.

    MORE:
    New York Times

  • Patently Stupid -Apple's Multitouch Lawsuit is Both Dumb and Dangerous.

    Apple has started a major war against Google by suing a third party. Slate has a great article on the litigation which places it in the broader context of the current state of high-tech patent law.

    RoadMAP is also sending along a bonus link. Yesterday’s RoadMAP, about Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek essay on why the Internet was all hype has generated a good bit of positive feedback, so RoadMAP thought it would be a good idea to share another Slate post placing Stoll’s article in perspective.

    Speaking of positive feedback, RoadMAP has been getting a lot lately. There’s always room for more people, so please, please, please share RoadMAP with your friends and colleagues.

    Patently Stupid -Apple’s Multitouch Lawsuit is Both Dumb and Dangerous.

    When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at 2007’s Macworld conference, he began by describing the device’s groundbreaking user interface. “We have invented a new technology called ‘multi-touch’ which is phenomenal,” Jobs said. “It works like magic.” In his superlative-laden way, Jobs explained that Apple’s new touch screen was so sensitive that you could use it without a stylus, so smart that it could detect and ignore unintended touches, so elegant that it could understand elaborate multifinger gestures. And then he added five words to emphasize how special and unique this multitouch technology was: “Boy, have we patented it!”

    Now Jobs is making good on that implied threat. This week, Apple filed a lawsuit against the Taiwanese electronics company HTC, alleging that HTC’s devices infringe on 20 Apple patents related to the iPhone. Because many of HTC’s phones run Google’s Android operating system-that includes the Google Nexus One, which HTC manufactures for the search company-Apple’s suit is best read as a proxy war against Google. Apple is suing HTC because suing Google would be more expensive and worse for public relations. Going after HTC achieves the same result without all the awkwardness of suing the tech world’s 800-pound gorilla.

    MORE:
    Slate

    BONUS LINK:
    Slate