Big Tech
Register for the July Broadband Breakfast Club Event: “Over the Top: Broadband Video’s Impact on Future TV”
Washington, Friday, July 12th, 2013 – BroadbandBreakfast.com will hold its July 2013 Broadband Breakfast Club event:
“Over the Top: Broadband Video’s Impact on Future TV” on Tuesday, July 16th, 2013 at Clyde’s of Gallery Place, 707 7th St. NW, Washington, DC 20001 from 8 am – 10 am.
Registration at: http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com
“Over the Top,” or video distribution directly over broadband networks, is the new way video is increasingly being consumed by a younger generation of internet users. What are the needs and preferences of this new generation, who watch films and programs on smart phones, tablets and laptops — but not on necessarily on televisions or through cable or broadcast programming? Apple’s iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Aereo and a range of other companies have begun to pave a new direction for what’s being called “future video” and “future TV”. What are the impacts of these new viewing patterns and video viewing options upon pay-television and broadcast providers? Are the new players in the broadband landscape able to purchase rights to also offer pay-television content? And is the traditional consumer “bundle” of television, telephone and broadband service no longer desirable for the typical consumer? These and other questions will be addressed by a panel of experts and moderated by Drew Clark, Chairman and Publisher of the Broadband Breakfast Club.
Details and Registration are available at:
http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com
Panel:
John Bergmayer
Senior Staff Attorney
Public Knowledge
John Bergmayer specializes in telecommunications, internet, and intellectual property issues. He advocates for the public interest before courts and policymakers, and works to make sure that all stakeholders–including ordinary citizens, artists, and technological innovators–have a say in shaping emerging digital policies. He is a member of the Colorado bar and a graduate of the University of Colorado Law School.
Daren Miller
Director
Content Partner Management
Centurylink
Daren Miller is a 30 year veteran of the telecommunications, cable and media industries. He currently serves as head of programming for CenturyLink. Miller’s responsibilities include content licensing and management for CenturyLink’s consumer video product platforms, including its wire line video service, PRISM, as well as its broadband portal. Prior to joining CenturyLink (formerly through Qwest Communications), Miller served in a number of senior management roles with TCI, Liberty Media and Fox Sports affiliates. He was the principal architect and manager of TCI’s, subsequently Liberty Media’s, portfolio of 15 regional sports networks and related businesses, now known as Fox Sports Nets. Miller has held roles in cable MSO programming licensing and television network management and operations for those affiliates. He has extensive experience in the negotiation of sports television programming as well as multiplatform pay television distribution rights. Miller is currently based in Denver, Colorado.
Michael E. Drobac
Senior Policy Advisor
Patton Boggs
Michael Drobac helps clients from the technology and telecommunications sectors define public policy objectives, develop strategic messaging in support of those objectives and define and execute outreach strategies. He advocates before Congress and federal agencies in support of policy objectives. Prior to joining Patton Boggs, Mr. Drobac was director of government relations for Netflix. He established and served as the first director of the company’s Washington DC office. Mr. Drobac also brings nearly ten years of experience in legislative affairs on Capitol Hill, acquired during periods of service to the offices of three United States senators. For Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Mr. Drobac reviewed all legislative items for the senator, with a primary focus on telecommunications and technology as well as judiciary matters, serving as lead policy advisor on Internet and technology issues for the Senate Commerce Committee.
Sharon Peyer
Founder
HitBliss
Sharon Peyer is a co-founder and VP, Business Development of HitBliss. In this capacity she oversees efforts related to the licensing of content distributed in the HitBliss store, efforts to attract third party brands to HitBliss Earn and HitBliss’ consumer marketing efforts. From 2004 until 2007, Sharon held similar responsibilities at Pixamo, a photo sharing and social networking startup that she co-founded and successfully sold. Prior to Pixamo, Sharon worked in a variety of entrepreneurial capacities primarily within the investment and venture capital industries in the United States and Europe. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgetown University and a Master degree in Business Administration from the Harvard Business School.
Eric J. Wolf
Executive for Technology Strategy and Planning
PBS
Eric Wolf is PBS’ Vice President for Technology Strategy and Planning. He spends much of his time at the intersection of media, technology, public policy, and the future. He’s currently working on issues as varied as the upcoming spectrum auctions, PBS next generation of content distribution, and unified asset management tools for PBS’ internal departments. Prior to PBS, Eric spent 9 years with AOL leading groups that built products used by tens of millions of people around the globe. Earlier in his career Eric held technology and organizational leadership roles at Peter D. Hart Research, a public opinion research boutique, and Symbolics, Inc. He holds 3 U.S. patents in the realm of interactive communications and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Political Science from Brown University.
Additional speakers have been invited
Moderator:
Drew Clark is the Chairman and Publisher of the Broadband Breakfast Club, the premier Washington forum advancing the conversation on broadband. Additionally, under his leadership as Executive Director of Broadband Illinois, he has helped unite the Land of Lincoln around a vision of Better Broadband, Better Lives. Illinois’ State Broadband Initiative has become the national model for public-private collaboration. Broadband Illinois provides the tools that citizens, communities and businesses need to get online and to get more out of their internet use. Clark earned his Bachelors of Arts (with Honors) in Philosophy and Economics from Swarthmore College, his Master of Science from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and his Juris Doctor from George Mason University School of Law. He has written widely on the politics of technology, entertainment and telecommunications for Ars Technica, GigaOm, National Journal, Slate, the Washington Post, and the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property. He also serves on the board of the Rural Telecommunications Congress. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter.
American and Continental breakfasts are included. The program begins shortly after 8:30 a.m. Tickets to the event are $45.00 plus a small online fee.
The Broadband Breakfast Club is sponsored by Comcast, Google and US Telecom.
The Broadband Breakfast Club series meets on the third Tuesday of each month (except for August and December).
The upcoming event schedule can be viewed at
http://broadbandbreakfastseries.eventbrite.com
Read our website for broadband news and event write-ups
http://www.broadbandbreakfast.com
Videos of our previous events are available at:
https://broadbandbreakfast.com/category/broadband-tv/
Background on BroadbandBreakfast.com
BroadbandBreakfast.com is in its fifth year of hosting monthly breakfast forums in Washington on broadband policy and related subjects. These events are on the record, open to the public and consider a wide range of viewpoints. Our Broadband Breakfast Club meets on the third tuesday of every month (except for August and December).
Our elected official keynotes have included Representatives Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), John Conyers (D-MI), Diane Watson (D-CA), James Clyburn (D-SC), Joe Barton (R-TX) and the former Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA).
Our agency and commission official keynotes have included Deputy Undersecretary for Agriculture Dallas Tonsager; FCC Wireless Telecommunications Chief, Ruth Milkman; former RUS Administrator Jonathan Adelstein, Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill; former Deputy Assistant Secretary NTIA Anna Gomez; and former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, among others.
Our moderated discussion panels are comprised of leaders from a wide variety of organizations including government, industry, law firms, academia, nonprofit, journalism and many others. Our audiences are equally diverse.
For More Information Contact:
Sylvia Syracuse
Director of Marketing and Events
BroadbandBreakfast.com
Sylvia@broadbandcensus.com
646-262-4630
Free Speech
Additional Content Moderation for Section 230 Protection Risks Reducing Speech on Platforms: Judge
People will migrate from platforms with too stringent content moderation measures.

