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Old 07-10-20, 09:10 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 10th, ’20

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October 10th, 2020




Movie Piracy Rising With Studios Skipping Theater Releases
Richard Chess

• Millions of unlicensed ‘Mulan’ copies were shared in September
• Government, studios target illegal streaming platforms

Along with stalling film production, shutting theaters, and throwing release schedules into chaos, the coronavirus pandemic has brought still another woe to Hollywood: a rise in movie piracy.

Studios have tried to salvage some of their big-budget films this year by selling them through streaming services for $20 to $30. But that business model has made it easier for pirates to illegally copy and share new releases, with an estimated loss of millions of potential customers for the production companies.

Unlicensed downloads of Walt Disney Co.’s most-recent picture, “Mulan,” have outpaced those of other movies since its Sept. 4 U.S. debut on the Disney+ streaming service, according to TorrentFreak, a website that tracks pirating activity on public servers. Compared with “The Lion King,” which came out last year in theaters, “Mulan” saw about twice as many downloads in the days and weeks after its release.

When a traditional movie is released in theaters, thieves struggle to obtain high-quality recordings of it, often resorting to bootlegging with a hidden camcorder. With digital releases, pirates use technologies not available to most consumers to make perfect copies quickly.

The high cost of legitimate first-run streaming movies may also be dissuading some people. A licensed version of “Mulan” costs $30, on top of a $7-a-month subscription to Disney+. “Trolls World Tour,” from Comcast Corp.’s Universal Pictures, started streaming in April for $20.

Disney and Universal didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Limelight Networks Inc., which provides digital distribution of entertainment content and applies antipiracy measures, has seen piracy “going up dramatically” in recent months, Chief Executive Officer Robert Lento said.

“We spend more time talking to our customers about it now than ever before,” Lento said.

Adding Watermarks

The most common technique to limit piracy is by adding watermarks that help trace which customer originally received the movie. When content is found on a pirating website, the watermarks can be used to ban the original purchaser. But that method doesn’t always work, and it hasn’t stopped the yearslong surge in piracy.

Government efforts have also been unsuccessful at preventing viewers from accessing pirated content. Pascal Metral, vice president of legal affairs at Nagra Kudelski, another digital-distribution company, said studios are most concerned with shutting down the big players who move films for profit. Attempts to go after casual users could alienate more customers than it’s worth, Metral said.

What Bloomberg Intelligence Says

“The seemingly muted performance of Disney’s ‘Mulan’ in the premium digital-film-distribution window raises questions about the viability of skipping a theatrical release in favor of streaming, further vexing the decision-making for studios delaying blockbusters like ‘Black Widow’ and ‘No Time to Die.’ ‘Mulan’ appears to have fallen short of the 10 million digital buys needed to break even on a $300 million production and marketing budget, based on our scenario analysis.” — Geetha Ranganathan, media analyst

While movies on peer-to-peer networks are free, those files often contain malware. Consequently, an entire industry has been propped up that offers reliable high-quality streaming of copyrighted works for a low monthly fee or advertisements. Streaming videos resolves most of the security risks.

Under scrutiny in Congress is one loophole of copyright law that lets streaming pirates off with only a misdemeanor offense, said Frank Cullen Jr., vice president of intellectual-property policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center. Other types of pirating where the content is republished as a file is punishable as a felony.

Closing the loophole has been discussed since at least 2011, although congressional talks are still ongoing, Cullen said.

‘Up-to-Date Penalties’

Karyn A. Temple, then-director of the U.S. Copyright Office, last year wrote to the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to urge the adoption of “up-to-date criminal penalties that are appropriate to the offenses and the digital world in which we operate.” Temple is now general counsel of the Motion Picture Association.

Last month, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched an ad campaign in conjunction with several industry trade groups. The focus is on risks to digital security and fraud when accessing pirated content. At a press conference, ICE officials highlighted the economic risks, noting that piracy costs the economy more than $29 billion each year.

“Clearly the rise of digital streaming presents new challenges when it comes to copyright protection for both the content creative industry and of course law enforcement,” said Derek Benner, executive associate director for Homeland Security Investigations.

Not all pirates go unchecked. In August, the Justice Department charged three men for their involvement in a disc-based piracy ring that distributed nearly every movie released by major production studios. The losses are estimated at tens of millions of dollars.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...eater-releases





Apple TV Plus Joins Motion Picture Industry Anti-Piracy Group
Gene Maddaus

Apple TV Plus is joining the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, an entertainment industry group that seeks to crack down on piracy.

The move represents a strengthening bond between Apple and the major studios, and draws the company deeply into industry efforts to check the flow of pirated content.

Apple will be on the governing board of the group, along with Amazon and the six members of the Motion Picture Association: Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros.

ACE was founded in 2017 by the MPA and 30 entertainment companies. At the time, it represented a novel partnership among the legacy studios and the streaming services. Netflix subsequently joined the Motion Picture Association in 2019, cementing the partnership.

“We are the premier anti-piracy force,” said Charles Rivkin, chairman of the MPA and of ACE, in an interview. “The governing board is what determines the strategy and where to spend the budget.”

Apple TV Plus launched last November, as part of a wave of new streaming providers. The tech giant hasn’t disclosed how many subscribers the service has. Apple TV Plus, stocked with original shows like “The Morning Show,” “Servant” and “Little America,” is regularly $4.99 monthly and free for one year with the purchase of an Apple device.

ACE investigates piracy services and sellers of hardware that can aid in piracy. Such illegal services often offer unlimited movies and live TV for a monthly price well below market rates, and they sometimes claim to have a legitimate access to pirated content.

The alliance files lawsuits and has obtained substantial judgments against such operators, typically forcing them offline. However, the exercise can have a Whack-a-Mole quality, as new pirate sites spring up to take the place of the old ones.

