AOL’s massive publication of users’ search data has been dissected and debated and heavily covered by the press and blogosphere so there’s not much to add to the discussion, except this: AOL is one run-down company and the “data Valdez,” as some are calling it, came at the worst possible time.
Just take a look at the blog entries of some of AOL’s top executives. Ted Leonsis says
I personally feel just awful about it. After we have worked so hard to build our users’ trust and protect their privacy for so many years, a single mistake can put it all at risk. In my time as an AOL executive, this is one of our saddest days.
Even hyper-energized Jason Calacanis has been slowed down by all of this. He’s taking some time off from blogging before he says something he will regret.
I was so angry today that I had to get off my computer and do a three-mile run. I’m back at my desk but I’m still seething—how could this happen?! Everyone is working so hard to get AOL on the right track, and it all gets forgotten when this kind of thing happens.
I think I’m gonna take the rest of the week off from blogging as a “cool down”period. I don’t want to say something I regret, and I don’t want to become the spokesperson for the entire company—that’s not my job and it’s not my desire. I just want to build cool stuff with cool people I respect.
David at Blog Herald offers up some PR crisis management tips, but leads off with the following statement:
AOL hasn’t had good PR in so long I can’t even think of anything good about this company.
How will AOL’s management team turn things around with this kind of malaise hanging over the company? If there were any momentum sparked by the risky gamble to forego paid member revenues in favor of bigger and better web advertising, it’s probably been snuffed out by this data spill.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:33 PM | Print | Comments (0)Common Cause has released a report on the incredible amount of astro-turfing that surrounds telecom reform legislation. Entitled “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” the report is a follow-up to an earlier attack on these phoney “public interest” groups, which are, in reality, industry-financed fronts designed to mess with people’s minds.
The report eviscerates five groups: Hands Off The Internet, TV4US, netcompetition.org, The Future…Faster and Video Access Alliance. Common Cause reserves its worst criticism for Hands Off The Internet and netcompetition.org.
If there were an award for Astroturf lobby campaigns, Hands Off the Internet (HOTI) would win hands down.
With its pithy name, viral web cartoons, high profile spokesman (former White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry) and barrage of print and television advertising, HOTI has been effectively injecting the telephone industry’s arguments on net neutrality into the public debate in recent months.
And they manage to do it while hiding their relationship with their corporate backers.
Netcompetition.org (led by supposed independent analyst Scott Cleland) is anything but the open forum for debating net neutrality that it says it is.
NetCompetition.org presents itself as a membership organization that brings people together to debate the merits of various telecom reform proposals. But the only diversity in NetCompetition.org’s list of supporters is cable industry interests versus phone industry interests.
And since cable and telephone companies both support the telecom legislation currently being considered in Congress, and both oppose net neutrality, it’s not exactly a wide-ranging debate.
These fake groups are bad for democracy, which is why Common Cause is on the case.
These sorts of campaigns are dangerous for our democracy. They deliberately mislead citizens, and they deliberately mislead our lawmakers, who are charged with the difficult task of making sense of complex telecommunications policies. Corporations that already have significant economic clout and influence are trying to co-opt the voices of everyday citizens and think tanks, and use them to their own advantage. In the end, that practice dilutes the power of true grassroots and nonprofit advocacy.
It is therefore ironic that one group that might fit Common Cause’s definition of astroturf, ItsOurNet, flagged this report for my attention in an email. Like the groups profiled by Common Cause, ItsOurNet has taken out ads to promote their views on net neutrality, although the group maintains it hasn’t spent “millions and millions on advertizing each week like the anti-Net Neutrality forces.”
Like the groups cited by Common Cause, ItsOurNet doesn’t make clear in its ads that funding comes from some pretty big companies, including Amazon, eBay, Google, IAC, Microsoft and Yahoo! I will say that ItsOurNet does a far better job on its web site disclosing its corporate backing that do the other groups. But still, astroturf is astroturf and ItsOurNet describes itself as “a broad coalition of consumers, grassroots groups and businesses working together to preserve the Internet and Net Neutrality.”
How’s that any different from Hands Off The Internet, which bills itself as a “nationwide coalition of Internet users” which supports “public policies that ensure the broadest possible range of choices for consumers and businesses using the Internet?”
Common Cause is right about all this noise from supposed public interest groups and coalitions. But the misleading groups don’t exist only on the telco-cable side of the fence, even if there are more “coalitions” operating on behalf of cable operators and phone companies.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:37 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The FCC’s auction of AWS broadband spectrum kicked off yesterday, and the jockeying is already fascinating to watch. As Business Week’s Olga Kharif points out, it’s almost akin to watching a fist-fight among Chuck Dolan, Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffett.
That’s because some major communications industry heavyweights are vying to grab the valuable but invisible real estate. Murdoch-backed Wireless DBS (a consortium that includes News Corp.’s DirecTV and DBS player EchoStar) led the second round, followed by T-Mobile, Spectrum Co, a consortium of cable operators, Dolan Family Holdings, which is affiliated with Cablevision Systems and Cellco Partnership, which represent Verizon Wireless.
The second round bids exceeded the first round bids by $165 million and it’s still early in the process before the bidding gets intense. But estimates that the auction could net the government between $8 billion to $15 billion could be conservative, as Khalif points out.
Below is a table of the top five second round bidders, courtesy of Pali Research.
| Top Five Bidders - AWS Auction, Round 2 | |
| 1. Wireless DBS | 2. T-Mobile |
| (DirecTV, EchoStar) | (Deutsche Telekom) |
| 10mhz (301,551,422) | 10mhz (71,670,933) |
| Bid/Pop: $0.55 | Bid/Pop: $0.52 |
| Per Mhz Pop: $0.05 | Per Mhz Pop: $0.05 |
| 20mhz (99,149,196) | 20mhz (84,582,116) |
| Bid/Pop: $1.19 | Bid/Pop: $1.00 |
| Per Mhz Pop: $0.06 | Per Mhz Pop: $0.05 |
| 3. Spectrum | 4. Dolan Family Holdings |
| (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Advanced Newhouse) | (Cablevision) |
| 10mhz (89,505,277) | 10mhz (75,770,667) |
| Bid/Pop: $0.53 | Bid/Pop: $0.58 |
| Per Mhz Pop: $0.05 | Per Mhz Pop: $0.06 |
| 20mhz (50,888,483) | 20mhz (42,729,310) |
| Bid/Pop: $1.17 | Bid/Pop: $1.06 |
| Per Mhz Pop: $0.06 | Per Mhz Pop: $0.05 |
| 5. Cellco Partnership | |
| (Verizon Wireless) | |
| 20mhz (49,999,164) | |
| Bid/Pop: $1.25 | |
| Per Mhz Pop: $0.06 | |
| Source: Pali Research. | |
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:29 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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