F.C.C. Backs Plan to Update a Fund That Helps Connect Schools to the Internet

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission voted on Friday to overhaul and possibly expand its E-Rate program, a $2.3 billion effort to provide schools and libraries with up-to-date telecommunications service and equipment, including high-speed Internet connections.

A proposal approved by the commission, which will be made available for public comment before a final version is completed, calls for funds to be moved away from outdated uses like paying for paging service and long-distance phone calls and into areas that will accelerate digital literacy, like Wi-Fi connections within a school or library.

The proposal also calls for measures that would drive down the cost of services, like adoption of purchasing consortiums, and the streamlining of administrative requirements — among them, shifting much of the required paperwork for applicants to electronic filings. “One of the biggest obstacles to seizing the opportunities of digital learning in America is inadequate bandwidth at our schools and libraries,” Mignon L. Clyburn, the F.C.C. chairwoman, said before voting. “Simply put, they need faster high-capacity connections and they need them now.”

Just last month in a visit to a North Carolina middle school, President Obama set a goal of connecting 99 percent of school students to the Internet through high-speed broadband and high-speed wireless within five years.

“To get there, we have to build connected classrooms that support modern teaching — investments we know our international competitors are already making,” Mr. Obama said on Friday.

The E-Rate fund has financed Internet connections to more than 95 percent of American public school classrooms, while only 14 percent were connected when E-Rate was established in 1997.

In 2010, however, an F.C.C. study found that more than half of the schools and libraries reported that their Internet connections were too slow to meet their needs. For the coming school year, libraries and schools requested more than $4.9 billion to pay for connections and equipment, more than twice the size of the fund.

“We fail our students if we expect digital-age learning to take place at near dial-up speeds,” said Jessica Rosenworcel, an F.C.C. commissioner. “Contrast this with efforts under way in some of our world neighbors. They are pouring resources into these subjects, into schools and connectivity.”

The E-Rate program has been faulted for inadequately allocating money in the fund, which is provided through a tax on consumers’ phone bills, a monthly charge between 50 cents and $1.

Commissioner Ajit Pai, the lone Republican on the five-member commission (where two seats are vacant), criticized allocations of the fund, saying an average of only $1.8 billion had been spent in each of the last 10 years, leaving more than $5 billion unused in the E-Rate account.

Mr. Pai also complained that the program placed greater emphasis on the wrong services.

“E-Rate today prioritizes long-distance telephone calls and getting phone service to a school’s bus garage over wiring up a classroom,” Mr. Pai said in a speech this week at the American Enterprise Institute. “How can it be that E-Rate in the last few years committed about $600 million, more than one-quarter of its annual budget, to support voice telephone services while at the same time denying eight out of 10 applicants’ funding for connecting classrooms?”

At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing this week, both Republicans and Democrats spoke favorably of the fund, although some quoted Mr. Pai’s observations in a warning of reckless spending.

As Europe Presses Google on Antitrust, U.S. Backs Away

BRUSSELS — Google seems on its way to coming through a major antitrust investigation in the United States essentially unscathed. But the outlook is not as bright for Google here, as the European Union’s top antitrust regulator prepares to meet on Tuesday with Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission appears to be ready to back off what had been the centerpiece of its antitrust pursuit of Google: the complaint that the company’s dominant search engine favors the company’s commerce and other services in search queries, thwarting competition.

Yet in a statement last spring, Joaquín Almunia, the competition commissioner of the European Union, placed the contentions about search bias at the top of his list of concerns about Google. And in a private meeting this month, Mr. Almunia told Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the F.T.C., that European antitrust officials remain focused on that issue, according to two people told of the meeting, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about it.

Mr. Almunia’s tougher bargaining stance, antitrust experts say, is not merely a personal preference.

European antitrust doctrine, they say, applies a somewhat different standard than United States law does. In America, dominant companies are given great leeway, if their conduct can be justified in the name of efficiency, thus consumer benefit. Google has consistently maintained that it offers a neutral, best-for-the-customer result.

In Europe, antitrust experts say, the law prohibits the “abuse of a dominant position,” with the victims of the supposed abuse often being competitors. “The Europeans tend to use competition law to level the playing field more than is the case in the United States,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert and law professor at the University of Iowa. (Mr. Hovenkamp advised Google on one project, but no longer has any financial connection to the company.)

The European rationale, legal experts say, is that shielding competitors to some degree preserves competition and enhances consumer welfare in the long run.

“Europe has a stronger hand to play with Google because of its standards,” said Keith N. Hylton, a professor at the Boston University School of Law.

The European antitrust regulators, like their American counterparts, have been in negotiations with Google for several months. The F.T.C. is expected to announce its decision within days, while the European timetable seems not as tight and is likely to go into next year.

The investigations in the United States and Europe really started with accusations of search bias. Rivals complain that the search giant gives more prominent placement and display for its online shopping and travel services, for example, than to competitors. The potential antitrust concern is that such specialized, or “vertical,” search services — like Yelp or Nextag — are partial substitutes for Google’s search engine because they also allow people to find information.

In his public statement in May, Mr. Almunia identified four areas of concern in Europe’s antitrust investigation of Google. The first concern he cited was search bias.

“Google displays links to its own vertical search services differently than it does for links to competitors,” Mr. Almunia said in a statement then. “We are concerned that this may result in preferential treatment compared to those of competing services, which may be hurt as a consequence.”

His other three concerns are ones that Google is preparing to address with a set of voluntary commitments in the United States, according to two people briefed on Google’s talks with the F.T.C., who declined to give their names because they were not authorized to speak about them.

Google, according to the people, has agreed to refrain from copying summaries of product and restaurant reviews from other Web sites and including them in Google search results, a practice known as screen scraping.