“It’s an ongoing fight but i’m really proud of the way ACE has been advancing and protecting content creators,” Rivkin said. “When you shut down these illegal sites… what happens is it drives traffic to legitimate sites.”

The alliance cites a report that showed 9 million households — representing 23 million users — subscribe to a pirate TV service.
https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/ap...up-1234795467/





Mega-Chain Cineworld Closing Regal Movie Theaters Following 'No Time to Die' Delay
Trilby Beresford , Pamela McClintock , Alex Ritman

Following the delay of more Hollywood tentpoles — including James Bond film No Time to Die — mega-movie theater chain Cineworld is planning to temporarily close or keep shut all of its locations in the U.K. and the U.S., The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

The British-based company is the largest circuit in the U.K with more than 120 sites, and the second-largest in North America, where it operates roughly 540 locations under the Regal Cinemas banner. While many of its U.K. theaters had reopened at the end of July, a substantial number of its U.S. sites had remained shut after being forced to go dark because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Across Hollywood, the surprise Saturday-night headline prompted immediate concern that AMC Theatres and Cinemark Theates, the other two largest U.S. chains, could soon follow suit. In the U.K., there are now fears that fellow cinema giants Vue and Odeon will also shutter their sites. The movie business had hoped the box office could recover in earnest this fall, but such isn't the case in many major markets.

The Sunday Times first reported the news on Saturday.

No Time to Die partners MGM, Eon Productions and Universal announced Thursday that the movie is being pushed back from Nov. 20 to late April 2021 because of the ongoing pandemic.

Disney and Pixar's Soul is likewise expected to scrub its Thanksgiving 2020 release, leaving exhibitors without major fall tenpoles following the delay of No Time to Die, Wonder Woman 1894 and Black Widow. Without fresh titles on the marquee, it will be tough to win over already-wary consumers.

Amid falling revenue over the last few months, Cineworld's stock was down nearly 15 percent on Sept. 23, and the company warned there was "no certainty" about what impact the pandemic would ultimately have on the business. Rival circuits are likewise in financial jeopary.

"The impact of COVID-19 on our business and the wider leisure industry has been substantial, with the closures of all of our cinemas worldwide for an extended period," said Cineworld CEO Moshe "Mooky" Greidinger in a recent statement.

The closures in the U.K. are expected to put at risk as many as 5,500 jobs. Cineworld is reportedly writing to the British government to say that the industry is now "unviable."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...e-to-die-delay





Google Must Negotiate to Pay for French News, Appeals Court Confirms
Natasha Lomas

Google’s appeal against an order by France’s competition watchdog to negotiate with publishers for reuse of snippets of their content has failed.

As we reported in April, the French authority was acting on a new ‘neighbouring right’ for news which was transposed into national law following a pan-EU copyright reform agreed last year.

The Paris court slap-down leaves little legal wiggle room for the tech giant when it comes to shelling out for reusing French publishers’ content.

France’s competition authority already ruled it can’t unilaterally withdraw the snippets shown in its Google News aggregator (and elsewhere on its search service) — as it did when the national law came into force, seeking to evade payment.

Reached for comment on the appeal court decision, a Google spokesperson sent us this statement: “As we announced yesterday, our priority remains to reach an agreement with the French publishers and press agencies. We appealed to get legal clarity on some parts of the order, and we will now review the decision of the Paris Court of Appeal.”

The company also told us it had appealed the interim measures ruling because it had concerns about aspects of the order that it found contradictory and confusing, adding that it continues to have significant concerns with respect to how publisher rights are being interpreted in the country. Although it also reiterated that the legal process is separate to its ongoing negotiations with French publishers which it said it continues to focus on.

A report by Reuters yesterday suggested Google is poised to strike a deal with French publishers.

Earlier this month the tech giant announced a $1BN licensing fees fund, which it has called the Google News Showcase, that it said would be paid to news publishers “to create and curate high-quality content” for new story panels to appear on Google News. It added that it would begin making payments in Germany and Brazil, expanding to other markets.

However that (Google PR) initiative is separate to the payment terms it will have to negotiate with French publishers as a result of a legal requirement for reuse of protected content.

The screw is also tightening on Google’s freebie reuse of news in Australia which is closing in on its own legally binding payment framework — triggering a warning from the tech giant that local access to its ‘free’ services may be at risk.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/08/go...ourt-confirms/





Google to Pay $1 Billion Over 3 Years for News Content
Kelvin Chan

Google will pay publishers $1 billion over the next three years for their content, the company’s latest effort to defuse tensions over its dominance of the news industry.

The company said Thursday that it has signed agreements for its news partnership program with nearly 200 publications in Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the U.K. and Australia.

“This financial commitment - our biggest to date - will pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.

On Thursday, Google’s News Showcase is launching in Brazil and Germany, featuring story panels that let publishers package stories with features like timelines. It will appear first on Google News on Android, then Apple iOS, before it is rolled out to Google Discover and Search.

The publications that have signed up include Germany’s Der Spiegel and Stern and Brazil’s Folha de S.Paulo.

Other features like video, audio and daily briefings are also in the works. Pichai said Google is working to expand the program to other countries, namely India, Belgium and the Netherlands. He did not say whether the U.S. would be included.

The funding builds on a news licensing program launched by Google in June, as it seeks defuse tensions with the beleaguered news industry. News companies want Google, and its Silicon Valley rival Facebook, to pay for the news content that they siphon from commercial media while taking the lion’s share of ad revenue.

Skeptics remain, however.

The European Publishers Council said it’s an attempt by Google to stave off legislation and government action to get them to negotiate.

