February 2014

[Commentary] Perhaps the most important and consistent observation about the role social media plays in global protest movements is that it isn’t static; it evolves just as the movements and the media themselves do, analysts said.

Whenever Twitter and other social networks appear to have played a defining role in a protest or revolutionary movement -- from Iran to Egypt to Turkey to Ukraine -- there’s typically been a succeeding narrative that says it was less influential than it seemed at the time or functioned in a different manner. While these analyses are often valid, said Joshua Tucker, a New York University politics professor who’s studying social media’s role in the protests in Ukraine, they ignore a larger lesson: that social media as an organizing and broadcasting tool is growing with each protest movement and shows no sign of slowing. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine protests that don’t utilize social media,” he said. “If you want to understand protests moving forward -- what leads to protests, the dynamics of protests -- you have to get a handle on how social media impacts protesters.”

[Commentary] Comcast and Netflix announced a commercial interconnect relationship between the two companies, which is in the very early stages of implementation, and as a result, many who clearly don't understand how the Internet works are writing about the news.

Those who don't cover network infrastructure for a living should not be trying to explain the technical details behind the announcement. Articles from mainstream outlets like TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal, NPR and many others aren't even getting the basics right. Words like transit, peering, speed, bandwidth, capacity, etc. are being used interchangeably without any understanding of what they mean. In the hopes of trying to educate the market, let's clear up a lot of the confusion many in the media have created. The first one is that consumers need more "speed" from Comcast or Verizon to get better quality video streaming from Netflix. Next up are articles where it says that transit allows two networks to exchange "bandwidth," which is not accurate. Another statement I have seen people write about is saying that the deal focuses on the "two company's pipes." Netflix is not a network operator, they don't have any "pipes." They buy capacity from other network providers who have the pipes. So while this deal is about the interconnection between Comcast and Netflix, Comcast is the only one who actually owns the pipes. Other misstatements of late have been about transit with no real idea of just how many types of transit one can buy or how transit deals work. Most writing about Netflix don't even know the basics of how their content is delivered today or how content delivery networks and transit providers are involved. Commercial deals around interconnect help alleviate the bright lines between settlement-free interconnect (or peering) and a customer buying a retail product. Wholesale commercial deals take into account efficiencies and many other factors to drive a much lower unit cost. Bottom line is this is good for Netflix, Comcast, and for consumers, and it has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality.

[Rayburn is executive vice president of StreamingMedia.com and principle analyst at Frost & Sullivan]

AT&T released for the first time in the phone company’s 140-year history a rough accounting of how often the US government secretly demands records on telephone customers. But to those who’ve been following the National Security Agency leaks, Ma Bell’s numbers come up short by more than 80 million spied-upon Americans.

AT&T’s transparency report counts 301,816 total requests for information -- spread between subpoenas, court orders and search warrants -- in 2013. That includes between 2,000 and 4,000 under the category “national security demands,” which collectively gathered information on about 39,000 to 42,000 different accounts. There was a time when that number would have seemed high. Today, it’s suspiciously low, given the disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata program. We now know that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is ordering the major telecoms to provide the NSA a firehose of metadata covering every phone call that crosses their networks. An accurate transparency report should include a line indicating that AT&T has turned over information on each and every one of its more than 80 million-plus customers. It doesn’t.

Rep John Dingell's departure will surely shake up a burgeoning competition over who gets to be the top Democrat on the House Commerce Committee.

Rep Dingell (D-MI) was well-placed to step in for Rep Henry Waxman (D-CA) on the committee. In fact, it's a position Rep Dingell has played before -- twice -- and was ousted most recently when Rep Waxman himself dislodged him from the post. Until his retirement announcement, Rep Dingell did not rule out trying to reclaim his old title. With Rep Dingell (D-MI) out of the picture, the spotlight now shines on two more junior lawmakers on the committee: Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ)