December 2014

[Commentary] Imagine if Internet access to the images and information from the aftermath of the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner was restricted, or disparately available. Would the communities who took to the streets, channeling decades of oppression and injustice, have captured the attention of the American public? Would the protests have sparked a national conversation on systemic racism or police accountability?

The Internet is now our central platform for engaging in dialogue about the most important issues facing our country. It’s where we share our views, speak out against injustice, and express our hopes for the future. But the truth is, a free and open Internet is now at risk -- endangering our rights as citizens and the freedoms that define the promise of this country. Without a renewed commitment to Internet Rights, we risk undermining the very core of our democracy, setting ourselves on a course for a modern-day news blackout. The Federal Communications Commission ought to demonstrate its commitment to the common good by restoring so-called Title II protection, reclassifying Internet Service Providers as common carriers responsible for sending and receiving information at uniform speeds. Such a move would safeguard the free exchange of information, make it harder to discriminate among ideas, and provide greater competition.

[Darren Walker is the President of the Ford Foundation]

[Commentary] It now appears that the Federal Communications Commission is in a race with Congress on network neutrality policy. We already know that any attempt by the FCC to cram Internet access services into the Title II straightjacket designed for telephone service will be challenged in court. It’s also become clear that Congress is already developing a pre-emptive strike of its own to prevent the FCC from doing anything crazy with a bill making rounds that closely follows the approach dictated by President Barack Obama to the FCC by creating a new "Title X" in the Communications Act.

It’s a bit alarming that Congress is forced to take hasty action to restrain a runaway regulator who is supposed to be enacting the will of Congress. There’s a very good chance that a hastily enacted bill will get something wrong, perhaps something quite major. The best way forward would be to pass a simple bill that says the FCC shall refrain from reclassifying broadband under Title II unless Congress says otherwise. It should also say that the FCC shall have the power to sanction anti-competitive acts such as blocking and capricious throttling regardless of the regulatory status of broadband and leave the fine-tuning to the new Communications Act.

The record before the [Federal Communications Commission] is already clear: This merger is not in the public interest. If successful, Comcast, which is already the nation’s largest cable company and Internet Service Provider, would control around half of the broadband market nationwide. This would make it the nation's content gatekeeper, with the power to single-handedly decide what the nationwide media marketplace looks like. This would harm consumers by raising costs, making it more difficult to access independent programming and online content, and limiting the opportunities for new kinds of online services.

In this filing, Public Knowledge and the Open Technology Institute rebut a few of the most egregious of Comcast's claims. Additionally, we include technical analyses and consumer survey data which underscore the power dominant ISPs like Comcast have over consumers and the broadband marketplace, and that show that the harms dominant ISPs can inflict on their subscribers are real today, and would get worse if Comcast gets even bigger.

A European court's so-called Right to Be Forgotten ruling has resulted in the scrubbing of hundreds of thousands of Google search results, according to data released by Google as part of its regular transparency reports on government requests for information removal.

Google, it turns out, has agreed to about 40 percent of the requested URL removals that it has received in the months since the European Union's Court of Justice issued its ruling that empowered citizens of the EU to have search results unlinked from their names online. The company also noted which of its products are the targets of the most content takedown requests across the board. The publishing platform Blogger, Google search tools and YouTube top the list.