Internet Neutrality: Más peleas a la vista (BusinessWeek)

Internet

Verizon's Net Neutrality Victory Means More Fighting to Come

By Joshua Brustein   January 14, 2014

For a small but passionate group of tech-minded policy wonks, the legal battle over net neutrality is the preeminent Internet issue of the year. A federal appeals court on Tuesday invalidated the rules set by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, but did so in such a way that guarantees the action won’t stop in January.

Net neutrality means that the companies controlling the infrastructure of the Internet can’t treat different kinds of Web activity differently. The FCC’s 2010 Open Internet Order (PDF) set out rules for Internet providers that said as much. Verizon Communications (VZ)quickly sued, saying the FCC doesn’t have the authority to regulate the Internet. While Verizon won, the ruling is based on a technicality: The court found that broadband providers aren’t “common carriers,” like telephone companies, and cannot be regulated as such under the law. The FCC retains the underlying power that Verizon wanted to strip away, and the commission has hinted in the past that it could choose simply to change the companies’ classifications.

“What has happened here is this makes things more of a mess than ever,” says Harold Feld of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that sided with the FCC in the case.

STORY: The Underdog Internet Providers Head to Washington

Since he took over at FCC chairman late last year, Tom Wheeler’s every word has been scrutinized for signs as to how he might approach this issue. A former industry lobbyist, Wheeler has said things in the last few months that have given everyone reason for hope and fear. He has explicitly supported the open Internet rules while saying he is open to new business models, including so-called two-sided markets, hinting at a model by which content companies could pay for some kind of special treatment. He took a wait-and-see attitude when AT&T (T) announced a sponsored data plan that would allow companies to pay to have their services not count against their customers’ data plans.

We’re reaching the end of the tea-leaf-reading era. Barring a successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Wheeler’s commission will need to rewrite its regulations, taking into account both the new legal landscape and its chairman’s own priorities. In a way, Wheeler comes out the winner here, says Roslyn Layton of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy, a critic of net neutrality rules. “What he wants to do is change the game,” Layton said in a conference call with reporters on Monday. “If I’m the new chairman, I don’t want the day-old bread. I want to make my own imprimatur.”

In the long run, the case could substantially change the economics of the Internet. But neither side of the debate expects to see sweeping changes immediately. Critics of net neutrality rules are primarily concerned about overly powerful federal regulators using broad authority to regulate the Internet. But several analysts in AEI’s conference call admitted there wasn’t anything very offensive about the Open Internet Rules themselves and said they didn’t expect Wheeler’s commission to do much they’d oppose with its new power.

VIDEO: Why European Internet Companies Are Surging

Groups such as Public Knowledge and the net neutrality advocate Free Press, meanwhile, see deals such as AT&T’s sponsored data plan as the seeds of a troublesome move to choke off competition. “The biggest broadband providers will race to turn the open and vibrant Web into something that looks like cable TV,” says Free Press Chief Executive Officer and President Craig Aaron. “They’ll establish fast lanes for the few giant companies that can afford to pay exorbitant tolls and reserve the slow lanes for everyone else.”

Don’t expect Internet service providers to, say, cut off Netflix (NFLX) until it coughs up millions soon, though. Even without specific net neutrality rules, the commission could still choose to go after blatantly anti-competitive behavior.

STORY: AT&T Lets Companies Pick Up the Tab for Data-Hungry Consumers

Brustein is a writer for Businessweek.com in New York.

Seminario del Servicio Comercial de los Estados Unidos: Sistema Automatizado de Exportación

Compradores de Autos Clásicos: Ojo con los falsos (BusinessWeek)

By Leon Mangasarian and Patrick Winters                                                                       January 02, 2014 

In the 1930s, British sports car maker MG manufactured exactly 33 of its vaunted K3 open-top race cars. But if you want to buy one today, there are more than 100 to choose from. No, the defunct manufacturer didn’t restart production. The tripling of the K3 fleet is part of the booming trade in fake antique autos as soaring prices for classic cars spur sophisticated counterfeits. “In the 1990s, I would find one faked car every five years,” says Norbert Schroeder, who verifies classic cars at TUV Rheinland, a Cologne (Germany)-based technical testing company. “Now I find up to five fakes a year.”

Fueling the jump in the number of bogus rides is heated demand from well-heeled collectors. Auction values for vintage cars have risen more than sevenfold over the past decade, according to Historica Selecta, a consulting company that specializes in vintage autos. In 2011, British auction house Bonhams sold a 1955 Aston Martin DB2/4 for £230,000 ($380,000). That was more than four times the price the same car sold for—in unchanged condition—in 2003, says James Knight, director of the auction house’s motoring department.

