Oct 19 Columbia: State of Telecom Oct 20 Media Concentration Around the World

Milo Medin, Matthias Kurth, Robert Pepper, Craig Moffett and other true experts. (Those links take you to comments about who these guys are and what good questions to ask them.) Eli Noam, world-leading public intellectual, and partner Robert Atkinson’s annual State of Telecom will be followed the next day by a remarkable conference on Media Concentration. Events like Columbia’s become even more important as the lobbyists control almost all the D.C. events. (Five of the first six speakers at the U.S. IGF planning meeting were current or former lobbyists, most from giant multinationals.)

The free Livestream is at http://livestream.com/internetsociety/citisot2015. Thanks to Joly McFie and the Internet Society for the stream. Tickets to the live event oost from $25-$150. I’m sure no one will be turned away because of inability to pay.

Tuesday the 20th will be a remarkable event with Eli bringing together more than two dozen scholars from around the world to discuss media concentration.

A few years ago, Eli had the courage to follow his data. The data showed a significant increase in concentration in the U.S., contrary to what Eli and other scholars had previously believed. With the help of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, Eli has led a remarkable group of peers compiling data around the world. Despite the Internet, concentration is increasing by most measures. I’ve learned a great deal from Eli, including the importance of following the money to understand what’s really going on in policy.

Live tickets for Media Concentration are here. Joly will again be recording for the Internet Society and the recording will be available afterwards. The Internet Society is using the live link to webcast the Marconi Symposium from London.  

Here are a few speakers of special interest and an interesting question to ask each one.

Milo Medin manages Google Fiber and much more.  Twenty years ago as CTO of @Home, Milo was instrumental in building the cable networks that delivered 10 megabits in 1999 to most of the U.S. He was part of the President’s Council on Science and Technology and worked on the PCAST Report that made sharing spectrum official U.S. policy. 

Question for Milo: What are people doing with a gigabit they couldn’t do quite well with 100-200 megabits? I asked Milo that a while back and his answer was, “A gigabit connection is as fast as many people’s home networks. People are moving everything to the cloud, including video and music. That’s new and different.” I ask the same question to several Koreans when I went to the ITU meeting. The only practical benefit anyone could think of today was “People think it’s cool. They get to brag about how fast their Internet connection is.”

Robert Pepper was the world’s most respected regulator when I began DSL Prime, virtually running the FCC from behind the scenes. Working for Cisco, he’s still in the middle of things around the world.k

Doctor Pepper is chairing what should be the most interesting panel: 5:00-5:40pm – The Google/Facebook/Netflix Problem, and Regulatory Approaches to Market Power in the Information Economy. Facebook and Google are efficiently doing what almost any company would like to: Dominate the World. The World hates that, even as many love Google and Facebook.A million Indians have signed a petition against Facebook’s attempt to dominate through the deceptively named Internet.org. 

Questions: Should major multinationals pay a proportionate tax in the countries in which they do business? Should they employ people in those countries? Should they obey local law? What should the U.S. government do to avoid being embarrassed by our multi-national giants? 

Those are comparatively easy questions. One worth asking is the flow of funds on the Internet. How much money is moving from poor countries to wealthier ones because of the Internet changes? The truth is “a lot and even more in the future.” No one dares to study that question, however. 

Craig Moffett is the most original analyst on Wall Street, one of the few with enough confidence to say “I’ve been wrong before… but rarely this wrong.” He is right far more often than he is wrong. Craig had calculated the value of Cablevision at about $8/share. Altice bid $34 to take over. I believe Moffett may still prove right – Altice’s $17B for Cablevision is over $5,000/customer. It’s paying 7.5% on $14B in debt. To earn a modest return on that investment, Altice will need $50/month in profit over and above all costs of programming and operations. The payment on the new $8B in bonds is $600,000,000/year. more than 50% higher than the company’s earnings the last three years. Patrick Drahi will fire a lot of people from a company whose service is not great. Essentially, Drahi’s betting that Verizon will collaborate with him to raise prices. New York State regulators are weak so Drahi could win his bet. 

Question for Craig: Interest rates are at historic lows and liable to go up substantially. What’s the likely effect on telcos, conservative giants and junk bond upstarts? 

A related question: Altice and Charter are taking on large debt for the Time Warner and Cablevision deals. Will that make it harder for them to give their territories the best service at a competitive price? Craig will probably give a diplomatic answer.

Mathias Kurth brought broadband to the smallest towns in Germany, at almost no public cost. After he retired as the regulator, he became Chair of the European cable association. 

Question for Matthias: In the latest U.S. CAF program, the level of subsidy is about twice the total cost of delivering broadband to rural areas. How can we prevent the ripoff and still serve rural homes? He did it in germany by requiring companies buying spectrum to first serve the most rural areas before they could go to the more profitable cities. Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, spending their own money, covered those territories for a small fraction of what French and British companies demand as a subsidy. The respected consulting outfit WIK believed the companies barely lowered their bids in the spectrum auction to cover taking on those costs.

Another question for Kurth would be about the emerging Deutsche Telekom monopoly in a third of the country. DT wants to upgrade to a faster version of DSL, (vectoring), which is difficult to unbundle. His successor Jochen Homann, has agreed in principle after DT seemed to make a deal with competitors. That’s having problems now. What should the Germans do to mitigate monopoly & duopoly power?

