Digital Content

The average Charter Communications broadband-only customer is now using 700 gigabytes of data per month, according to Christopher Winfrey, the cable operator’s CFO. Winfrey said the high level of wireline broadband usage is the No. 1 reason wireless companies won’t be able to pry broadband marketshare from cable with fixed wireless products. “The average wireless customers uses only 10 gigs a month,” Winfrey said. “The difference in utilization rates is significant.

With the wholesale transfer of so much entertainment, social interaction, education, commerce, and politics from the real world to the virtual world—a process recently accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic—many Americans have come to live in a nightmarish inversion of the Tocquevillian dream, a new sort of wilderness.

Former President Donald J. Trump called multiple times for repealing the law that shields tech companies from legal responsibility over what people post. President Biden, as a candidate, said the law should be “revoked.” But the lawmakers aiming to weaken the law have started to agree on a different approach. They are increasingly focused on eliminating protections for specific kinds of content rather than making wholesale changes to the law or eliminating it entirely.

AT&T announced it would be spinning off its TV business — including DirecTV, AT&T TV, and U-verse — in a deal it claimed would greatly benefit the company’s customers, employees, and shareholders. The deal provides AT&T with a $7.8 billion cash infusion to pay down debt and recent wireless spectrum purchases, and a 70 percent stake in the “new” DirecTV.

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry. In 2022 Google plans to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet. The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital-advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.

The residents of Thursday Island, a speck on the archipelago Torres Strait Islands, have relied for years on Facebook to learn of everything from cyclone warnings to crayfish prices. The platform doesn’t eat up data the way other websites do, a priority for the remote communities, where people often use prepaid phones. Newspapers and radio stations with staffs made up of indigenous reporters publish Facebook updates in local dialects—a critical feature for those for whom English is a third or fourth language. It’s as real-time as the island can get.

Facebook will walk back its block on Australian users sharing news on its site after the government there agreed to make amendments to the proposed media bargaining laws that would force major tech giants to pay news outlets for their content. The code is structured so that if Facebook and Google do not sign commercial deals with traditional media outlets the Treasurer can "designate" them, and force them to pay for access to news content. The government promised to make further amendments to the code, including giving Facebook more time to strike those deals.

Each country has its own car safety regulations and tax codes. But should every country also decide its own bounds for appropriate online expression? We probably don’t want internet companies deciding on the freedoms of billions of people, but we may not want governments to have unquestioned authority, either. Regulating online expression in any single country — let alone in the world — is a messy set of trade offs with no easy solutions. Let us lay out some of the issues:

Section 230 of the Communications Act has been dubbed the “twenty six words” that created the interactive free expression of the internet: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. This simple piece of legislation provides immunity from liability as a speaker or publisher for providers and users of an “interactive computer service” who host and moderate information provid

In the third quarter of 2020, more than 50% of US broadband households reported that their broadband usage has increased since the start of the COVID-19 crisis. While consumers report broadband performance is keeping pace with the increased demand, in Q3 2020, 24% of fixed broadband households reported plans to upgrade their speed in the next six months, compared to 18% in 2Q 2020. “Broadband upgrade plans indicate many households see some COVID-19-related changes as permanent,” said Steve Nason, Research Director, Parks Associates.