“Many are quite cynical about Google’s perceived strategy,” said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the council. “By launching a product, they can dictate terms and conditions, undermine legislation designed to create conditions for a fair negotiation, while claiming they are helping to fund news production.”

The council’s members include German publisher Axel Springer and the British unit of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which have been fighting a yearslong battle to get the tech giants to pay for news stories appearing on their platforms.

The pressure has been rising over compensation in a number of countries for Google and Facebook.

Australia’s government is drafting a law to make Facebook and Google pay the country’s media companies for the news content they use by early October. Facebook has responded by threatening to block Australian news content rather than pay for it.

In France, Google has refused to show snippets of some stories as it fights government demands for license fees to publishers, as required by a recent European Union directive.

Facebook last year unveiled its own plan to pay U.S. news companies including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today for their headlines — reportedly millions of dollars in some cases. It also said in 2019 that it was investing $300 million over three years in news initiatives, with a focus on local news partnerships and third-party fact-checking.
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-ge...38cdeddaacf043





Amazon’s Growing Ad Business Could Forever Change Tech

Google and Facebook’s ad business might not survive Amazon
Thomas Smith

Google has long been known to monitor basically everything you do, and use the data it gleans to target banner and search ads. Facebook integrates ads into users’ news feeds, Groups, and other parts of the platform, which recently landed the company in hot water for running ads next to hate speech.

But there’s a relatively new, rapidly growing player in the online advertising world: Amazon. The company’s advertising revenue has grown from almost nothing a few years ago to over $10 billion in late 2020. Revenue is expected to quadruple by 2023. Given its unique business model, its history of swallowing whole industries, and its sheer size, Amazon has the potential to massively disrupt the online ad world — and forever change tech.

The success of online ads depends on how close a user is to buying something. That’s part of why search engine ads are so effective. If you type “Lunch” into Google, there’s a fair chance that you’re looking for a place to eat lunch. If the company can show you an ad for a restaurant, there’s a good chance you’ll click through and end up eating there. All the better if Google knows where you live and that you like burgers, and can show an ad for a specific burger joint in your neighborhood.

In contrast, services like Twitter struggle with ads because users are there to doomscroll horrifying Covid-19 news or see the latest bizarre thing Donald Trump said. They’re not there to buy stuff. Facebook suffers from a similar problem, but its intense knowledge of user behavior (down to the specific items you’ve purchased at thousands of retailers) allows it to target ads so effectively that it still makes massive sums of money — $69 billion in ad revenue in 2019, according to TechCrunch.

Few companies, though, are more intimately connected to peoples’ buying behaviors than Amazon. As of mid-2020, Amazon controlled nearly 40% of American e-commerce, and data from 2018 suggests that it may control as much as 94% in certain categories, like cosmetics and batteries. Overall, the company is forecast to control almost 5.5% of all retail in America in 2020 — especially as Covid-19 has forced consumers to do more of their shopping online.

If you’ve browsed Amazon lately, you’ve probably seen items listed as Sponsored Products. Sellers and brands pay to have their products advertised in this way. Sponsored Products generally appear first in search rankings. They’re also easy to confuse with Amazon’s Choice — products that are similarly flagged and ranked, but based on being “highly rated and well-priced” rather than on payments from an advertiser, according to Amazon. You may have clicked on a Sponsored Product without even realizing it. Especially as the pandemic has driven overall growth in e-commerce, other retailers like Target, Walmart, and CVS are increasingly challenging Amazon with their own versions of Sponsored Products and self-service ad platforms.

Marketers love these ads because they reach buyers right at the moment they’re about to purchase something. If I type “Lunch” into Google, I’m probably looking for that perfect burger place. But I could also be looking for recipes, photos of food, or a variety of other lunch-related content. If I type “shovel” into Amazon, though, I’m almost certainly trying to buy a shovel. And if a Sponsored shovel appears first in my search results, I’m probably going to buy that shovel. Brands have long known about this — according to a 2016 report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, some brands pay “slotting fees” of $30,000 to $50,000 to have their products included on brick-and-mortar grocery store shelves, or featured more prominently within a store.

As a former Amazon seller, I can vouch for the power of Sponsored Products. The funds I put toward these listings were the most efficient advertising dollars I’ve ever spent. Every dollar I spent on Sponsored Products generated about $12 in sales. At least 30% of my sales for one product, a dog comb, came from a single Sponsored Product campaign using my competitor’s product name as the target keyword.

And the ads are cheap. For one campaign, I paid just $249 to show my ad to 1,049,000 people. Ads are cheap because Amazon has a vested interest in driving more sales. The company collects a commission of between 6% and 20% on every item sold through the site. For every product I sold through a Sponsored Products campaign, Amazon was effectively getting paid twice — once for running the ad, and again for managing the sale of my product. This likely allows them to keep ad rates lower than those charged by their competitors.

Ad prices may also be low because Amazon’s ad program has relatively little overhead. To understand what you mean by the query “Lunch,” Google has to run a massive, worldwide data-gathering program that peers into every aspect of your online and offline life, from the websites you visit to the humidity level in your home. That’s expensive. In contrast, when you type something into an e-commerce platform like Amazon, you’re telling the company exactly what you want to buy — no world-spanning surveillance program needed. Amazon has recently expanded its advertising program to Twitch (which Amazon owns), giving marketers the option to target the platform’s younger audience.

If the meteoric rise of Amazon’s advertising program continues, it could have massive impacts on the tech world. Amazon has continually proven itself willing and able to swallow entire industries, from its early conquest of book publishing and sales to its more recent takeover of cloud computing via the company’s wildly successful Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.

