April 2014

A meeting in Brazil this week will reveal whether Washington has succeeded in preventing international anger over the Edward Snowden revelations clouding discussions about future governance of the Internet.

São Paulo is to host a two-day international meeting, starting on April 23, called by Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, one of the international leaders who was a target of US surveillance. International unrest over US and British internet surveillance has weakened Washington’s ability to shape the debate about the internet’s future, according to people involved in the process. “The US has lost the moral authority to talk about a free and open internet,” said a former senior US government official. The São Paulo meeting had the potential to become deeply political and expose rifts between countries over future control of the internet, said Greg Shatan, a partner at law firm Reed Smith in Washington. “It was called under extraordinary circumstances, it’s a reaction to a perceived crisis,” he said.

[Commentary] If the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger must go through, the Federal Communications Commission should impose the seven conditions on the deal:

1. The combined Comcast has to stop pushing state laws that restrict competition from municipal systems or commercial overbuilders, has to work for their repeal and will not contest any competition. TWC is the most obvious culprit, having fought its battle against municipalities in North Carolina. TWC, Comcast and others work also through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the shadowy group pushing anti-consumer legislation.
2. Comcast-TWC has to establish a fund of, say, $1 billion, to aid local governments in building their own systems.
3. The combined entity must agree to a stringent Network Neutrality policy. Off the table are the weak-tea rules negotiated by Verizon and Google, and put in place by the late and unlamented Julius Genachowski during his term at the FCC. This time, former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, the embodiment of the public interest, gets to write the rules.
4. No data caps. It’s been proven time and time again that caps have nothing to do with traffic management and everything to do with stifling competition.
5. If there are to be these ridiculous retransmission disputes, the channels stay on the systems until the issue is resolved.
6. The company shall not require direct connection to its network. Netflix gets its money back.
7. Independent programmers get the same treatment as those owned by Comcast and TWC pre-merger.

The battle between local governments and telecommunications providers over the right to establish community broadband networks heated up over the last several months, as a number of bills were introduced that could have significant impact on municipalities in five states. Kansas, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Utah and Tennessee were all in the spotlight earlier this year regarding everything from de-facto bans on community networks to funding and development issues. Some of the bills were pulled off the table, while others have continued through their respective states’ legislative processes. Government Technology took a closer look at the broadband concerns in those states and what public-sector technologists should keep tabs on moving forward.

Whoever said, “Money can’t buy you friends,” clearly hasn’t been on the Internet recently.

Retweets. Likes. Favorites. Comments. Upvotes. Page views. You name it; they’re for sale on websites like Swenzy, Fiverr and countless others. But many of your new friends may live outside the United States, mostly in India, Bangladesh, Romania and Russia -- and they may not exactly be human. They are bots, or lines of code. But they were built to behave like people on social media sites. Today’s bots, to better camouflage their identity, have real-sounding names. They keep human hours, stopping activity during the middle of the night and picking up again in the morning. They share photos, laugh out loud -- LOL! -- and even engage in conversations with each other. And there are millions of them. These imaginary citizens of the Internet have surprising power, making celebrities, wannabe celebrities and companies seem more popular than they really are, swaying public opinion about culture and products and, in some instances, influencing political agendas.