March 2015

Public Knowledge Urges House Judiciary to Preserve FCC Authority over Broadband

Some members of the [House Judiciary] committee have asked whether antitrust law is sufficient on its own to address broadband policy in the digital age. As on all previous occasions anyone has seriously looked at this question, the answer, once again, is ‘no.’

Furthermore, the timing and framing of this hearing, ‘Wrecking the Internet to Save It,’ following a similar hearing in February, suggests that no one on the [House Judiciary] Committee seriously wants to debate the question. Rather, this appears to be yet another effort spurred by cable and telephone lobbyists to punish the Federal Communications Commission for doing its job. The FCC and Federal Trade Commission occupy complementary roles in the quest to promote competition and consumer protection. Antitrust is narrowly tailored to provide redress to very specific harms, and only after the fact. In keeping with the importance of the Open Internet in our daily lives, however, the FCC has a broader mandate to craft policies that not only prevent harms from occurring in the first place, but also actively promote network deployment, competition, consumer protection, and innovation. Stripping the FCC of its authority will only leave consumers vulnerable and encourage cable and telephone companies to continue to push the envelope on abusive practices. We urge members to recognize the important roles both agencies play in protecting consumers and fostering competition and innovation on the Internet.

Widespread problems hampering new 911 fire dispatch system in DC

A computer system used to dispatch Washington (DC) firetrucks and ambulances has malfunctioned almost daily since it was installed in the fall, slowing response times to their worst levels in more than two years and leaving dispatchers blind to whether they are sending the closest units to fires and medical emergencies.

DC Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) told the DC Council that her administration had begun emergency work to fix the system and will soon deploy additional ambulances and take other precautions to compensate for the troubled system. Tablet computers installed in ambulances and firetrucks beginning in late October have routinely lost their 4G network signals as the vehicles traverse the city, at times providing dispatchers with inaccurate information about unit location when deciding which are best positioned to respond to 911 calls.

Facebook’s ‘On This Day’ wants to rewire your relationship to the past. Here’s why that’s strange.

[Commentary] The Internet is obsessed with the now, the new, the “trending”: It takes only minutes for Facebook posts to fall out of our News Feeds or for tweets to disappear into the past. (On the ephemeral messaging app Snapchat, it takes even less time than that.) We are frantic with the pulse of the present; we are pummeled by the thunderous, unending cascade of breaking news. And because that’s stressful and unpleasant and overwhelming, and one of the primary reasons people start floating phrases like “digital detox,” tech companies have sought to manufacture a solution to a problem that they themselves created: They want to return your sense of the past. “Facebook’s emphasis upon memory, both personal and collective, allows for an escape from history and, therefore, linearity, order and narrative,” the media scholar Joanne Garde-Hansen once wrote. Maybe “On This Day” is an attempt to restore that narrative -- but it’s a narrative that Facebook itself broke.

How the golden age of domain-trolling was born

In two short months, the domain troll problem is going to get even worse: That’s when three of the most controversial new top-level domains -- .porn, .adult and .sucks -- are released to a merciless public. Taylor Swift already snapped up Web addresses on those domains to make sure no one uses them against her. But as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the group that oversees and regulates domains, continues to make more of them available, the Internet is only getting bigger and more troll-able. New domains -- .singles, .holiday, .guitars, .buzz, .gripe -- have rolled out almost every week since ICANN began this latest round of domain expansion in October 2013. If you’re trying to protect your brand or reputation, good luck.

Fight breaks out over ‘.doctor’ websites

A fight is breaking out about who can call themselves a doctor on the Internet. Domain registry company Donuts is opposing a restriction handed down by the international body overseeing some technical functions of the Internet -- known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- that would limit who is able to register a website that ends in “.doctor” instead of .com or .net. If ICANN gets its way, only “legitimate medical practitioners” will be able to use the domain name.

But “the term 'doctor' is pretty broad and has a lot of uses,” said Jon Nevett, a co-founder and executive vice president at Donuts, which sells domain names with endings beyond the traditional .coms and .nets. “It could be used by a Ph.D, it could be used by a rug doctor, a computer doctor, a lawn doctor, a veterinarian.” Donuts is one of three firms that applied for control of .doctor, as part of a massive undertaking by ICANN to create hundreds of new domain extensions for use across the Internet. In March, Donuts filed a formal petition of reconsideration asking ICANN to change its tune.

Skeptics worry service, rates may suffer if Comcast spins off Minnesota

Right now, GreatLand Connections exists only on paper. But if you buy TV, Internet or phone service from Comcast in Minnesota, GreatLand could be your next cable provider.