AWS originally began as a way to eke a little money out of internal work Amazon had done to make life easier for its developers. It’s since grown — almost by mistake — into one of the most wildly profitable businesses in the world. The service earned Amazon over $7 billion in profit in 2018 — a substantially higher net profit than the company makes on actually selling things. In building AWS, Amazon also essentially ate Microsoft’s lunch, stealing an industry it was expected to dominate right out from under it.

By moving into the advertising world, Amazon could well do the same thing for ad-funded giants like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Advertising is largely a zero-sum game — the ad dollars currently flowing to Google and Facebook come largely at the expense of newspaper, magazine, and television ads. If the dollars start flowing to Amazon instead, the other tech giants could see a massive drop in their bottom lines.

That would have big ramifications for the advertising industry. But it would have an even bigger impact on tech. More than 70% of Google’s revenue comes from ads. For Facebook, that number is 98.5%.

Funds from advertising (and the public and private investment those funds unlock) are what allows the companies to invest in world-altering technologies that have little to do with their core businesses. For Google and its parent Alphabet, this has meant building the world’s second most popular email platform, its most-used mobile phone OS, self-driving cars, a fiber-optic network, and a company that planned to “cure death,” among much else. Facebook has spent its ad money on flying giant internet airplanes, developing brain-computer interfaces, and operating the wildly successful, wholly unprofitable messenger service WhatsApp for no apparent business reason.

Jeff Bezos’ personal passion for spaceflight aside, Amazon generally spends its revenues on one thing and one thing only: further enriching Amazon. Its top-secret research lab, Amazon Grand Challenge, is reportedly focused on projects like curing the common cold. Even this is likely a shrewd investment in the company’s growth. According to the Integrated Benefits Institute, a human resources industry trade group of which Amazon is a member, illness cost American employers $530 billion in lost productivity in 2017. Curing the cold would certainly have broad societal benefits. But as the nation’s second-largest employer, few would benefit as much as Amazon itself.

Amazon’s laser focus on its own growth is not necessarily a problem. It’s the company’s ruthless efficiency and culture of cost-cutting which has allowed it to grow so large and become so successful. And through its operations, Amazon does deliver many benefits to society (albeit, many say, at a cost to workers and individuals’ privacy) — innovations in voice recognition with its Alexa platform, a great deal of wildly creative new content through Amazon Studios, and the ability to have nearly anything delivered to your door in 48 hours. But you’re not likely to see the company develop technology for storing energy in molten salt or creating eating utensils for patients with hand tremors, both of which Google is working on.

If Amazon’s ad business continues its rapid growth, it would have several far-reaching effects. Firstly, we’d expect to see a much larger Amazon. AWS has already helped Amazon fund its international expansion and invest heavily in infrastructure, further securing its dominant position in e-commerce. Buoyed by billions in ad revenue, the company would have an even larger war chest with which to grow its empire.

But if the company indeed steals business from ad-funded tech giants, we’d also see another effect — a much smaller Google and Facebook. With lower ad revenues to fund their lavish tech spending, Google and Facebook would likely need to focus much more directly on their core businesses of search and social media, respectively. Google would have to rein in its X venture capital arm, and Facebook might need to divest from unprofitable acquisitions like WhatsApp.

Big tech companies like Google and Facebook invest directly in technology development, but they also employ and train legions of engineers who often go on to found their own startup companies. With less ad money, both of these activities would likely be scaled back, which could have a ripple effect on the launch of new companies and the availability of engineering talent.

If Google and Facebook stopped reinvesting ad money into buying innovative, emerging companies, startups would also lose two major acquisition targets (Google has reportedly spent over $19 billion on acquisitions since its launch). And a takeover of the digital ad market by Amazon would make it harder for new companies to build a business model around monetizing their user bases via advertising. That would likely make it harder for them to demonstrate a path to profitability, and attract the venture capital money they need to launch in the first place.

The overall result would be a chilling effect on the tech industry. In short, the same story which has played out in so many other industries would play out in tech, too: Amazon would grow, and everyone else would shrink.

Amazon’s move into the advertising world could have another consequence, too. It could finally force antitrust hawks to take action against the company. Legislators have been circling Big Tech for years now. Especially with the growth of AWS, Amazon looks like an increasingly juicy target for a breakup.

It’s already widely acknowledged in the tech industry that Amazon will eventually have to split off its AWS unit from its retail operations. An attempt to dominate digital advertising as well as cloud computing and retail might finally give lawmakers the leverage they need to call for a broader-reaching breakup of the company.

No matter who sits in the White House come January, these efforts would likely proceed — Donald Trump is generally against corporate breakups, but reserves a special hatred for Amazon and Jeff Bezos, which would make the company unlikely to enjoy special political treatment. Presidential hopeful Joe Biden has already criticized Amazon over its expansionary practices and hasn’t ruled out antitrust action.

This makes Amazon’s future direction uncertain. It could continue to foster the growth of its advertising business, as many expect it will do. But that would risk attracting unwanted attention from antitrust regulators, which might force the company to part with the money machine that is AWS. Amazon might also choose to pump the brakes on its move into advertising, and focus on growing its core retail business while flying under the antitrust radar.

Alternatively, it could choose to spin off AWS even without regulatory pressure. It could then use the proceeds to move full force into the advertising world. Advertising complements its core retail business much better than cloud computing, so this scenario seems distressingly possible.

Whatever move Amazon makes, the future of Big Tech potentially hangs in the balance. If the company chooses to steer clear of its competitors’ ad-funded business models, Google and Facebook can likely keep on growing their digital advertising empires, and keep bankrolling the myriad side projects and startup companies they currently support.

