February 2015

The fastest Internet connections available to Michiganders are coming from small Michigan companies you've probably never heard of. In 2011, Ann Arbor was vying with cities around the nation to get the first installation of Google Fiber, a connection that was faster and better than anything around. The city lost, but what once took an Internet giant to accomplish is now being done by small companies in pockets across the state.

Commissioner Mignon Clyburn of the Federal Communications Commission has asked FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to eliminate from new network neutrality rules a new legal category of “broadband subscriber access services,” which was created as an additional point of legal authority for the FCC to monitor the ways that companies hand off traffic on the back end of the Internet.

Those deals, known as “interconnection” arrangements, became a point of contention when Netflix accused Comcast and other companies of erecting “Internet tolls” before easily passing Web traffic from one network to another.

The initial plan sought by Chairman Wheeler would allow the FCC to investigate and take action against deals that are “not just and reasonable,” according to a fact sheet released by the FCC.

Eliminating the new legal category could make it trickier for the FCC to police those arrangements, said the FCC officials. Other FCC officials have previously said that the broader act of reclassifying broadband Internet service would, in and of itself, give the commission enough powers to oversee interconnection deals.

Clyburn’s changes also would replace a new standard for Internet service providers’ conduct, which was meant to act as a catchall rule for any future behavior that might abuse consumers. That standard would be swapped out with potentially narrower language from 2010 net neutrality rules that prevented “unreasonable discrimination.”

In a speech at the Federal Communications Bar Association, Commissioner Clyburn said that she was “pleased” with the initial draft but also hinted that she might need some fixes to strike that balance between “strong” protections for consumers and “clarity” for investors.

“Some have expressed concerns about allowing private rights of action in court, failing to consider the impact on smaller [Internet service providers], that including interconnection goes too far or that the case-by-case approach does not go far enough and that the new conduct rule may not be as strong as the previous unreasonable discrimination rule,” she said.

A lawsuit against Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Rev. Al Sharpton and the NAACP alleges that the media companies discriminated against black-owned businesses and paid activists like Sharpton to “whitewash” its practices. The complaint alleges that Comcast gave large donations to Sharpton, the NAACP and other civil rights groups to make it appear that the cable company was promoting diversity, even while it was failing to follow through on a promise to do so.

The lawsuit, seeking $20 billion, was filed in Los Angeles federal court by Entertainment Studios, a television company founded by black producer and comedian Byron Allen and the National Association of African-American Owned Media (NAAAOM). The complaint, which comes as regulators mull a $45-billion merger between Comcast and TWC, alleges that Comcast has refused to do business with Allen and other black media executives. “Comcast has engaged in, and is engaging in, pernicious, intentional racial discrimination in contracting,” it reads. Whether or not it gets anywhere is another question. Both Sharpton and Comcast dismissed the allegations. Sharpton called the lawsuit a “bogus statement from a person who has no credibility” and said that he will be bringing counterclaims for defamation.

Europe’s digital economy chief Guenther Oettinger says the European Union should create a single law to protect the data of citizens across Europe from Google and Facebook. Oettinger, who is Germany’s representative to the European Commission, said in a speech that the technology giants are using “an electronic vacuum cleaner” to collect and sell personal data. Oettinger said: “The Americans are in the lead, they’ve got the data, the business models and so the power." Google and Facebook “will go to the member states where data protection is least developed, come along with their electronic vacuum cleaner, take it to California and sell it,” Oettinger said.