Bonhams, which says sales of classic cars now exceed $1 billion annually, in July 2013 sold a 1954 Mercedes-Benz F1 race car for a world record price of £19.6 million. And at a Dec. 1 auction it sold dozens of pricey vintage autos, including a 1964 Porsche 904 GTS racing coupe for £1.15 million, a 1959 Aston Martin DB4GT Sports Saloon for £1.57 million, and a 1956 Jaguar D-Type “Shortnose” for £2.58 million. “People with a lot of money prefer to have a classic car in the garage than money in the bank,” says Adolfo Orsi, president of Historica Selecta.

Video: Sotheby’s Art of the Automobile Auction Makes $62M

That’s one reason criminals are going to unprecedented lengths to grab a piece of the action. Sophisticated forgers have been known to buy old screws and washers and leave reproduced frames out in fields to weather. “When there is a lot of money, there are fakes,” Orsi explains. “In today’s world, it is possible to replicate everything.”

Bernhard Kaluza, vice president of international antique auto club Fédération Internationale des Véhicules Anciens (FIVA), says counterfeiters even bought an old movie theater in France to get the worn antique leather from the seats. “The people faking cars are not a few lone wolves,” says TUV’s Schroeder, who’s traveled as far as California to authenticate cars, evaluating welded joints and chemically testing the metal to determine its age. “It’s organized crime, because it’s expensive to build such cars and you need a good infrastructure to do it.”

Christian Jenny, retired chief information officer of Zurich Insurance Group, spent five years proving his rare 1952 Jaguar C-Type racer was authentic after another car came on the market claiming the same identification number. The owner of 13 vintage Jaguars consulted many experts, including Norman Dewis, chief test engineer for the British luxury brand for more than 30 years. With the car valued at about $2.5 million, a lot was at stake. “It might be a problem if you tried to sell the car years later,” Jenny says. Verifying it was “a precautionary measure.”

Slideshow: An Italian Auto Design Master's Second Act

Authenticaton can require sleuthing. Simon Kidston, a classic-car consultant in Geneva, was once offered an Alfa Romeo Giulia TZ racer from the 1960s by a seller who claimed to have discovered it in a scrap yard in Italy. After consulting numerous sources, Kidston eventually discovered a photo of a car with the same identification number that was involved in a fiery crash at the annual Sebring 12-hour endurance race in 1964. The driver barely escaped. “It was clear there could be nothing left of the original car,” says Kidston, who rejected the offer.

Many frauds are more subtle, like taking an authentic vintage Porsche 911 and turning it into a high-performance racing version, which could quadruple the car’s value. Other scammers take authentic parts and build a vehicle around them, making the line between refurbished and forged murky. “There are plenty of adapted cars,” says Bonhams’s Knight. “Fake has another meaning: It’s trying to deceive.”

The extent of classic-car fraud is difficult to track because few victims come forward. Still, to prevent the threat of counterfeits from discrediting the whole market, FIVA has proposed issuing a standardized verification document for each antique car, Kaluza says, to improve transparency and help keep buyers from getting duped. “The whole problem of faked classic cars is being treated warily” because people in the market “don’t want to ruin the good mood,” Schroeder says. “I want to speak out on this before the whole thing blows up.”

The bottom line: Selling vintage cars has become a $1 billion-a-year business. Counterfeiters have taken notice.

Mangasarian is a reporter for Bloomberg News in Berlin.

Winters is a reporter for Bloomberg News in Zurich. 

Los Europeos evitan usar Buscadores Americanos...

European Consumers Avoid U.S. Search Engines

Play

Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Hans Nichols reports on European security concerns in the wake of NSA spying allegations. He speaks on Bloomberg Television's "In The Loop." (Source: Bloomberg)

El Papa Francisco...Es Marxista o No? ....(BusinessWeek)

Economy

Pope Francis Says He's Not a Marxist. Others Aren't Sure

By Carol Matlack                                                                                                                  December 16, 2013

 

Is a Communist running the Vatican? Pope Francis, after stirring controversy with his “who am I to judge?” comment on homosexuality, now is under attack for his criticisms of capitalism.

 

In a Dec. 14 interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, the pontiff defended a recent “apostolic exhortation” in which he disputed the theory of “trickle-down” economics, condemned the global financial system, and accused rich people of “stealing” if they do not share their wealth with the poor.

