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Poll: Internet Edges Networks As Public’s Source For News

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Photo Credit: APBye bye Walter Cronkite, Brian Williams and Scott Pelley. Hello Google, Yahoo and Drudge.

A new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that traditional network news continues to fall as the nation’s source for news. The internet now is a bigger source of news for Americans than network TV, by a point, 25 percent to 24 percent.

Cable TV is still king, with 32 percent of the 1,000 likely voters Rasmussen polled getting their news from that source. Newspapers barely register a 10 percent, and radio is the source of news for 7 percent of the country.

The poll gauged how well the public trusted the media and if they see a bias. On both fronts, it is bad news.

Just 6 percent of the nation considers the national media “very trustworthy,” and nearly half believe reporters are more liberal than they are, said Rasmussen.

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Iceland Considers Pornography Ban

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Photo Credit: AlamyThe government is considering introducing internet filters, such as those used to block China off form the worldwide web, in order to stop Icelanders downloading or viewing pornography on the internet.

The unprecedented censorship is justified by fears about damaging effects of the internet on children and women.

Ogmundur Jonasson, Iceland’s interior minister, is drafting legislation to stop the access of online pornographic images and videos by young people through computers, games consoles and smartphones.

“We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link to incidences of violent crime,” he said.

Methods under consideration include blocking access to pornographic website addresses and making it illegal to use Icelandic credit cards to access pay-per-view pornography. A law forbidding the printing and distribution of pornography is already in force in Iceland but it has yet to be updated to cover the internet.

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‘Anonymous’ Hacks Federal Reserve Site

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. Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/GettyUS central bank confirms intrusion after hacktivist group Anonymous was claimed to have stolen 4,000 bankers’ details

The US Federal Reserve bank has confirmed one of its internal websites was broken into by hackers after the hacktivist group Anonymous was claimed to have stolen details of more than 4,000 bank executives.

“The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a spokeswoman for the US central bank said.

“Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system,” the spokeswoman said, adding that all individuals affected by the breach had been contacted.

The admission follows a claim that hackers linked to Anonymous struck the bank on Sunday. The technology news site ZDNet separately reported that Anonymous appeared to have published information said to containing the login information, credentials, internet protocol addresses and contact information of more than 4,000 US bankers.

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United Nations’ Effort to Tax, Regulate Internet Gaining Steam

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U.S. Ambassador Terry Kramer warned on Friday that a proposal to give a United Nations agency more control over the Internet is gaining momentum in other countries.

Proposals to expand the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) authority over the Internet could come up at a treaty conference in Dubai in December. European telecommunications companies are pushing a plan that would create new rules that would allow them to charge more to carry international traffic.

The proposal by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association could force websites like Google, Facebook and Netflix to pay fees to network operators around the world.

Kramer said the idea of an international Internet fee is “gaining more interest in the African states and also in the Arab states.”

He said the United States delegation to the conference will have to redouble its efforts to convince other countries that the proposal would only stifle innovation and economic growth.

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Time to Rise Up Again: United Nations Considering International “SOPA” to Regulate, Tax Internet

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In January, several million Americans contacted Congress to stop passage of two bills that would have destroyed Internet freedom and stifled innovation. The twin bills, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), were meant to counter Internet piracy, a very real problem. But they both used a sledgehammer when a scalpel was necessary. The legislation would have done more than block piracy – they would have hurt Internet users’ ability to get content from their favorite websites and prevented new websites from being created.

The world needs a similar citizen uprising to stop another well-meaning but harmful attack on the ability of Internet users to access websites outside their home countries. A United Nations body, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), will be meeting in December in Dubai to consider at least two proposals which would dramatically affect the ability of Internet users to get the content they want to receive over the Internet.

One proposal would require that a website owner or service provider pay a fee as a “sending party” to the government of any country for the country’s citizens to view the content. This would mean that popular websites like Khan Academy or BBC World would not be available to people outside their native countries unless the website or service provider paid a fee to the user’s country. This would hurt people in developing countries who hunger for access to quality news and education.

The countries that are advocating for this were getting money for international phone calls and have seen that revenue fall off. They see foreign website owners and service providers as having cash to fill the gap in declining long distance telephone revenue. They say they need this money to pay for their broadband infrastructure. But there are other proven ways to encourage quick broadband adoption, including liberalizing market access, encouraging broadband competition, providing spectrum awards and insisting on transparency of ownership of awardees of government telecommunications contracts.

Another proposal up for vote at the ITU meeting would allow governments or some type of multi-government body to use “security” or other justifications to create new rules to regulate the Internet.