But if Amazon decides to take on Google and Facebook directly, it could result in a fight that saps the strength of both tech giants, and ultimately kills off the emerging companies that rely on them for funding and talent. The impact on the tech industry could be massive, world-changing — and permanent.
https://debugger.medium.com/amazons-...h-ea231b1459af





AT&T Offloading DirecTV Could be a “Fire Sale” as Company Weighs Low Bids

AT&T moves ahead on DirecTV sale despite low offers, seeks second round of bids.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T is reportedly moving ahead with its plan to sell DirecTV despite receiving bids that value the satellite division at less than one-third of the price AT&T paid for it.

AT&T bought DirecTV for $49 billion in 2015 and has lost seven million TV subscribers in the last two years. In late August, news broke that AT&T is trying to sell DirecTV to private-equity investors and that a deal could come in at less than $20 billion.
The New York Post yesterday provided an update on the sale process, writing that AT&T is pressing ahead with an auction even though it is "shaping up to be a fire sale." The sale process is being handled for AT&T by Goldman Sachs.

"Opening bids from a coterie of buyout firms came in at around 3.5 times DirecTV's roughly $4.5 billion of EBITDA, implying a valuation at around $15.75 billion, according to a source close to the process," the Post article said. Despite the low first-round bids, AT&T "last week invited a handful of suitors into the second round of an auction of the struggling satellite-TV broadcaster," the Post wrote.

Private-equity firms "are looking to milk the shrinking company for cash as DirecTV's subscribers steadily flee to lower-priced streaming-video services like Netflix," the Post wrote. AT&T could retain a minority stake in DirecTV after a sale. We contacted AT&T about the report and will update this article if we get a response.

“Serious destruction of value”

"It is very, very surprising they would sell DirecTV at such a low price—that's a serious destruction of value," a former AT&T executive told the Post. But it isn't surprising that no one wants to buy DirecTV at anything close to the price AT&T paid five years ago, because the company has been reporting big customer losses each quarter for the past couple of years. After a Q2 2020 loss of 954,000 customers, AT&T was down to 18.41 million customers across DirecTV, U-verse TV, and AT&T-branded online TV services. That's a loss of more than 7 million customers since mid-2018 when AT&T had 25.45 million subscribers in those categories.

DirecTV would likely be losing customers in any circumstance because of the trend toward cheaper online-streaming services, but AT&T has accelerated the decline by imposing price increases and reducing use of promotional offers that lower monthly costs for customers. AT&T is trying to improve its TV fortunes with the $15-per-month HBO Max, a result of AT&T's 2018 acquisition of Time Warner Inc. for $85 billion (or $108 billion including Time Warner's debt).

The purchases of DirecTV and Time Warner dramatically increased AT&T's debt load. Under pressure from investors, AT&T in October 2019 promised to conduct a "disciplined review" of its portfolio and swore off "major acquisitions" for three years. AT&T's long-term debt was $153.4 billion as of June 30, 2020, down from $168.5 billion in mid-2018.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...ighs-low-bids/





AT&T Shelving DSL May Leave Hundreds of Thousands Hanging by a Phone Line
Rob Pegoraro

One of America’s largest internet providers is uploading its oldest broadband technology into the sunset.

On Oct. 1, AT&T stopped selling digital-subscriber-line connections, stranding many existing subscribers on those low-speed links and leaving new residents of DSL-only areas without any wired broadband.

“We’re beginning to phase out outdated services like DSL and new orders for the service will no longer be supported after October 1,” a corporate statement sent beforehand read. “Current DSL customers will be able to continue their existing service or where possible upgrade to our 100% fiber network.”

DSL – a broadband connection delivered over old copper telephone lines – is no prize at AT&T. The company doesn’t sell downloads faster than 6 Mbps, less than a fourth of the 25-Mbps minimum definition of the Federal Communications Commission and further cramps their utility with stringent data caps of just 150 gigabytes.

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But the technology that provided many people (myself included) their first real broadband still works to provide an always-on connection and far more capacity than satellite connectivity.

“I'm really not surprised that AT&T is phasing out DSL, as it's an obsolete technology,” emailed one soon-be-stranded DSL subscriber, retiree Jack Mangold of Collettsville, North Carolina. “I am, however, very disappointed that AT&T has no interest in replacing DSL in rural areas with some other technology.”

AT&T reported 653,000 total DSL connections at the end of its second quarter, compared to 14.48 million on its fiber-optic and hybrid-fiber services. The latter, sold as “AT&T Internet,” combines fiber trunk lines with DSL last-mile connections for faster speeds.

The company has seen DSL subscribers steadily dwindle. Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst at the research firm Leichtman Research Group, wrote in an email that two years ago, AT&T had just over a million DSL customers.

“AT&T basically gave up on fighting cable over a third of its territory” said Dave Burstein, editor of the trade publication Fast Net News.

That decline has put AT&T narrowly behind Verizon in this slower slice of the market; that New York firm reported 661,000 DSL connections in its second quarter, versus 6.298 million Fios fiber-optic connections.

Verizon and such smaller telecom firms as Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) and Frontier have not announced plans to sunset their own DSL. That’s a good thing for the potentially 3 to 6% of the U.S. that Burstein estimated can only get wired broadband via this technology, even if such fixed-wireless ventures as Verizon’s just-announced expansion of its unlimited-data LTE Home Internet service to some rural areas across 48 states give more people more choices.

But for those customers to get faster connections, providers can’t neglect their networks.

“When I was at the FCC, there was actually hope that DSL technology could be improved to provide actual high speed broadband,” emailed Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy who served as an advisor to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler during the Obama administration. “If I recall correctly, the companies were making promises of speeds around 25 Mbps or even higher.”

That remains possible, as the CEO of a regional provider offering DSL over AT&T phone lines humble-bragged in a Twitter direct-message conversation.

“We deliver up to 100 Mbps,” wrote Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic. That Santa Rosa, California firm reaches those speeds by pairing DSL connections and installing its own, upgraded switching gear. In some areas, it also sells separate fiber-optic connections that can run 10 times as fast.

