The Federal Communications Commission ordered Comcast on Wednesday to place Bloomberg News in the same channel neighborhood as other news channels like CNBC as part of the neighborhooding condition attached to the Comcast-NBC Universal merger. The FCC's order settles a long-running dispute between the two companies over whether the condition applies to channels carried by Comcast before the merger (the Commission's Media Bureau concluded it does). Comcast has indicated it plans to challenge the ruling.
News Corp Scandal to Cross the Atlantic? Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent a letter on Wednesday to Lord Justice Brian Leveson, who is leading the British special investigation into the phone hacking scandal at News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation. Rockefeller asked whether the inquiry has uncovered any new information suggesting News International's actions involved U.S. citizens or violated U.S. law. News International is under investigation after journalists were found to have hacked into the voicemail accounts of members of the Royal Family and other news subjects. Subsequent allegations have emerged of News International officials bribing police and other public officials for information.A report from Parliament released this week found News Corp. Rupert Murdoch chairman "unfit" to run a major international company and accused him of turning a blind eye to the actions taking place under his nose. The report raises questions about the News Corp's 39 percent stake in British broadcaster BSkyB and whether the company will be allowed to continue holding a broadcast license there. The reverberations didn't take long to reach Washington, as the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) quickly sent a letter to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, arguing the agency should revoke the broadcast licenses for the 27 stations owned by News Corp. under the Fox network banner.
Lack of candor with the government is one of the reasons the FCC can revoke a broadcaster's license, so we will be watching closely as this saga unfolds.
International Cooperation Crucial to Fighting Cybercrime: CQ Homeland Security's Rob Margetta reports experts from Europe and the U.S. emphasized the need for international cooperation to tackle cybercrime at a forum on Wednesday. The E.U. is particularly focused on domain name issues, since about half of the data given to the five largest domain providers by applicants turns out to be fake. The E.U. is hoping the U.S. can pressure ICANN, the nonprofit that coordinates Internet addresses globally, to take action to reduce that fraud. A DHS representative also noted understandings of privacy differ across the Atlantic. Europeans are more focused on being able to control who has access to their personal information, while Americans are more focused on keeping the government out of their lives. Pew: One-Third of Teens Use Online Video: The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Lift Project released a short report on Thursday regarding online video use by teenage Web users. The report notes 37 percent of Web users between ages 12 and 17 participate in video chats using services like Skype and iChat, with girls being more likely to do so than boys. 27 percent of Web teens record and upload video to the Internet, while another 13 percent stream video live for others to watch. The information should be of interest to lawmakers concerned about the issue of protecting the privacy of minors online. Markey Wants Street View Hearing: More details about the Google Street View privacy incident continued to surface this week after the FCC published its report on the incident, and news reports unveiled the identity of the engineer in charge of the code that sucked up payload data from private WiFi networks. In response, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a prominent voice on telecom policy and privacy issues, again called for a Congressional hearing on the case yesterday. Markey and his Republican colleague Joe Barton have been following the Street View case closely since May 2010 when reports of the data collection first surfaced. Talking Cybersecurity with Howard Schmidt on C-SPAN: Yours truly will interview White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt on C-SPAN's "The Communicators" airing this Saturday at 6:30 p.m. Topics of discussion will include the administration's threat to veto CISPA and the likelihood of the president signing cybersecurity legislation into law this year. Air Force Drones Could Land on Southwest Border: Rob Margetta also brings us word that House lawmakers are considering a proposal that would preserve the Air Force's Global Hawk drone fleet and deploy them to the Southwest border. Democrat Henry Cuellar and Republican Michael McCaul, both of Texas, want to see the drones deployed on the border instead of retired, as proposed in the administration's budget request. The House Armed Services Subcommittee approved a fiscal 2013 defense policy bill with $260 million more than the Pentagon's request to preserve the drone program; lawmakers argued scrapping the drones, which cost $100 million each, would be wasteful.