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Pew Research: Internet News Now Displacing Not Just Papers But TV, Too

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The transformation of the nation’s news landscape has already taken a heavy toll on print news sources, particularly print newspapers. But there are now signs that television news – which so far has held onto its audience through the rise of the internet – also is increasingly vulnerable, as it may be losing its hold on the next generation of news consumers.

Online and digital news consumption, meanwhile, continues to increase, with many more people now getting news on cell phones, tablets or other mobile platforms. And perhaps the most dramatic change in the news environment has been the rise of social networking sites. The percentage of Americans saying they saw news or news headlines on a social networking site yesterday has doubled – from 9% to 19% – since 2010. Among adults younger than age 30, as many saw news on a social networking site the previous day (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form.

These are among the principal findings of the Pew Research Center’s biennial news consumption survey, which has tracked patterns in news use for nearly two decades. The latest survey was conducted May 9-June 3, 2012, among 3,003 adults. For more on the growth of mobile technology, see the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism report: “The Explosion in Mobile Audiences and a Close Look at what it Means for News,” released Oct. 1, 2012.

The proportion of Americans who read news on a printed page – in newspapers and magazines – continues to decline, even as online readership has offset some of these losses. Just 23% say they read a print newspaper yesterday, down only slightly since 2010 (26%), but off by about half since 2000 (47%).

The decline of print on paper spans beyond just newspapers. The proportion reading a magazine in print yesterday has declined over the same period (26% in 2000, 18% today). And as email, text messaging and social networking become dominant forms of communication, the percentage saying they wrote or received a personal letter the previous day also has fallen, from 20% in 2006 to 12% currently. There has been no decrease in recent years in the percentage reading a book on a typical day, but a growing share is now reading through an electronic or audio device.

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White House considers circumventing Congress again, leaves Internet takeover through exec. order a possibility

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The White House has left open the possibility of enacting its Internet agenda via executive order after the failed effort to bring the Democrat-supported cybersecurity bill to a full vote in the Senate last week.

In response to a question from The Hill, a Washington, D.C. political newspaper, about whether President Obama was considering advancing his party’s cyber-plan through an executive order, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney didn’t rule out the possibility.

“In the wake of Congressional inaction and Republican stall tactics, unfortunately, we will continue to be hamstrung by outdated and inadequate statutory authorities that the legislation would have fixed,” he said via email.

“Moving forward, the President is determined to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today’s cyber threats and we will do that,” added Carney.

The failed cyber security bill, which could be revived by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid when the Senate comes back from recess in September, would have given federal agencies in charge of regulating critical infrastructure industries like power companies and utilities the ability to mandate cybersecurity recommendations.

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Tea Party Republicans sketch out Internet policy

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the son of libertarian Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, visited the conservative Heritage Foundation on Thursday to sketch out his agenda for preserving Internet freedom. In Paul’s view, this means opposing warrantless government snooping of private networks—and also opposing regulations intended to protect privacy and network neutrality.

The event follows last month’s announcement of a new “Internet freedom” initiative by the Campaign for Liberty, an activist group founded by the elder Paul. It appears that father and son see eye to eye on Internet issues, and the younger Paul used the Heritage event as an opportunity to explain his views.

Sen. Paul began by referencing Gordon Crovitz’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal, questioning whether the government launched the Internet. We’ve pointed out that Crovitz’s column was factually challenged; Paul offered a more nuanced version of the argument.

“It may not be completely simple but it’s definitely not as simple as that the government invented it,” he said. “When you say stuff like, ‘Oh, the government invented the Internet,’ it sort of demeans the process of the individuals who were involved.”

For example, “There was Vinton Cerf. There was Tim Berners-Lee. There were individuals. But it wasn’t the faceless government that invented the Internet. It was individuals. Even if some of them did work for government, the mind of the individual is what should be extolled, not some faceless bureaucracy.”

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Russia joins international effort to limit Internet freedom; pushing bill with similarities to SOPA, China’s firewall

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Two months after Vladimir Putin once again assumed the post of Russian president, the long-feared crackdown on his critics appears to have begun. The internet bill due to be considered by parliament on Wednesday is, say activists, the latest sign of growing repression of civil freedom in Russia.

The bill calls for the creation of a federal website “nolist”. Internet providers and site owners would be forced to shut down any websites on this list. According to Wikipedia authors on Tuesday, the bill will “lead to the creation of a Russian analogue to China’s great firewall”.

The bill’s backers in Putin’s United Russia party argue that the amendments to the country’s information legislation are aimed at child pornography and sites that promote drug use and teen suicide.

But critics, including the Russian-language Wikipedia, say the legislation could be used to boost government censorship over the internet.

In protest, the Russian-language Wikipedia site shut down for 24 hours on Tuesday. The Wikipedia logo was crossed out with a black rectangle, and the words “imagine a world without free knowledge” appeared underneath.

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Photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com