WASHINGTON, March 13, 2023 – Requiring companies to moderate more content as a condition of Section 230 legal liability protections runs the risk of alienating users from platforms and discouraging communications, argued a judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeal last week.
“The criteria for deletion are vague and difficult to parse,” Douglas Ginsburg, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said at a Federalist Society event on Wednesday. “Some of the terms are inherently difficult to define and policing what qualifies as hate speech is often a subjective determination.”
“If content moderation became very rigorous, it is obvious that users would depart from platforms that wouldn’t run their stuff,” Ginsburg added. “And they will try to find more platforms out there that will give them a voice. So, we’ll have more fragmentation and even less communication.”
Ginsburg noted that the large technology platforms already moderate a massive amount of content, adding additional moderation would be fairly challenging.
“Twitter, YouTube and Facebook remove millions of posts and videos based on those criteria alone,” Ginsburg noted. “YouTube gets 500 hours of video uploaded every minute, 3000 minutes of video coming online every minute. So the task of moderating this is obviously very challenging.”
John Samples, a member of Meta’s Oversight Board – which provides direction for the company on content – suggested Thursday that out-of-court dispute institutions for content moderation may become the preferred method of settlement.
The United States may adopt European processes in the future as it takes the lead in moderating big tech, claimed Samples.
“It would largely be a private system,” he said, and could unify and centralize social media moderation across platforms and around the world, referring to the European Union’s Digital Services Act that went into effect in November of 2022, which requires platforms to remove illegal content and ensure that users can contest removal of their content.
Antitrust
Panel Disagrees on Antitrust Bills’ Promotion of Competition
Panelists disagree on the effects of two antitrust bills intended to promote competition.

