April 2013

A rural Vermont telephone company might just have your $70 gigabit Internet offer beat. Vermont Telephone, whose footprint covers 17,500 homes in the Green Mountain State, has begun to offer gigabit Internet speeds for $35 a month, using a brand new fiber network.

So far about 600 Vermont homes have subscribed. VTel’s Chief Executive Michel Guite says he’s made it a personal mission to upgrade the company’s legacy phone network, which dates back to 1890, with fiber for the broadband age. The company was able to afford the upgrades largely by winning federal stimulus awards set aside for broadband. Using $94 million in stimulus money, VTel has invested in stringing 1,200 miles of fiber across a number of rural Vermont counties over the past year. Mr. Guite says the gigabit service should be available across VTel’s footprint in coming months. VTel joins an increasing number of rural telephone companies who, having lost DSL share to cable Internet over the years, are reinvesting in fiber-to-the-home networks.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) warned that the government’s search for information online is approaching a “dangerous line” of infringing on people’s liberties. Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep Chaffetz said that there has to be a balance between liberty and security, even as the government works to hunt down potential terrorists.

[Commentary] Your privacy is being debated by lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington D.C., and there's a good chance you're going to lose out.

In Congress, a poorly written bill could erode your privacy, while in the California Legislature, a good bill that would protect your privacy is coming under fierce attack. Internet companies -- including Google, Facebook and Amazon -- have for years been collecting vast amounts of personal data about their users and often share that information with other companies, particularly Internet marketing firms. The two bills under consideration could significantly affect who has access to that personal data and how much users must be told about how their data is used. The bill before Congress, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA for short, is nominally intended to allow the government and companies to more effectively respond to coordinated computer attacks on their networks. The bill, which passed the House earlier this month but has now reportedly stalled in the Senate, would allow companies to share with federal agencies information about cyberattacks without requiring those agencies to get a warrant.

The California bill, by contrast, could be a boon for consumers' privacy. Dubbed the "Right to Know Act," and sponsored by Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, it would update an existing state law requiring direct marketers to disclose to their customers, when requested, the information they collect about them and with whom they share that information. Internet marketers claim the bill is unworkable, that it would put an undue burden on them and would open them up to frivolous lawsuits from customers claiming they didn't get the information they requested in a timely fashion. But direct marketers have had to live within this kind of law for the past eight years, and online companies that operate in Europe already have to comply with similar transparency laws there. You can bet that the real reason they're putting up such a fuss is because they don't want you to know just how much information they're collecting or who they're selling it to. According to the bills' analysis, some companies have placed as many as 100 tracking tools on their websites. The information they're harvesting can include sensitive financial, health and location information.

According to supporters of the bill, access to that kind of information has caused real harm, including the unwilling outing of gay teens and physical harm done to women whose location was disclosed to their abusers. "People want to have control and knowledge about what information is being gathered and what it's being used for," said John Simpson director of the privacy project at Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group. "That's not an unreasonable expectation." Hear, hear.

[Commentary] We used to turn on the television to see people who were happier, funnier, prettier versions of ourselves. But at the turn of the century, something fundamental changed and we began to see scarier, crazier, darker forms of the American way of life.

Click on ambitious cable channels now, and you will find a high school science teacher who makes meth when he is not dissolving his enemies in vats of acid (“Breaking Bad”); a successful Madison Avenue advertising executive whose entire life is a lie (“Mad Men”); a forensics investigator who is a serial killer on the side (“Dexter”); and a New Jersey gangster, this one in Atlantic City, who is very much the family man (“Boardwalk Empire”). It has been a winning formula, but the execution risk is high. In “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution,” to be published in July by Penguin Press, the author, Brett Martin, suggests that the programming was produced by men who were as tortured and sometimes as despotic as the antiheroes they hung their plots on.