December 2014

Sen Rockefeller Exits With Call for Bipartisanship

Sen Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), retiring Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, took to the Senate floor to say farewell to the body he has served for 30 years.

Sen Rockefeller's message was aimed at calling his colleagues to the more bipartisan angels of their nature. He also praised the E-rate program, saying that was an example of when the government needed to step in, when private industry couldn't or wouldn't, to insure that the Internet got to schools and libraries. He also said that the government should not outsource its security to telecommunications companies, saying he had "seen what telecommunications companies can do when they can get away with it." That appeared to be a reference to Congress' inability to pass legislation on data collection or cybersecurity.

Who Pays For Network Neutrality?

[Commentary] Network neutrality proponents won’t be honest about what they really are asking for from the Federal Communications Commission when they demand “no fast lanes” or “no paid prioritization” net neutrality, because they know openly demanding a permanent zero-price for Silicon Valley’s downstream Internet traffic, paid for and subsidized by consumers, is a political loser and indefensible as deceptive.

The deep deception here is the public claim that it would be unfair to entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley giants if any business voluntarily could pay for faster Internet speeds and for more usage -- like consumers already routinely do. Thus the supposed “fair” policy would be “equal” corporate welfare from the FCC in the form of a permanent zero-price for downstream Internet traffic. If the FCC applies 1934 Title II “telecommunications” utility regulations to the Internet, in order to mandate a permanent zero-price for downstream Internet traffic, consumer broadband bills will go up.

[Scott Cleland is Chairman of NetCompetition, a pro-competition e-forum supported by broadband interests]

#Crimingwhilewhite: White people are confessing on Twitter to crimes they got away with

On Twitter, white Americans are responding to a grand jury's decision not to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island by tweeting about crimes they claim to have committed, but got in little to no trouble for.

In a way, it's a digital version of the protest movements taking hold across the country, with the Staten Island grand jury's decision coming shortly after a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict a white police officer in the shooting of Michael Brown. There's no way to verify the confessions in the tweets, which reached over 600 per minute at one point, but the hashtag represents an expression by whites who are disturbed by the continuing racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Operation AURORAGOLD: How the National Security Agency Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide

According to documents provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally, including in countries closely allied to the United States, in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that it can exploit for surveillance.

The documents also reveal how the NSA plans to secretly introduce new flaws into communication systems so that they can be tapped into -- a controversial tactic that security experts say could be exposing the general population to criminal hackers. Codenamed AURORAGOLD, the covert operation has monitored the content of messages sent and received by more than 1,200 e-mail accounts associated with major cellphone network operators, intercepting confidential company planning papers that help the NSA hack into phone networks.

Karsten Nohl, a leading cellphone security expert and cryptographer, said that the broad scope of information swept up in the operation appears aimed at ensuring virtually every cellphone network in the world is NSA accessible.

Claims That Real Net Neutrality Would Result in New Internet Tax Skew the Math and Confuse the Law

[Commentary] The anti-Network Neutrality crowd at the Progressive Policy Institute claims that Internet service providers and users would pay billions of dollars in new fees if the Federal Communications Commission reasserts its Title II authority. PPI insists that following the law and reclassifying broadband Internet-access service under Title II would allow federal, state and local governments to collect for broadband the same kind of Universal Service Fund (USF) fees that are already levied on phone companies. PPI also claims that reclassification would lead to new state taxes.

There’s a problem with this argument: Authors Hal Singer and Robert Litan have let their pro-ISP bias skew their math and confuse the law. PPI’s main mistake -- or attempt to mislead -- comes from ignoring the difference between services that cross state lines and those that exist entirely within one state. If the FCC reclassifies broadband access as a Title II service, it will also (based on precedent) declare that broadband is a purely interstate telecom service. Because broadband access is interstate and not intrastate, none of the intrastate taxes or special telecom fees would apply. PPI’s argument also ignores the possibility that the FCC and Congress could take additional steps to remove or limit any future taxes or fees.

The bottom line is this: If the FCC does nothing more than stick with precedent and designate broadband as an interstate telecom service, the average potential increase in taxes and fees per household would be far less than PPI estimates. If Congress extends and updates the Internet Tax Freedom Act and the FCC declines to include broadband in the revenue base at this time, the increase would be exactly zero.

AT&T still throttles “unlimited data” -- even when network not congested

AT&T has changed its policy to stop the automatic throttling of many unlimited data plans, but the company’s older throttling policy still applies to customers with unlimited LTE data. AT&T said the policy will be changed for all customers sometime in 2015, but it did not say whether that will happen closer to the beginning of the year or the end of the year. AT&T’s goal is moving customers off unlimited data plans and onto plans that hit customers with automatic overage fees when they exceed data limits.

It's showtime in fight against state barriers to public broadband

[Commentary] In 2015, we should expect to see many of the legal restrictions on public-owned broadband networks aggressively challenged because, frankly, communities are mad and aren’t going to take these impediments to local economic growth any longer. Two organizations have formed to organize and focus efforts by public, private and nonprofit sector stakeholders to find paths to greater broadband coverage.

The Coalition for Local Internet Choice (CLIC) unites public and private interests that support local choice and provide communities practical advice and tools to prevent new state barriers from being enacted and remove existing barriers. [Editor’s note: Joanne Hovis, a member of the Benton Foundation board, is a founding member of CLIC] Next Century Cities is a membership organization providing knowledge and peer support for communities and their elected leaders, including mayors and other officials, as they seek to ensure that all have access to fast, affordable, and reliable Internet.

[Craig Settles is the author of Fighting the Next Good Fight: Bringing True Broadband to Your Community]

Urban Libraries Council Recommends Higher Level of Support for Libraries That Serve the Most Users from the FCC

In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, the Urban Libraries council demonstrates that a small number of libraries provide Wi-Fi service to a larger percentage of the nation's users, and that these libraries require a budgetary allocation for internal connections significantly higher than the commission proposed in its July E-Rate Modernization Order. Allowing the heaviest users to qualify for needed funding guarantees that the top 7% of libraries, which serve over 63% of all public Wi-Fi users, are eligible to receive the requisite funding.

Tech firms say schools need more spectrum

If President Barack Obama really wants to put Wi-Fi in every US classroom, then the government will need to release more unlicensed spectrum for public use -- or so says WifiForward, a spectrum lobbying group backed by Google, Microsoft, the cable companies and the Consumer Electronics Association.

WifiForward released a paper that calls for regulators to open up or lift restrictions on big swathes of the 5 GHz band so it can be used to build bigger, badder gigabit Wi-Fi networks. It also calls for the government to open up more white space spectrum and move forward with its plans to create a shared public-private band at 3.5 GHz, which could be used to link those Wi-Fi networks to the Internet proper without using wires or fiber.

In the ‘global struggle for Internet freedom,’ the Internet is losing, report finds

The year 2014 marks the moment that the world turned its attention to writing laws to govern what happens on the Internet. And that has not been a great thing, according to an annual report from the US-based think tank Freedom House.

In response to circumnavigation tactics by online activists, repressive regimes have begun opting for a "technically uncensored Internet," Freedom House finds, but one that is increasingly controlled by national laws about what can and can't be done online. In 36 of the 65 countries surveyed around the world the state of Internet freedom declined in 2014. According to Freedom House, "Some states are using the revelations of widespread surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) as an excuse to augment their own monitoring capabilities, frequently with little or no oversight, and often aimed at the political opposition and human rights activists."

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