WASHINGTON, March 10, 2023 – In a fiery debate Thursday, panelists at Broadband Breakfast’s Big Tech and Speech Summit disagreed on the effect of bills intended to promote competition and innovation in the Big Tech platform space, particularly for search engines.
One such innovation is new artificial intelligence technology being designed to pull everything a user searches for into a single page, said Cheyenne Hunt-Majer, big tech accountability advocate with Public Citizen. It is built to keep users on the site and will drastically change competition in the search engine space, she said, touting the advancement of two bills currently awaiting Senate vote.

Photo of Adam Kovacevich of Chamber of Progress, Berin Szoka of TechFreedom, Cheyenne Hunt-Majer of Public Citizen, Sacha Haworth of Tech Oversight Project, Christine Bannan of Proton (left to right)
The first, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, would prohibit tech companies from self-preferencing their own products on their platforms over third-party competition. The second, the Open App Markets Act, would prevent app stores from requiring private app developers to use the app stores’ in-app payment system.
Hunt-Majer said she believes that the bills would benefit consumers by kindling more innovation in big tech. “Perfect should not be the enemy of change,” she said, claiming that Congress must start somewhere, even if the bills are not perfect.
“We are seeing a jump ahead in a woefully unprepared system to face these issues and the issues it is going to pose for a healthy market of competition and innovation,” said Hunt-Majer.
It is good for consumers to be able to find other ways to search that Google isn’t currently providing, agreed Christine Bannan, U.S. public policy manager at privacy-focused email service Proton. The fundamental goal of these bills is directly at odds with big companies, which suggests its importance to curb anti-competitive behavior, she said.
No need to rewrite or draft new laws for competition
But while Berin Szoka, president of non-profit technology organization TechFreedom, said competition concerns are valid, the Federal Trade Commission is best equipped to deal with disputes without the need to rewrite or draft new laws. Congress must legislate carefully to avoid unintended consequences that fundamentally harm businesses and no legislation has done so to date, he said.
Both bills have broad anti-discrimination provisions which will affect Big Tech partnerships, Szoka continued.
Not all experts believe that AI will replace search engines, however. Google has already adopted specialized search results that directly answer search queries, such as math problems, instead of resulting in several links to related webpages, said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech policy coalition.
Kovacevich said he believes that some search queries demand direct answers while others demand a wide range of sources, answers, and opinions. He predicts that there will be a market for both AI and traditional search engines like Google.
To watch the full videos join the Broadband Breakfast Club below. We are currently offering a Free 30-Day Trial: No credit card required!
Big Tech
Preview the Start of Broadband Breakfast’s Big Tech & Speech Summit
Watch the start of the Big Tech & Speech Summit from March 9. Sign up for full webcast.

WASHINGTON, March 10, 2023 – Watch the beginning of the Big Tech & Speech Summit from Thursday, March 9, 2023.
This is the first 10 minutes. To see the full stream, register for a free trial of the Breakfast Club.

Photo of House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee Chairman Mike Bilirakis by Tim Su.
High-resolution videos will be available soon.
To watch the full videos join the Broadband Breakfast Club below. We are currently offering a Free 30-Day Trial: No credit card required!
Panelists Recommend More Concentrated Focus on Federal Privacy Legislation
Creating Institutions for Resolving Content Moderation Disputes Out-of-Court
Section 230 Shuts Down Conversation on First Amendment, Panel Hears
Congress Should Focus on Tech Regulation, Said Former Tech Industry Lobbyist
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