In particular, should Europe return to the previous cost-based unbundling rules, recently changed in the EU?  Cost-based pricing is particularly attractive because the result would be a faster Internet for most Germans. Some of us think a better Internet is a good thing.

 Here are the latest programs for the two days.

Media concentration has been an issue around the world. To some observers, the power of large media conglomerates has never been greater. To others, the Internet has brought openness and diversity. Which perspective is correct? The answer has significant policy and business implications.

The answer to the empirical question is not as obvious as many sincerely believe. Although numerous large-scale mergers have taken place, the sector itself has grown rapidly. Also, de-mergers have taken place. And with digital convergence and globalization, firms have been crossing industry and national lines.

Why extend the analysis to the world at large? Because if we can identify common trends, we can seek the drivers, whether technological, economic, or political. This has policy implications. When drivers are fundamental in nature it is difficult to deal with them through regulatory policy. But when a country or a region is an outlier, with a media market that is different from similarly positioned countries, a corrective policy might be more effective.

To address this question, this conference analyzes the media sector, across countries and across time, and identifies its dynamics, concentration, and ownership trends. The conference will discuss the findings and implications of a CITI-led study on international media concentration. This project brought together author teams from 30 countries examining 13 media industries in the platform, distribution, and content sectors. The result is a book published by Oxford University Press, to be unveiled at the conference. The book is 1300 pages in length and includes 800 figures and tables. It aims to provide a serious data analysis of questions of media concentration trends, their drivers, the impact of technology, and variations across countries and industries.

Draft Agenda

8:30-9:00am Registration and Breakfast

9:00-9:10am Welcome

Introduction of Topic, Project, and of the International Collaboration on Media Concentration

• Eli Noam, Columbia University

9:10-9:20am Media Concentration and the OSI

• Marius Dragomir, Open Society Foundations, London.

The conference format is a series of short panels on overarching themes, including reference to specific countries and to the report’s findings, provided by the authors of country chapters and members of the International Collaboration on Media Concentration.

9:20-10:00am – Trends of Concentration in Content Industries: a Problem? What are Policy Approaches?

• Jo Groebel, Germany/Belgium
• Kiyoshi Nakamura, Japan
• Paulo Faustino, Portugal
• Dwayne Winseck, Canada
• Moderator: Eli Noam

10:00-10:40am – Media Concentration in the BRICs and Developing Countries, and what do about it?

• Min Hang, China
• Anuradha Bhattacharjee, India
• Moderator: Raul Katz

10:40-11:20pm Is Concentration an Effective Tool for Industrial Policy?

• Raul Katz,CITI, United States
• Joost van Dreunen,Netherlands
• Moderator:Eli Noam

11:20-11:35am Coffee Break

11:35-12:15pm – High Concentration and Democracy: What is the Interaction?

• Jo Grobel, Germany/Belgium
• Paschal Preston, Ireland
• Juan Enrique Huerta, Mexico
• Moderator: Jason Buckweitz, Columbia Institute for Tele-Information

12:15-12:55pm – A The Role of State Ownership in Media Concentration: Pro and Con

• Huseyin Bayazit, Turkey
• Min Hang, China
• Ben Compaine,CITI, United States
• Marius Dragomir, Senior Manager, Open Society Foundations, London

01:00-1:40pm – Lunch

01:40-2:00pm – Lunch Speaker

• Alfonso Sánchez-Tabernero, Rector, University of Navarra

2:10-2:50pm – Media Concentration in Authoritarian Countries, and how should others respond?

• Huseyin Bayazit, Turkey
• Sergio Godoy Etcheverry, Chile
• Marius Dragomir, Senior Manager, Open Society Foundations, London

2:50-3:30pm – The Impact of Globalization on Concentration: Pros and Cons

• Kiyoshi Nakamura, Japan
• Anaruda Bhattacharjee, India
• Juan Enrique Huerta, Mexico
• Moderator: Ben Compaine

3:30-4:10pm – Is the Internet the Solution to Market Concentration, or the Problem?

• Dwayne Winseck, Canada
• Moran Yemini, Israel
• Daeho Kim, South Korea
• Moderator:Robert Pepper, VP Public Policy, Cisco, United States

4:10-4:20pm Coffee Break

4:20-5:00am – Institutional Ownership: a Problem?

• Paulo Faustino, Portugal
• Sergio Godoy Etcheverry, Chile
• Ben Compaine, CITI, United States
• Moderator: Jason Buckweitz, Columbia Institute for Tele-Information

5:00-5:40pm – The Google/Facebook/Netflix Problem, and Regulatory Approaches to Market Power in the Information Economy

• Joost van Dreunen, Netherlands
• Moran Yemini, Israel
• Paschal Preston, Ireland
• Moderator:Robert Pepper, VP, Cisco, United States

5:40-6:00pm – Group Discussion: What have we learned? What should be done next in academia and policy?

6:00pm Receptionbrite.com/e/building-the-next-generation-of-entertainment-online-platforms-cloud-tickets-18741482278

https://citimediaownership.eventbrite.com

5:00-5:40pm – The Google/Facebook/Netflix Problem, and Regulatory Approaches to Market Power in the Information Economy