The Bush Administration is opposing FCC Chair Kevin Martin’s proposed free nationwide Wi-Fi network. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said a national Wi-Fi network “would likely lead to congested and inefficiently used broadband, and it would be inconsistent with the Administration’s view that spectrum should be allocated by markets rather than governments.”
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes will also take over the role of Chairman. Bewkes, whose contract as Chief Executive said he could retire after a year if he wasn’t named Chairman, will follow in the footsteps of Richard D. Parsons, who will step down December 31st. Parson’s time at Time Warner was mostly spent cleaning up the AOL mess, which cost the company $124 billion and led to record share holder loses.
Sony Music will pay the FTC $1 million after being found guilty of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Sony Music collected information on at least 30,000 underage children on 196 websites, without proper registration and parental consent. The reason for the fine is that most of the sites involved allowed children to post pictures, videos and engage in other social networking tasks like private messaging. The $1 million fine is the largest ever for a COPPA case.
A survey done by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com reports that 20% of teenagers have put nude pictures of themselves online. Of the 1,280 teens surveyed, most boys (67%) and girls (71%) said they sent the photo to a boyfriend or girlfriend, while a shocking 15% sent nude photos to people they only know “online.” This is horrifying for a variety of reasons, mainly that digital natives don’t understand that there is no expectation of privacy online.
Nielsen estimates that almost one-quarter of US television households are watching in HD. The latest survey finds that 23.3% of US TV households own HDTV’s, more than double the 10% found in July 2007. This number has grown due to downtrending prices, which should continue to get cheaper.