 

In the document, the pope decried “ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation.” He called on the world’s political leaders to enact financial reform with “an ethical approach which favors human beings.”

 

STORY: Bloomberg View: Pope Francis and the Poor

 

His statements outraged some conservatives such as radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, who described them in a Nov. 27 broadcast as “pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope.”

 

In the La Stampa interview, the pope said: “The Marxist ideology is wrong. But I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don’t feel offended.”

 

In the interview, the pope said that he questioned “trickle down theories” that assume that “economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and social inclusiveness in the world. The promise was that when the glass was full, it would overflow, benefiting the poor. But what happens, instead, is that when the glass is full, it magically gets bigger and nothing ever comes out for the poor.” That view, he said, reflects “the Church’s social doctrine. This does not mean being a Marxist.”

 

The pope’s comments on capitalism also drew an attack from Lant Pritchett, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, who writes in a Bloomberg View op-ed column that the pontiff is “promoting envy” of the rich while discouraging entrepreneurship and innovation. “Encouraging people to measure themselves against others only leads to grief,” he writes. “Resenting the success of others is a sin in itself.”

It’s worth noting that Pope Francis is not the first pontiff to criticize capitalism—particularly the neo-liberal brand promoted by the U.S. Here’s what John Paul II wrote in a January 1999 exhortation:

“More and more, in many countries of America, a system known as ‘neoliberalism’ prevails; based on a purely economic conception of man, this system considers profit and the law of the market as its only parameters, to the detriment of the dignity of and the respect due to individuals and peoples. At times this system has become the ideological justification for certain attitudes and behavior in the social and political spheres leading to the neglect of the weaker members of society. Indeed, the poor are becoming ever more numerous, victims of specific policies and structures which are often unjust.”

Nobody accused that pope, whose interventions were widely credited with helping end Soviet rule in his native Poland, with being a Marxist sympathizer.

Matlack is a Paris correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Intel invierte en elm interior de las camisetas del Barcelona Futbol Club

By Ira Boudway                                                                                December 13, 2013


Barcelona's forward Lionel Messi shows a shirt reading 'Happy Birthday Mami' after scoring during a 2011 match in Barcelona

Next time you start to feel like everything that can be sold will be sold, just remember that most soccer clubs in the world do not sell the underside of their jerseys to advertisers. Most of the time, when a player lifts up his shirt to celebrate a goal, it is an act of joy that brings profit to no one. Do not fret over news that Futbol Club Barcelona, the second-richest soccer team in the world, has sold the inside of its shirts to silicon chip maker Intel (INTC) for a reported $25 million over five years.

Do not consider that the space that striker Lionel Messi once used to wish his mother a happy birthday (earning a fine of about €2,000, or $2,740) now belongs to a corporation with a market value of about $120 billion. Do not wonder if Barcelona players are raising their shirts because they want to or because they have to. Definitely do not think of Barcelona goal celebrations as a return on investment. But if you must know, they are worth $8,858,678 annually, according to Eric Smallwood, an analyst who tracks these things for Front Row Marketing Services—$6,013,000 from TV exposure, $469,680 from in-stadium exposure, and $2,375,000 from surrounding promotions and publicity such as this story.

Try not to consider the cleverness of a company that makes internal parts for computers buying the inside of a shirt. Don’t think of the slogan Intel Inside. And whatever else you do, try not to remember the time Danish striker Nicklas Bendtner was fined £80,000 ($130,400) for exposing the logo of an Irish bookmaker on his underwear.

STORY: Samsung Bought Almost Every Screen Anywhere Near an NBA Game

 

 Boudway is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.

 

From BusinessWeek: The Business of War...

What Blackwater Founder Erik Prince Learned About the Business of War
By Drake Bennett                                                                  November 21, 2013

What Blackwater Founder Erik Prince Learned About the Business of War

Erik Prince is not whining, he wants that clear. “However much I had to put up with, in terms of the assault from all sides, from the lawyers and the bureaucrats, pales in comparison to guys who lost their lives, who were maimed, either active-duty military or contractors,” he says. “I’m just providing a cautionary tale to the next guy dumb enough to run to the sound of the alarm bell. Because the government can drop you on a dime and leave you hanging.” For Prince, who in less than a decade took an obscure military training facility, Blackwater USA, and transformed it, with government contracts, into a billion-dollar company before selling it in late 2010, even score-settling is a public service.