Jasper said Sonic customers in its slower lanes don’t have to worry about their own bandwidth’s viability: “That is unaffected by AT&T’s decisions about their own network.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/...ed/5880219002/





Comcast Working Toward 10Gbps to Your Home

Are you still waiting for Gigabit to your home? Comcast wants to go one better: 10Gbps to your home using cable, not fiber.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

These days, when many of us are working from home, having great broadband isn't a luxury; it's a necessity. While I wouldn't kill for Gigabit internet to my home, I'd consider maiming. Alas, I can't get it. But, while I'm still worrying over that, Comcast is working toward delivering 10 Gigabit per second (Gbps) to homes.

That sound you hear is me crying with longing.

Comcast has achieved a 10Gbps technical milestone by delivering 1.25Gbps upload and download speeds over a live production network using Network Function Virtualization (NFV) combined with the latest Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) hardware. This is being done with DOCSIS 4. With this cutting-edge cable internet technology, you can expect to see up to 10Gbps speeds downstream and up to 6Gbps upstream capacity over a hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network.

In its first real-world test, to a home in Jacksonville, Fla., technicians achieved its Gigabit plus speed using upon Comcast's Distributed Access Architecture (DAA). This is an edge-based computing model. This architecture has a suite of software-powered networking technologies, including digital fiber optics, "Remote PHY" digital nodes, and a cloud-based, virtualized cable modem termination system platform (vCMTS). The result? Comcast's team consistently measured speeds of 1.25Gbps upload and 1.2Gbps download over the connection.

Yo, Comcast, if you never need to test this service in Asheville, N.C., feel free to give me a call.

You don't think you need that much speed? I, and Comcast, beg to differ.

"Our customers build their digital lives on the foundation of our internet service, so we continue to push the technological envelope to anticipate their future needs," said Tony Werner, president of technology, product, and experience at Comcast Cable. "The great strength of our network technology is that we will have the ability to scale these next-generation speeds to tens of millions of homes in the future without digging up yards, or starting massive construction projects. This technology provides a path to meeting the needs of the future and making multi-Gigabit symmetrical speeds a reality for everyone, not just a select few."

According to a study by Dr. Raul Katz of Telecom Advisory Services, 10Gbps internet will generate at least $330 billion in total economic output and create more than 676,000 new jobs over the next seven years. It will do by enabling not just 8K video streams for everyone living in your home, but by enabling 5G access points, virtual reality applications, and telehealth.

It's not just hardware that's making this possible. Comcast is a major open-source developer and user. As Comcast notes, "The trial was made possible not by a single technological innovation, but rather by a series of interrelated technologies that Comcast continues to test and deploy in its network, all powered by a DAA ecosystem. These include our increasingly virtualized, cloud-based network model."

Comcast, like any smart open-source citizen, isn't doing it on its own. Comcast is working on the "10G" initiative along with NCTA, CableLabs, and SCTE, and other telecom and cable operators from around the world. In addition, Comcast and Charter Communications have worked closely to align on their approaches to 10Gbps and are driving technology standards and architectures to benefit everyone.

I, for one, will be more than happy to welcome 10Gbps internet into my home office. Mind you, in the meantime, I wouldn't say no to just getting gigabit to my house.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/comcas...-to-your-home/





The End of the American Internet
Benedict Evans

When Netscape launched in 1994 and kicked off the consumer internet, there were maybe 100m PCs on earth, and over half of them were in the USA. The web was invented in Switzerland, and computers were invented in the UK, but the internet was American. American companies set the agenda and created most of the important products and services, and American attitudes, cultures and laws around regulation and speech dominated.

This is not quite so true anymore. 80-90% of internet users are now outside the USA, there are more smartphone users in China than in the USA and western Europe combined, and the creation of venture-based startups has gone global.

Meanwhile, of course, the internet has become vastly more important. In the last decade it has gone from being interesting and exciting but not really an important part of most people’s lives to being a central part of society. This is my favorite way to illustrate this - by 2017, almost half of new (straight) relationships in the USA started online.

This has two pretty basic sets of consequences.

First, as I discussed in some detail here, technology is becoming a regulated industry, if only because important and specialised industries are always regulated. That regulation will not only be determined by the USA. Other countries have their own laws, cultures and constitutions, and so we are entering a period of increasing regulatory expansion, overlap and competition from different jurisdictions, from the EU and UK to Singapore or Australia and, of course, China.

Second, you can no longer assume that the important companies and products themselves are American.

Both of these are captured in Tiktok. This is the first time that Americans have really had to deal with their teenagers using a form of mass media that isn’t created in their country by people who mostly share their values. It’s from somewhere else. That’s compounded by the fact that the ‘somewhere else’ is China, with all of the political and geopolitical issues that come with that, but I’d suggest that the core, structural issue is that it’s foreign. This is, of course, a problem that the rest of the world has been wrestling with since 1994, but it comes as something of a shock in Washington DC. There’s an old joke that war is how God teaches Americans geography - now it’s regulation.

There are many questions that flow out of this. One, for example, is how far and how many Chinese consumer internet companies will spread globally as opposed to being constrained by their domestic environment (this would be the ‘Galapagos Effect’ often suggested of Japanese tech. Tiktok worked, but WeChat failed). Another is how many ‘unicorns’ come from Europe - how fast does its population, economic, scientific and educational base produce a proportionate number of big tech companies (or if not, why not?). Yet another is the ‘Is Silicon Valley Over?’ debate, which goes back decades - when my old colleague Marc Andreessen arrived there in the early 1990s, he thought the whole thing was over and he’d missed it.

