June 2014

President Barack Obama said this nearly a year ago during his announcement of the ConnectED initiative, a plan to equip every school in the United States with high-speed Internet access by the end of the decade.

According to Open Technology Institute analysts Danielle Kehl and Sarah Morris, “nearly sixty percent of schools in the US today lack sufficient wireless capacity to support the needs of students” -- a somewhat alarming statistic when compared to the vastness of 21st century connectivity. This problem is exacerbated by a lack of E-rate initiative funds, a program that helps schools and libraries to obtain affordable communications services and broadband Internet.

In an effort to narrow this connectivity divide, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler recently characterized the wireless Internet issue as a national priority. He recently released his draft order for E-rate modernization, which would implement a number of changes to the program by the summer of 2014 -- including increasing funding by $2 billion.

According to Lindsey Tepe, a program associate in New America’s Education Policy Program, the order highlights three main objectives:

• Closing the Wi-Fi gap for schools and libraries, while phasing down support for non-broadband services.
• Making current funds go further by cutting back the matching fund ratio, as well as increasing transparency on how funds are currently spent.
• Updating program administration processes to make the program faster, simpler, and more efficient.

Rep Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) doesn’t see Congress moving a bill to protect consumer privacy anytime soon.

“We’re not doing that,” Rep Lofgren said.

Earlier in 2014, the Administration renewed previous calls by President Barack Obama for baseline consumer privacy legislation through its report on Big Data. That report -- initiated after the administration faced public backlash over government surveillance practices -- called on the Commerce Department to work with the private sector to develop legislative proposals.

Rep Lofgren said that there is no enthusiasm in Congress for such a bill at the moment. “Do you see any appetite to do that? No,” she said. That appetite might increase based on consumer reactions to evolving, and potentially privacy-threatening, technologies, she acknowledged. “Consumer reaction … will shape what goes on,” she said.

In its ruling against the TV streaming company Aereo, the Supreme Court has removed one of the most visible threats to the pay-TV industry's notoriously expensive bundle.

There is also a generation of viewers, particularly young people, who increasingly forgo cable and satellite in favor of online outlets including Netflix and Hulu. Analysts contend the media industry will lose this key TV-watching demographic without adopting less restrictive, and more affordable options.

"If Aereo had been upheld, you could've told your cable company to jump in a lake," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. "With Aereo, and also things like Netflix and Hulu, that would have been the start to a pretty good package."

Broadcasters worry that services like Aereo encourage so-called cord-cutting and undercut the rising fees they charge distributors including Time Warner Cable and DirecTV to carry their programming. Those fees account for billions of dollars in revenue a year.

The Supreme Court issued two major rulings: in Riley v. California, the court required cops to get a warrant before searching cellphones, and in American Broadcasting v. Aereo, the court banned the cloud-TV service Aereo from retransmitting broadcast television signals over the Internet. But both of these cases are also fundamentally about technology -- specifically, what happens when technology moves so fast that the law simply doesn't understand it anymore.

When that happens, it's up to the courts to provide answers to difficult questions: is searching a smartphone like searching a pack of cigarettes? Can thousands of tiny antennas and some clever code dance around copyright law well enough to create a new business model?

To answer these questions is to answer the hardest question of all: can you put the technology back in the box, or do we need to change society around it for good? The Supreme Court took a huge step when it agreed 9-0 that the smartphone revolution requires a change in how we interpret the Fourth Amendment. But the hard part for our legal system will be the thousands of little steps we need to ensure all those smartphone apps can keep changing the world.