January 2015

Introducing Title X: Net neutrality in 2015

[Commentary](Some Members of) Congress is intent on by creating a new section of the Communications Act, the governing law for all communication by wire or radio in the United States. This new policy division is informally known as “Title X,” as the Act is organized by titles for each major technology.

Title X explicitly protects the Internet from the harms that network neutrality advocates have hypothesized in the current, deregulatory status quo, all of which are forms of unfair leverage applied by Internet service providers to their customers and/or the Internet services these customers enjoy today. The discussion draft of the new law lists 11 principles that would be upheld, embracing everything from fast lanes, device attachment, and meddling with content. All in all, the bills to be discussed are fine examples of the good old-fashioned compromise that used to be the bedrock of Congress, where each side gets something they want and each side gives up something. Congress is not happy with the Federal Communications Commission operating as a parallel Congress, and the net neutrality advocates are not happy with discrimination, fast lanes, and blocking. This is the kind of deal that would have been automatic as recently as the mid-90s.

Time Warner Cable mistreats customers, shouldn’t merge with Comcast

Time Warner Cable has mistreated its customers for decades and should face a wide-ranging investigation as part of its proposed merger with Comcast, a new complaint to the Federal Communications Commission says.

Telecommunications analyst Bruce Kushnick of New Networks Institute, who recently petitioned the FCC to investigate Verizon for perjury, is now taking aim at TWC’s billing practices and customer service. Kushnick points out that Comcast and TWC are two of the most hated companies in the US, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, and lays out five areas the FCC should investigate.

Proof-of-concept FirstNet project gets underway in New Jersey

Setting out to meet an ambitious timeline, first responders in three regions of New Jersey are expected in 2015 to use a new dedicated public-safety LTE network composed entirely of deployable infrastructure operating on 700 MHz Band 14 spectrum licensed to the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet).

PMC Associates, a New Jersey-based company specializing in mission-critical radio solutions for first responders, is teaming up with Oceus Networks and Fujitsu Network Communications to build the proof-of-concept network, known as JerseyNet. Under the terms of its Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) funding, the JerseyNet deployment must be completed by September, a requirement that is expected to be met under the current schedule.

FCC Fines Viacom and ESPN $1.4 Million for Misuse of Emergency Alert Warnings

The Federal Communications Commission fined Viacom and ESPN $1.4 million for misusing the Emergency Alert System warning tones. The cable networks transmitted EAS warning tones for several days in 2013 to promote the movie “Olympus Has Fallen,” which portrayed a terrorist attack on Washington, DC.

Broadcast or transmission of these tones outside an emergency or test violates the FCC’s laws protecting the integrity of the system. In March 2014, the FCC proposed a total fine of $1,930,000 against NBCUniversal, ESPN, and Viacom. NBCUniversal paid its $530,000 fine, but ESPN and Viacom objected and requested reductions. The FCC rejected their arguments and imposed fines of $1,120,000 against Viacom and $280,000 against ESPN. The fines, which differ based on several factors including the number of channels involved and the number of transmissions on each channel, must be paid in 30 days.

Facebook Tries to Block ‘Hoaxes’ From the News Feed

Facebook is now saying it will tip off users when an item in the news feed is a hoax. If enough people report a piece of content, a notification will be added to it saying “Many people on Facebook have reported that this story contains false information”.

Facebook didn’t say how many times an item will have to be flagged to trigger the warning. Facebook said it won’t remove the posts identified as false. But they’ll likely appear less often in users’ news feeds, in part because users might delete them or share them less frequently. The initiative is part of Facebook’s effort to make the news feed more useful so users spend more time and come back more often. Facebook calls this packing the feed with “high quality content.”

Google is now a more trusted source of news than the websites it aggregates

Online search engines have overtaken traditional media as the most trusted source for general news and information, according to a global survey of 27,000 people by Edelman, a public relations firm.

The trust gap between traditional media and search engines is even more pronounced among millennials. The biggest search engine is, of course, Google. And the striking thing is that Google does not actually report on anything, but instead serves up links to stories on a mix of other sites that users, apparently, trust less than the aggregator itself.

Why is gender diversity in tech so much easier to solve than racial diversity?

[Commentary] For one of the most innovative industries, tech's progress on diversity has been depressingly slow. The lack of blacks and Hispanics throughout the tech industry is far from the only diversity-related issue -- women are sorely underrepresented in all aspects of the tech industry, especially in technology positions.

Only 17 percent of the technology roles at Google and Microsoft are filled by women, and that number falls to 10 percent at Twitter. More companies must be willing to have these conversations before change can begin to take place. With so much of the world becoming dependent on technology, we can’t have one of the most powerful industries on Earth run without women, without different cultures, and without diversity. That isn’t good for technology, it isn’t good for the customers, it isn’t good for our society, and it definitely isn’t good for business.

Texas prisons try telemedicine to curb spending

Telemedicine connects prisoners, who are often housed in remote areas, with medical experts throughout the state of Texas.

It’s just one way that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is trying to control spending on prison health care. But while telemedicine has shown some success in curbing spending, it hasn’t been enough to stem rising costs due to an aging prison population. About 100,000 telemedicine encounters take place in Texas state prisons each year. Dr. Owen Murray, Vice President of Offender Health Services at the University of Texas Medical Branch points to a combination of strategies used to lower costs in Texas prisons. He said telemedicine, along with electronic medical records, preferred drug lists and adherence to disease-management guidelines, have curbed spending while improving access to care.

The 4 Kinds of people who watch the State of the Union

These days, State of the Union addresses are just as much an opportunity for the White House to study us, the voters, as it is for Presidents to present a report card to Congress.

White House communications adviser Dan Pfeiffer offers a glimpse into that strategy, saying that the White House reaches out to its viewers differently depending on how they're interacting with the State of the Union: "As we plan out the State of the Union, we think of four audience types  --  the TV Watcher who watches it live, the “Two Screen” Viewer watching on TV with a tablet or smartphone in hand, the Livestreamer who will watch on WhiteHouse.gov with special enhanced content, and the Social Consumer, who won’t watch the speech at all, but will discover our content and policy through their social media feeds." Anyone who tweets about the speech, fills out a White House poll while watching the livestream or otherwise engages the Administration during the event will be generating data that can be used to gauge the nation's response to President Obama's speech and proposed initiatives.

What the Miss Lebanon selfie ‘scandal’ says about meaning on the Internet

[Commentary] Whenever any seemingly stupid, superficial Internet issue combusts like a cluster bomb, we’re never actually talking about a bad tweet, or an ill-advised meme, or the abstract niceties of international politics.

We’re talking about identity, personal identity: that one, closely guarded thing that reliably riles up comments sections each and every time it is even tangentially threatened. Everything else -- the tweets, the memes, the embattled selfies -- is just symbolism. And that explains everything. Miss Lebanon and Miss Israel -- Saly Griege and Doron Matalon, IRL -- took a selfie with two other contestants at the Miss Universe pageant. The Miss Lebanon selfie isn’t just a lolzy social media gaffe: It’s about the difficulties of embodying a self and a country simultaneously. It’s about the politics of personal identity and vice versa. It’s about the unwieldiness of semiotics itself.