You can argue about the details of these all day, but it does seem clear that we should just presume a global diffusion of software creation and internet company creation. It doesn’t really matter if Silicon Valley ends up as 25% or 75% of the next 100 important companies - America doesn’t have a monopoly on the agenda any more.

Hence, there are all sorts of issues with the ways that the US government has addressed Tiktok in 2020, but the most fundamental, I think, is that it has acted as though this is a one-off, rather than understanding that this is the new normal - there will be hundreds more of these. You can’t one-at-a-time this - you need a systematic, repeatable approach. You can’t ask to know the citizenship of the shareholders in every popular app - you need rules that apply to everyone. Today, the rules come from Apple, or California, both of which are increasingly becoming America’s privacy regulators by default. But they will also come from the EU, which is increasingly writing laws that, intentionally or not, change how American companies do business in America, and the more different rules we have in different places, the more fragmented and complicated things get. Regulation is an export industry, and a competitive industry.
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictev...rican-internet





French Bar Owners Arrested for Offering Free WiFi but Not Keeping Logs
Simon Lee

At least five bar owners in Grenoble, France have been arrested for providing WiFi at their businesses without keeping logs. The bar owners were arrested under a 2006 law that technically classifies WiFi hotspot providing establishments as ISPs, and requires them to store one year’s worth of logs or connection records for anti-terrorism purposes. This requirement is in place even if the WiFi network is password protected.

The law No. 2006-64 extends the traditional ISP logging requirements “to all persons who, in respect of an activity primary or secondary professional, offer the public a connection allowing on-line communication via network access, including free of charge.” Violating this crime means that the owner of a small cafe that offers WiFi to patrons could face up to one year in prison and up to a 75,000 euro fine.
All businesses in France providing WiFi to the public are required to log

That all public WiFi hotspots in France are required by law to be logging shouldn’t be too surprising. BFM Business noted that most large providers of free WiFi like hotels, conference centers, airports, and such do so with business packages that include this logging. However, it seems that most people aren’t aware that even small businesses like bars, cafes, nightclubs, and restaurants that offer WiFi to their patrons are faced with these logging requirements. One of the arrested bar owners noted that the relevant organization, Umih, never noted this requirement when renewing his license:

“Nobody, not even the professionals of Umih who provide compulsory training as part of a license IV resumption, to me never said I should keep this history.”

In response to questions by BFM Business, Umih admitted that the training doesn’t mention WiFi logging but noted that Umih members should have known about this important requirement because it was mentioned in a newsletter.

If anything, this piece of dystopian news highlights the state of surveillance in France and the desperate need for online privacy there, as well. Small business owners in France need to make sure that they are in compliance with the laws; similarly, public WiFi users in France need to make sure they never connect without a VPN.
https://www.cozyit.com/french-bar-ow...-keeping-logs/





Andrew Yang Takes Lead in California Data Privacy Measure
Jocelyn Gecker

The Fitbits on our wrists collect our health and fitness data; Apple promises privacy but lots of iPhone apps can still share our personal information; and who really knows what they’re agreeing to when a website asks, “Do You Accept All Cookies?” Most people just click “OK” and hope for the best, says former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

“The amount of data we’re giving up is unprecedented in human history,” says Yang, who lives in New York but is helping lead the campaign for a data privacy initiative on California’s Nov. 3 ballot. “Don’t you think it’s time we did something about it?”

Yang is chairing the advisory board for Proposition 24, which he and other supporters see as a model for other states as the U.S. tries to catch up with protections that already exist in Europe.

The California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 would expand the rights Californians were given to their personal data in a groundbreaking law approved two years ago, which took effect in January. The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 was intended to give residents more control over their personal information collected online. It limited how companies gather personal data and make money from it and gave consumers the right to know what a company has collected and have it deleted, as well as the right to opt out of the sale of their personal information.

But between the time the law was passed and took effect, major companies have found ways to dodge requirements. Tech and business lobbyists are pressuring the Legislature to water it down further, with proposals to undo parts of the law, says Alastair Mactaggart, a San Francisco real estate developer who spearheaded support for the 2018 law and is behind the effort to amend it.

“Business is actively seeking to undermine the protections that were just put in place,” says Mactaggart. He began advocating for consumer privacy after a dinner party conversation with a Google employee who told him people would be shocked by how much the company knows about them. As more time passes without restrictions, he said “these businesses, because of the nature of their power, will be too powerful to regulate.”

To help research and draft the measure, Mactaggart said he hired Ashkan Soltani, former Federal Trade Commission chief technologist, and consulted with numerous other privacy experts.

The measure is supported by Common Sense Media and Consumer Watchdog, along with several privacy experts and labor organizations that say the measure will strengthen the law and protect it from industry attempts to dilute it.

The pro-24 campaign has raised over $5.5 million, most of it from Mactaggart.

The campaign to defeat the measure has raised just $50,000. Opponents say the 52-page initiative is so complicated that most voters won’t read it, or understand their rights if they do. Early voting begins Monday.

Opponents include groups like the California Small Business Association, a handful of local chambers of commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, which say it’s too soon to rewrite the law. They say the measure would further burden small businesses still trying to comply with the new law. “And now Prop. 24 would upend all of that for an even more stringent, onerous law,” the NFIB said in a statement.

The ACLU of Northern California is also opposed, saying some updates would actually hurt consumers.

“Overall, it is a step backward for privacy in California,” said Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. He argues Proposition 24 would make it easier for businesses to charge customers higher prices — or “pay for privacy” — if they refuse the collection of their data, or downgrade service for those who don’t pay the fee, which could hurt low-income communities and those who can’t pay to protect themselves.

“That’s not how privacy should work. It should not be a luxury that only rich people can afford,” he said.

Mactaggart says these objections are a misrepresentation of the measure and that the “pay for privacy” provision is already part of the existing law.