 

In a dark suit and white, open-collar shirt, Prince is sitting warily in a hotel suite above New York’s Times Square. For years he’s been rumored to be working on a memoir about Blackwater (now called Academi), a name linked in the public imagination with the killings of dozens of Iraqis and Afghans. Now, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror, is published, and Prince is busy promoting it. A private person, he submits to an interview with the enthusiasm of a dog in a shower. And yet he’s been waiting for this, too—to make the case for himself and his company and place the blame where he believes it belongs: “If I could send a message back to my younger self, it would be: Do not work for the State Department at all.”

 

Story: Blackwater Founder Erik Prince Is Tired of Other People Telling His Secrets

 

At 44, Prince has always striven to be the sort of person who runs to the alarm. At Hillsdale College in Michigan, he joined the local volunteer fire department, becoming a rescue diver. It was grim work. The emergency calls were usually for snowmobilers who had gone through thin ice, and they never lasted long enough to be revived. Still, he found it thrilling: stepping through a hole into inky water, accompanied only by the hiss of his own breath.

 

As Prince was growing up in the conservative, proudly Dutch town of Holland, Mich., Edgar Prince, his father, built a billion-dollar fortune making auto parts. When Erik graduated from college, however, he signed up for the U.S. Navy, survived the brutal attrition of Hell Week, and joined SEAL Team 8. In the spring of 1995, when Erik was 25, his father died of a heart attack, and a year later Erik’s wife, Joan, was diagnosed with breast cancer—she would live with it for seven years before succumbing. Erik left the service to tend to his family and his father’s estate. The family sold Prince Automotive, and Erik went into business for himself, building a private military training ground in the backwoods of North Carolina.

 

The business catered to law enforcement and the military—post-Cold War cuts had reduced training capacity—but struggled to find clients for its first couple of years. After Sept. 11, however, Prince and Blackwater went from training soldiers to finding them work, deploying thousands of vets to guard and transport American diplomats, aid workers, politicians, and CIA case officers through two wars. Forty-one Blackwater contractors eventually died in the line of duty. None of the U.S. State Department officials they were guarding were killed or seriously injured. While running the company, Prince says, he did covert intelligence work for the CIA.

 

Video: How Are Security Contractors Vetted and Hired

 

Civilian Warriors is an angry book, and some of Prince’s contentions have made immediate headlines: He argues that ill-conceived State Department regulations led to Blackwater’s many firefights in Iraq; he has accused former CIA Director Leon Panetta of blowing his cover as an intelligence asset; and he contends that, had Blackwater still been providing security for America’s diplomats, Chris Stevens, the ambassador killed in Benghazi, would be alive today.

And yet, Civilian Warriors is not just a rant about government incompetence. It’s also the tale of how Prince founded, ran, and then lost his company. Like many a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Prince never saw Blackwater as simply a moneymaking venture. He wanted it to prove two things he strongly believed in: the dynamism of the private sector, and that some of the world’s most frustrating problems—piracy, warlords, genocide—could be solved by small groups of highly trained men with guns.

Blackwater got into the security business almost by chance. After the attacks of Sept. 11, Prince writes, he applied to the CIA’s National Clandestine Service but was turned down for a lack of field experience—he had seen little action in his five years in the SEALs. Soon thereafter, though, the CIA asked his company for help, and they developed a close relationship. (Prince’s book was vetted by the CIA.) The agency’s executive director, Alvin Bernard “Buzzy” Krongard, had heard of Blackwater—his son, a SEAL, had trained there. Krongard, uneasy about some of the local guards at the facilities the agency was setting up in Afghanistan, asked Prince if Blackwater could supply some men to do the job, drawing on its growing Rolodex of special forces veterans. That contract, fulfilled in days, was the first of many.

Incorporated in 2002, Blackwater’s security arm soon began supplying guards to other parts of the government. Crucially, two Blackwater contractors were attached to the U.S. Army team protecting Paul Bremer, the American diplomat who from May 2003 to June 2004 ran Iraq as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. One of the two was Frank Gallagher, a former Force Reconnaissance marine who had once run security for Henry Kissinger. When the Pentagon decided to contract out the whole detail in August 2003, he became its leader. Seven days later, Blackwater had found 34 more guys—former Army Rangers and special forces, Force Recon marines, SEALs, and SWAT team officers—promised them $600 a day, and flown them into Baghdad. Gallagher had a single day to train his team, and then they were in the field.

Story: Pentagon Cuts Leave Largest Military Air Charter in Chapter 11—Again

 

To read the complete story, go to: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-21/what-blackwater-founder-erik-prince-learned-about-the-business-of-war?campaign_id=DN112113 

 

Bennett is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.