Daily Digest 6/11/2018 (Net Neutrality Protections End)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai (in)famously said, “We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation.” On June 1, 2018, we learned a bit about how far follow-Republican FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly is willing to go to cut back consumer protections. In FCC Regulatory Free Arena, Commissioner O’Rielly highlights the pervasiveness of the “app economy” to argue that traditional companies regulated by the FCC should seek to be released from their regulatory obligations.

Although net neutrality protections end June 11, don't expect to see huge changes right away.

First, there are still some rules constraining broadband providers. Several states, including New York and Washington, have passed regulations that ban or discourage internet providers from favoring certain content based on payments from content providers. Comcast, the nation's largest broadband provider, is temporarily forbidden from violating net neutrality under the terms of the government's approval of its 2011 acquisition of NBC Universal; that restriction expires in September. Charter, the second-largest home broadband provider, is required to uphold net neutrality until 2023 under the terms of its acquisition of Time Warner Cable in 2016.

Most major internet providers have promised not to block, throttle, or discriminate against legal content. But net neutrality activists don't want to take the companies at their word. They’re fighting to block the Federal Communications Commission's December decision in both Congress and the courts while also working to pass new state laws. The most immediate battle to save net neutrality is legislation that would effectively force the FCC to bring back the rules the FCC approved in 2015. 

Facebook struck customized data-sharing deals with a select group of companies, some of which had special access to user records well after the point in 2015 that the social-media giant has said it cut off all developers from that information, according to court documents.  The unreported agreements, known internally as “whitelists,” also allowed certain companies to access additional information about a user’s Facebook friends. That included information like phone numbers and a metric called “friend link” that measured the degree of closeness between users and others in their network, apparently. The whitelist deals were struck with companies including Royal Bank of Canada and Nissan Motor Co. , who advertised on Facebook. They show that Facebook gave special data access to a broader universe of companies than was previously disclosed. They also raise further questions about who has access to the data of billions of Facebook users and why they had access, at a time when Congress is demanding the company be held accountable for the flow of that data.Many of these customized deals were separate from Facebook’s data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers, which it recently disclosed.

The user agreement has become a potent symbol of our asymmetric relationship with technology firms. For most of us, it’s our first interaction with a given company. We sign up and are asked to read the dreaded user agreement — a process that we know signifies some complex and inconveniently detrimental implications of using the service, but one that we choose to ignore. Our privacy hangs in the balance, yet we skim to the end of those tedious terms and conditions just so we can share that photo, or send a group message, or update our operating system… It’s not our fault. These agreements aren’t designed in a way that would allow us to properly consider the risks we’re taking. Tech companies have no incentive to change them. Lawmakers don’t seem to know what the alternatives are. But that doesn’t change the reality: User agreements are a legal and ethical trap, and they betray the trust of users from the very start. Privacy policies are useful governance documents. But users should be protected regardless of what these policies say or how long or clear they are. Tech companies shouldn’t be allowed to launder the risk of disclosure onto users by engineering permission for dubious data practices. And if platforms like Facebook want to invite the trust of users, they should be required to respect the faith we place in them.

[Woodrow Hartzog is Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University School of Law and College of Computer and Information Science]

It’s been four months since my colleague, Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, and I penned an op-ed reaffirming the need and accompanying reasons to stop states from diverting critical 9-1-1 fees collected from consumers to non-9-1-1 functions.  After such time, it seems appropriate to ask: have things improved?  In reality, the effort to end 9-1-1 fee diversion has had mixed results.  Of the five self-reported diverting states and seven states and territories that did not respond to the Commission’s inquiry (for a total of twelve), two states remedied filing errors to clarify that they are not diverters, one state and one territory are in the process (one with firm commitments) of ending diversion within their borders, one state started exploring ways to stop the practice, and seven states and territories have not yet made progress on either providing the Commission with their state data or ending the despicable practice of stealing 9-1-1 fees for their own personal spending. 

Tech companies know that they have a race problem. But their efforts to address it have so far yielded little. Facebook Inc. says that 3 percent of its U.S. workforce is black, up from 2 percent in 2014, while black workers in technical roles stagnated at 1 percent. Only 2 percent of Google's workers are black, a figure that has remained static for the past three years. The Alphabet inc unit's efforts to increase that have sparked an internal backlash, with one former employee suing because of perceived discrimination against white and male candidates. Among 8 of the largest U.S. tech companies, the portion of black workers in technical jobs rose to 3.1 percent in 2017 from 2.5 percent in 2014. The latest data from the U.S. government, released in 2016, reinforces the point: Blacks made up 7 percent of U.S. high-tech workforce, and just 3 percent of the total Silicon Valley workforce.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's team is reportedly reviewing the encrypted messaging apps of witnesses in the Russia investigation. The team is looking at what experts say are some of the best apps at keeping messages private. Not all encrypted messaging apps disclose their user numbers, so it's hard to pinpoint just how prolific they have become. But the most popular among them, WhatsApp, claims 1.5 billion users around the world. Offering people what's known as end-to-end encryption, in which only the sender and the intended recipient can read a message, the apps are designed to help people communicate more securely. They are popular among activists, journalists, security professionals and government officials.

China’s technology boom, it turns out, has been largely built on top of Western technology. The ZTE incident, as it is called in China, may be the country’s Sputnik moment. Like the United States in 1957, watching helplessly as the Soviet Union launched the first human-made satellite, many people in China now see how far the country still has to go. For years, China has defied the axiom that a free political system and economic growth go hand in hand. The thriving tech industry is the epitome of the so-called China model, which says people can rise and prosper under tight government control. Most people outside China think of it as “1984,” a dystopian society ruled by a repressive government with powerful brainwashing machines, which it is in many ways. But if you live in China, it feels more like that other dystopian novel, “Brave New World.” It’s a colorful, vibrant and consumeristic society. In many ways, Chinese people have more choice than they ever had before — except when it comes to individual liberty.