Proposition 24 would also create the California Privacy Protection Agency, with an annual budget of $10 million, to enforce the law and fine companies for violations.

Now, only the state attorney general can bring enforcement actions, but Attorney General Xavier Becerra has said his office has limited resources and could only bring a handful of cases each year.

It would also triple the fines on companies that violate kids’ privacy or illegally collect and sell their private information, while closing some of the loopholes that proponents say companies such as Facebook, Google and Spotify have exploited by saying they’re not selling personal information but “sharing” it with partners. Consumers could also opt out of data sharing and sales of private information about everything from their race and ethnicity to union membership or religion.

“I think this is going to be an opportunity for us to set a national standard,” said Yang. “As soon as other states see that Californians have these data and privacy rights, they’re going to want the same thing.”
https://apnews.com/article/election-...cbe7f0037aeed3





Come Back with a Warrant for my Virtual House
Kurt Opsahl

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in your home can involve the creation of an intimate portrait of your private life. The VR/AR headsets can request audio and video of the inside of our house, telemetry about our movements, depth data and images that can build a highly accurate geometrical representation of your place, that can map exactly where that mug sits on your coffee table, all generated by a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system. As Facebook’s Reality Labs explains, their “high-accuracy depth capture system, which uses dots projected into the scene in infrared, serves to capture the exact shape of big objects like tables and chairs and also smaller ones, like the remote control on the couch.” VR/AR providers can create “Replica re-creations of the real spaces that even a careful observer might think are real,” which is both the promise of and the privacy problem with this technology.

If the government wants to get that information, it needs to bring a warrant.

Nearly twenty years ago, the Supreme Court examined another technology that would allow law enforcement to look through your walls into the sanctity of your private space—thermal imaging. In Kyllo v. United States, the Court held that a thermal scan, even from a public place outside the house, to monitor the heat emanating in your home was a Fourth Amendment search, and required a warrant. This was an important case, building upon some earlier cases, like United States v. Karo, which found a search when the remote activation of a beeper showed a can of ether was inside a home.

More critically, Kyllo established the principle that new technologies1 that can “explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a 'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.” A VR/AR setup at home can provide a wealth of information—“details of the home”—that was previously unknowable without the police coming in through the door.

This is important, not just to stop people from seeing the dirty dishes in your sink, or the politically provocative books on your bookshelf. The protection of your home from government intrusion is essential to preserve your right to be left alone, and to have autonomy in your thoughts and expression without the fear of Big Brother breathing down your neck. While you can choose to share your home with friends, family or the public, the ability to make that choice is a fundamental freedom essential to human rights.

Of course, a service provider may require sharing this information before providing certain services. You might want to invite your family to a Covid-safe housewarming, their avatars appearing in a exact replica of your new home, sharing the joy of seeing your new space. To get the full experience and fulfill the promise of the new technology, the details of your house—your furnishings, the art on your walls, the books on your shelf may need to be shared with a service provider to be enjoyed by your friends. And, at the same time, creating a tempting target for law enforcement wanting to look inside your house.

Of course, the ideal would be that strong encryption and security measures would protect that information, such that only the intended visitors to your virtual house could get to wander the space, and the government would be unable to obtain the unencrypted information from a third-party. But we also need to recognize that governments will continue to press for unencrypted access to private spaces. Even where encryption is strong between end points, governments may, like the United Kingdom, ask for the ability to insert an invisible ghost to attend the committee of correspondence meeting you hold in your virtual dining room.

While it is clear that monitoring the real-time audio in your virtual home requires a wiretap order, the government may argue that they can still observe a virtual home in real-time. Not so. Carpenter v. United States provides the constitutional basis to keep the government at bay when the technology is not enough. Two years ago, in a landmark decision, the Supreme Court established that accessing historical records containing the physical locations of cellphones required a search warrant, even though they were held by a third-party. Carpenter cast needed doubt on the third-party doctrine, which allows access to third-party held records without a warrant, noting that “few could have imagined a society in which a phone goes wherever its owner goes, conveying to the wireless carrier not just dialed digits, but a detailed and comprehensive record of the person’s movements.”

Likewise, when the third-party doctrine was created in 1979, few could have imagined a society in which VR/AR systems can map, in glorious three dimensional detail, the interior of one’s home and their personal behavior and movements, conveying to the VR/AR service provider a detailed and comprehensive record of the goings on of a person’s house. Carpenter and Kyllo stand strongly for requiring a warrant for any information created by your VR/AR devices that shows the interior of your private spaces, regardless of whether that information is held by a service provider.

In California, where many VR/AR service providers are based, CalECPA generally requires a warrant or wiretap order before the government may obtain this sensitive data from service providers, with a narrow exception for subpoenas, where “access to the information via the subpoena is not otherwise prohibited by state or federal law.” Under Kyllo and Carpenter, warrantless access to your home through VR/AR technology is prohibited by the ultimate federal law, the Constitution.

We need to be able to take advantage of the awesomeness of this new technology, where you can have a fully formed virtual space—and invite your friends to join you from afar—without creating a dystopian future where the government can teleport into a photo-realistic version of your house, able to search all the nooks and crannies measured and recorded by the tech, without a warrant.

Carpenter led to a sea change in the law, and since has been cited in hundreds of criminal and civil cases across the country, challenging the third-party doctrine for surveillance sources, like real-time location tracking, 24/7 video cameras and automatic license plate readers. Still the development of the doctrine will take time. No court has yet ruled on a warrant for a virtual search of your house. For now, it is up to the service providers to give a pledge, backed by a quarrel of steely-eyed privacy lawyers, that if the government comes to knock on your VR door, they will say “Come back with a warrant.”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/1...-virtual-house

















Until next week,

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