September 2014

Google’s settlement of a privacy lawsuit probably won’t win approval because it includes a donation to an Internet research center at Harvard University and to other schools that attorneys who brought the case attended, a judge said.

US District Judge Edward Davila voiced his concerns at a hearing in San Jose (CA) over the settlement of a suit claiming the company transferred personal information contained in user searches to third parties including marketers and data brokers. The proposed accord includes several million dollars of funding for privacy research earmarked for institutes at Harvard, Stanford University and Chicago-Kent College of Law. “The elephant in the room is that many of them are law schools that you attended,” Judge Davila said. The judge said he had expected a wider net to be cast, and that it was exactly the same list of recipients as the lawyers presented to him a year ago. “I’m disappointed that the usual suspects are still usual,” Judge Davila said. The lack of transparency in the selection process “raises a red flag” and “doesn’t pass the smell test,” he said.

Crowdpac is a web site that aims to produce a data-driven voter guide to help voters decide which candidates to support.

University of California at Irvine Professor Scott Jordan is the Federal Communications Commission’s new chief technology officer. What’s particularly interesting in this case is that Jordan's engineering and technical expertise is a near-perfect overlap with many of the most complicated, most contentious issues facing the FCC today.

In announcing Jordan, the FCC highlight his work on "communications platforms, pricing, and differentiated services on the Internet," as well as the integration of "voice, data, and video on the Internet and on wireless networks." In short, much of the makings of the modern Internet. And while it's generally dangerous to parse an academic's publishing record to deduce how he or she might make public policy, Jordan has done us the favor of actually filing comments with the FCC the last time the commission considered rulemaking on the open Internet question. It's a nuanced take, distilled in Jordan and a co-author's statements that "neither the extreme pro nor con net neutrality positions are consistent with the philosophy of Internet architecture" and "the net neutrality issue is the result of a fragmented communications policy unable to deal with technology convergence."

Vodafone and Telefonica used a technology conference in Spain to call for the European Union to focus less on new rules for phone companies and more on Facebook and Google to reduce their dominance.

The carriers are battling so-called network neutrality proposals, championed by Internet companies, that they say will hurt business and discourage new products such as driverless cars. The proposals are meant to prevent carriers from blocking access to some websites or slowing Web traffic. “Network neutrality was invented by those who don’t want neutrality,” Telefonica Chief Executive Officer Cesar Alierta said. “All we request is a level playing field for the whole sector, not only for telcos.” Internet companies have become too dominant, giving them the power to control what applications are developed and used by consumers, the carriers said. “They’re so obsessed with us not having a market share of 40 percent in countries like Ireland, countries with 3 million inhabitants, but they’re not concerned about a well-known company having 90 percent of the market in search engines,” Alierta said.