James Kanter reported from Brussels and Steve Lohr from New York. Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting from San Francisco.

F.C.C. Backs Plan on Reclaiming Spectrum for a Wireless Auction

WASHINGTON — The government took a big step on Friday to aid the creation of new high-speed wireless Internet networks that could fuel the development of the next generation of smartphones and tablets, and devices that haven’t even been thought of yet.

The five-member Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a sweeping, though preliminary, proposal to reclaim public airwaves now used for broadcast television and auction them off for use in wireless broadband networks, with a portion of the proceeds paid to the broadcasters.

The initiative, which the F.C.C. said would be the first in which any government would pay to reclaim public airwaves with the intention of selling them, would help satisfy what many industry experts say is booming demand for wireless Internet capacity.

Mobile broadband traffic will increase more than thirtyfold by 2015, the commission estimates. Without additional airwaves to handle the traffic, officials say, consumers will face more dropped calls, connection delays and slower downloads of data.

The F.C.C. will issue proposed rules for what it calls incentive auctions — the sale of airwaves that are voluntarily given up by broadcasters in exchange for a portion of the auction proceeds.

A proposal detailing the program will be released next week, officials said.

The commission will seek public comments over the coming months.

“In this flat, competitive world, capital and talent can flow anywhere,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said before the vote. “We’re in a global bandwidth race. It’s similar to the space race in that success will unleash waves of innovation that will go a long way toward determining who leads our global economy in the 21st century.”

The auctions are not expected until 2014, but commission officials and Congress have estimated that the process could generate $15 billion in proceeds. About $7 billion of that would be set aside to build a nationwide emergency communications network for public safety officials, a yet-unfulfilled recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.

The auction proposal received widespread acclaim from wireless companies, Internet trade groups and telecommunications experts — just about everyone, that is, except television broadcasters. Most broadcasters want to retain their airwaves, and they have disputed a brewing shortage of spectrum.

Industry lobbyists note that broadcasters gave up significant amounts of airwaves several years ago in the conversion of television signals to digital from analog format. That spectrum was auctioned in 2008, with no compensation to broadcasters, and industry officials grumble that many of the buyers of those airwaves have not used them yet.

Gordon H. Smith, a former Republican senator from Oregon who is president of the National Association of Broadcasters, said on Friday that he thought the high expectations for the auction “may be premised on the mistaken belief that broadcasting is an industry in decline.”

Some major broadcast groups, including CBS, which owns more than two dozen broadcast channels around the country, have said they do not intend to give up their broadcast spectrum.

But Mr. Genachowski said he believed there were many small broadcasters, particularly independent, individually owned stations in urban areas, whose low profit margins and lack of original programming made them more likely to give up spectrum in the auctions.

Also casting some wariness on the auction details were the commission’s two Republican members, who warned against making the auction rules so complicated that they exclude potential bidders, lessening the chances the auctions will raise enough money for the public safety network and other uses.

Robert M. McDowell, a Republican commissioner, said that the agency must remain open to public and industry recommendations about how best to structure the auctions and the movement of broadcasters to new places on the electromagnetic spectrum.

“In the past, regulatory efforts to over-engineer spectrum auctions have caused harmful, unintended consequences,” Mr. McDowell said.

The auction process will have three parts. In the first, the F.C.C. will conduct a reverse auction to determine which holders of broadcast television licenses will submit bids to voluntarily give up their spectrum rights in exchange for payment.

In addition to seeking the broadcasters that will give up their licenses and go off the air, the agency will also consider whether to allow alternatives, like agreeing to allow broadcasters to share spectrum with another station or to move from a UHF television channel to VHF, which occupies different spots on the dial.

A second portion of the process involves repacking — essentially moving and squeezing together the remaining airwaves so they occupy a smaller portion of the spectrum band, known as UHF. Once those bands of newly available spectrum are identified, they would be auctioned in the traditional format, going to the highest bidders.

Those three parts can be conducted either consecutively or concurrently, and the F.C.C. is seeking comment on that approach as well.

The F.C.C. also voted to begin a review of its mobile spectrum ownership policies, specifically whether it should revise its limits on how much spectrum any one wireless telecommunications company can own in a geographic area.

The F.C.C. now limits companies to holding no more than one-third of an area’s available airwaves. Big wireless companies have said those rules, put in place more than a decade ago, should be changed to allow bigger holdings by dominant carriers.

Smaller wireless companies, however, say the F.C.C. should keep limits while also changing its counting method to give greater weight to the most attractive spectrum bands, on which signals travel further and more easily through obstacles like buildings.

Axl Rose’s Ex-Wife Backs Him Up — Axl Didn’t Graffiti My House!

Axl Rose
Ex-Wife Backs Singer --
Axl Didn't Graffiti My Home
They're divorced, but Axl Rose's ex-wife still has the Guns 'N Roses singer's back -- insisting Axl NEVER tagged her house with vengeful graffiti ... and now, she's also going after the artist behind the allegations.

Axl's ex Erin Everly just sent a cease and desist letter to L.A. photographer Laura London, reiterating what Axl said in his own cease and desist letter to the artist -- Axl did NOT spray paint his wife's garage door with the message "Sweet Child o' DIE."

In the letter, Erin's attorney writes, "Ms. Everly unequivocally denies that Axl Rose ever painted those statements on her garage door."

London claims she took the photograph of the vandalized garage door back when she was Axl's neighbor many years ago. According to London, Axl had spray painted the message during a fight with Everly.

London is currently displaying the photograph in an exhibit in Downtown L.A. called "Once Upon a Time ... Axl Rose Was My Neighor."

Sources close to Everly tells us ... neighborhood kids were responsible for the damage, NOT Axl.