If federal regulators back its $45 billion merger with Time Warner, Comcast says a new company, GreatLand, would be formed to take over the cable giant's operations in Minnesota and 10 other states. The move is meant to ease worries that Comcast and Time Warner combined would control too much of the pay TV and broadband markets in the United States. The potential spinoff, however, makes some regional regulators nervous. Some worry GreatLand's prices and service quality will be worse than what the estimated 550,000 Comcast subscribers in the metro area have now. Comcast officials dismiss the concerns. "Our goal is to make the transition to GreatLand Connections as seamless as possible for our customers, if it is indeed approved," Comcast spokesperson Mary Beth Schubert said. GreatLand will rely on rival Charter Communications for help with several important functions, including customer service, engineering and billing.

NBCU Interested In Spectrum Auction Options

David Cohen, executive vice president of Comcast, owner of NBCUniversal, suggests that when the Federal Communications Commission holds its auction to buy TV spectrum in 2016, the NBC and Telemundo stations may be among the sellers. “That’s a matter of continuing evaluation,” he said. “All the broadcasters are looking at [the auction].” Like CBS and Fox, “NBC has an interest in the situation.”

The game changer was the auction of AWS spectrum that closed earlier in 2015 and yielded $45 billion, far more than had been anticipated, he said. “The economic value that was attributed to the AWS spectrum in the auction has caused everyone, including NBCUniversal, to go back to the drawing board and say: ‘If spectrum is really worth six to 10 times as much as we thought it was … we ought to take a look at it again.’” But selling spectrum would come with an opportunity cost, he said. Even though broadcasters today reach only “6 percent, 8 percent, 12 percent” of their viewers directly with their over-the-air signals, he said, some want to hang on to their spectrum so that can also broadcast to mobile devices. “Because technology moves so quickly there has been some sense among many in the broadcast industry that they can’t afford to give up the spectrum because they might lose an opportunity to do something … in the future.”

Why Cable TV Beats the Internet, For Now

[Commentary] Are you ready to cut cable? Probably not -- yet.

That pains me to say, both as tech columnist and someone who watches enough TV to own a Snuggie. Many of us are rooting for the Internet to upend our indecent cable bills. Surely Silicon Valley’s brightest can figure out a better way to get us the stuff we want to watch. Why are we still paying cable for a “live” channel of back-to-back “Bewitched” reruns? But after reviewing pretty much every available Internet TV service, streaming box and smart TV, I’ve yet to find a replacement that covers all the TV bases while costing less. Instead, I recommend “shaving down” your cable-and-broadband subscription and supplementing it with streaming services such as Hulu, Amazon and Netflix until this all shakes out. There’s hope: Now that Internet companies can make their own channel bundles, perhaps we’ll see some designed for specific interests that can save us money. Classic movie-lovers shouldn’t have to pay for baseball games they’ll never watch. Sports junkies who don’t care about nature documentaries shouldn’t pay for them, either. At some point, a smart company may figure out a way to make everybody happy.

RadioShack's Bankruptcy Could Give Your Customer Data to the Highest Bidder

The remnants of RadioShack’s retail empire went on the auction block, giving bidders the first chance to snap up the company’s trademarks, patents, leases -- and the names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers of millions of RadioShack customers.

For RadioShack itself, the stakes are enormous. Bloomberg News reported that Standard General, a hedge fund that is one of RadioShack's creditors, has won the auction. Hanging in the balance, when a federal bankruptcy court is expected to approve or reject the asset sale, is the continuation of the 94-year-old retailer's operations. Standard General has said it will try to keep the retail chain operating on a smaller scale. RadioShack's customers -- even those whose most recent purchase came years ago -- could also find themselves sold off in the deal. The company included personal data in its bankruptcy auction as its own asset class. A website maintained by Hilco Streambank, which is serving as an intermediary for RadioShack, says that more than 13 million e-mail addresses and 65 million customer names and physical address files are for sale. Hilco Streambank is careful to note that the bankruptcy court might not approve the deals, and there have already been two legal filings in attempts to block the sale of customer data.

Mergers and privacy promises

Every company takes a different approach to how it collects, maintains, and shares consumers’ personal information. Companies that want to do right by their customers are careful to explain how they handle that data. That way, consumers will know how their data will be treated. But what happens when a company changes owners or merges with another entity? Do the representations the company made to consumers before a merger about how their information will be used apply after the merger? Are there limits on how it can be used and shared? The Federal Trade Commission recognizes that to innovate and keep pace in today’s economy, businesses may acquire other companies or sell business units. However, companies must still live up to their privacy promises. One company’s purchase of another doesn’t nullify the privacy promises made when the data was first collected. When a purchase or acquisition does occur, companies have two choices. They can simply abide by their promises -- that is, handle the data as promised when they collected it from consumers. Or, if they want to materially change how they collect, use, or share consumers data, they must get permission from the consumers to whom they made the original promise.

Benton

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