Review of Blogs from apennings.com - January 2011

Comcast and General Electric Complete NBC Universal Deal

Comcast has now completed it’s acquisition of NBC Universal. Marguerite Reardon reports that the new company will retain the NBC Universal name but Comcast now owns 51 percent while General Electric will retain 49 percent. The deal comes after The US Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission recently allowed the joint venture to [...]

Communications and Media Policy in the 112th Congress

The Republican victory in House of Representatives suggests new dynamics for communications policy in the 112th Congress although the majority of Democrats in the Senate, however slim, will make it unlikely that any radical changes will occur in the upcoming year. In the Congress, “communications” covers a wide range of media and telecommunications issues including [...]

Shutting Down a Nation’s Internet: The Case of Egypt

Late in the evening of January 27, 2011, US trackers watched the global access to Egypt’s cyberspace shut down. Starting with incumbent Telecom Egypt’s TE Data; Raya Telecom and other ISPs (Internet Service Providers) around the country began to hit the proverbial “kill switch”. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and emails failed to traverse the country’s cyberspace [...]

The Dual Product Media Model

Digitalization has had a dramatic impact on media industries, causing them to reevaluate their business models and also creating the conditions for new types of media companies to emerge. Media content has always had unique economic properties and the challenge now is to figure out how the dynamics of digitalization and the Internet will change [...]

Transatlantic Telegraphy

While Western Union was consolidating its power over the widespread US market, others dreamed of using the telegraph to connect with other continents. The dream of electronically connecting North American with Europe was held strongest by Cyrus West Field, a Massachusetts entrepreneur. Born sickly in 1819, Field developed a fierce temperament and drove himself intensely. [...]

Telegraphy: The Space-Time Governmentality, Part II

This continues the argument started in Part I What Hath God Wrought? It is generally acknowledged that Samuel Morse did not invent the telegraph, but the painter and NYU professor can nevertheless be credited with its rapid development and commercialization. Morse first became enamored with the idea of transmitting “intelligence” by electricity on a transatlantic [...]

Telegraphy: The Space-Time Governmentality

By reducing what previously took weeks, to a minute, it (the telegraph) forced the acceleration of methods of obtaining, processing, and codifying information, thus laying the foundation of what decades later was to be called “data processing.” – Moreno Fraginals [1] As argued in Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet, the development of widescale telegraphy was [...]