Technology Review

Some venture capitalists at the cutting edge of Internet innovation say they will shun startups requiring fast connections for video, audio, or other services, mindful that the Federal Communications Commission may let Internet service providers (ISPs) charge extra fees to major content providers.

In the absence of clear rules, some ISPs have already begun requesting -- and receiving -- access fees. if deep-pocketed players can pay for a faster, more reliable service, then small startups face a crushing disadvantage, says Brad Burnham, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a VC firm based in New York City.

“This is absolutely part of our calculus now,” he says. Burnham says his firm will now “stay away from” startups working on video and media businesses. It will also avoid investing in payment systems or in mobile wallets, which require ultrafast transaction times to make sense. “This is a bad scene for innovation in those areas,” Burnham says of the FCC proposal.

The sensor that lets your phone know which way the screen is oriented also -- thanks to minute manufacturing variations -- emits a unique data “fingerprint” that could allow your phone to be tracked, even if all other privacy settings are locked down, researchers say.

In addition to governing basic things like screen orientation, accelerometer data is widely used by apps such as pedometers and mobile games. Meanwhile, many apps often rely on advertising, which has led advertisers to search for ways to track users and their Web habits.

Even if you don’t allow apps to see your personal data or location, just the raw movements of the phone -- which can be measured without permission -- can betray the phone’s unique identity and track it over time, says Romit Roy Choudhury, an associate professor at the University of Illinois who cowrote a paper with colleagues at the University of South Carolina that describes the phenomenon.

“There has been a lot of work to catch the leakage of ID information from phones,” he says. “We are now saying that accelerometer data going out of the phone can be treated as an ID.”

[Commentary] Employers can get into legal trouble if they ask interviewees about their religion, sexual preference, or political affiliation. Yet they can use social media to filter out job applicants based on their beliefs, looks, and habits.

Laws forbid lenders from discriminating on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality. Yet they can refuse to give a loan to people whose Facebook friends have bad payment histories, if their work histories on LinkedIn don’t match their bios on Facebook, or if a computer algorithm judges them to be socially undesirable. These regulatory gaps exist because laws have not kept up with advances in technology.

The gaps are getting wider as technology advances ever more rapidly. And it’s not just in employment and lending -- the same is happening in every domain that technology touches. There is a public outcry today -- as there should be -- about National Security Agency surveillance, but the breadth of that surveillance pales in comparison to the data that Google, Apple, Facebook, and legions of app developers are collecting. Our smartphones track our movements and habits. Our Web searches reveal our thoughts. With the wearable devices and medical sensors that are being connected to our smartphones, information about our physiology and health is also coming into the public domain. Where do we draw the line on what is legal -- and ethical?

[Wadhwa is a fellow at Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University]

[Commentary] Among the many threats to the future of Internet access in the United States, nothing tops Comcast’s proposed $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. The combined company would be in a position to provide high-capacity data services to almost two-thirds of American households and to tightly control everything flowing over its pipe.

An episode from Comcast’s past shows why this plan is worrisome. Just two decades ago, Comcast distrusted the idea of giving one company the sort of power that Comcast now aims to amass. The consolidation and geographic clustering that swept the cable industry in the late 1990s eventually destroyed the compact among TCI, Comcast, and Cox that had made @Home possible. Comcast and Cox grew big enough that they didn’t feel the need to cooperate with TCI any more, and by 2002 the @Home company was no more.

But now the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable can be understood as the execution -- at long last -- of the @Home business plan. The result might feel just like the Internet -- but it won’t be the Internet. It will be AOL and @Home all over again. But this time there will be no .Com Committee constraining how ComcastTimeWarner treats different streams of bits.

Comcast’s recent interconnection tussle with Netflix, its strong support for Streampix, and the rumor that it is planning to license its X1 platform for free to all other cable operators foreshadow the curated walled garden that we have to look forward to.

[Crawford is a professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law]

[Commentary] Here’s an interesting way to look at the often abstract topic of “net neutrality.”

Let’s say you are an online storage vault like Carbonite or Dropbox. Now, further assume that your company’s major technical activity is data inhalation. Petabytes of pictures, video, and so forth are uploaded to your servers every day. And you can’t help noticing that the major sending party is a Comcast, the giant Internet service provider (ISP). Outrageous. They’re paid by their customers, and now they are sending you all of this data, forcing you to upgrade your connections to handle the upload volume.

So in addition to whatever subscriptions you charge your customers, shouldn’t you also charge Comcast a toll for sending you all that traffic? It’s an absurdity. But it’s an intriguing piece of the argument that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings articulated.

Ten years ago, when most of us still had no idea what a smartphone was, Steve Perlman was contemplating a future in which we’d be watching so many YouTube videos over cellular networks that the radio frequency bands available to wireless carriers would get clogged up.

Now Perlman, a longtime inventor who cofounded WebTV and founded the cloud gaming service OnLive, says he has a solution that can make better use of the wireless spectrum and could eventually lead to cheaper, lighter phones. Perlman says pCell takes a different approach than the standard cellular network that seeks to minimize interference: it embraces signal interference.

In his vision, base stations smaller than your typical satellite TV antenna are placed wherever it’s convenient (such as on the roof or the side of a building), and their signals purposely overlap. Those overlapping signals, Perlman says, combine constructively to create a sort of personal cell, a centimeter in diameter, that moves with you as you move around the network. The signal doesn’t diminish as each additional user joins the network.

Overall capacity can grow by adding more access points. Perlman says that pCell works with existing LTE devices, and that users won’t notice as they move from a regular cellular access point to a pCell node. Perlman’s San Francisco-based company, Artemis Networks, is working with wireless carriers and spectrum owners, he says, as well as entrepreneurs interested in using pCell over unlicensed spectrum.