March 2015

A bipartisan budget amendment expressing support for some type of network neutrality rules was unanimously adopted during the evening of March 26's “vote-a-rama” in the Senate. The measure called for a deficit-neutral reserve fund “to preserve and protect the open Internet in a manner that provides clear and certain rules” while also protecting consumers, competition and other issues. The measure was entirely ceremonial and non-binding.

Still, the mere fact that Senators of both parties could agree on the idea that there should be some rules in place to protect Internet users represents a partial bridging of the partisan split on the issue, and may offer a flicker of hope to supporters of a compromise piece of legislation. “Passage of this amendment is a good omen that Congress can come together, on a bipartisan basis, to address uncertainty facing the Internet and consumers,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD), who co-sponsored the measure along with Ranking Member Bill Nelson (D-FL). “This amendment underscores that Congress has a role and responsibility to set policy for protecting an open Internet.”

If you have AT&T’s gigabit Internet service and wonder why it seems so affordable, here's the reason -- AT&T is boosting profits by rerouting all your Web browsing to an in-house traffic scanning platform, analyzing your Internet habits, then using the results to deliver personalized ads to the websites you visit, e-mail to your inbox, and junk mail to your front door. Subscribing to a VPN (virtual private network) service would encrypt your traffic before it hits AT&T’s servers, preventing the Internet service provider from analyzing it. VPNs can degrade Internet performance because they cause traffic to also travel through the VPN provider’s servers, and you have to decide whether you trust the VPN provider more than you trust AT&T. But some Internet users may think a VPN worth the expense.

Consumers can complain to the Federal Trade Commission about privacy violations, but AT&T’s Internet Preferences doesn’t appear to be facing any challenges. When contacted about AT&T’s Internet Preferences, an FTC spokesperson said the commission’s policy is “not to comment on companies’ practices unless it’s part of a lawsuit or report.” For now, AT&T customers who value their privacy will continue to face a tough decision.

Strong growth in mobile devices and multi-platform content consumption continued unabated in 2014, as new research from comScore illustrates. “Perhaps more so than at any other time in recent memory, changes were not merely incremental but rather seemed to represent key inflection points in the evolution of various markets and behaviors,” comScore writes in the introduction of its “US Digital Future in Focus 2015” report. “We saw platforms collide in ways that upended existing markets, reconfigured the economics of various industries, and suggested that we are embarking on a new era of digital that will look markedly different from its predecessor.”

Smartphones and tablets accounted for the bulk of growth in digital media consumption (up 394 percent and 1,721 percent respectively) over the past four years, comScore highlights in its report. It turns out that their ascension hasn’t been eating into the amount of time Americans spend consuming media via desktop equipment however. The total amount of time Americans spent consuming digital media via desktop devices and equipment rose 37 percent over this time period, according to comScore.

Farmers in rural parts of Maine who struggle to maintain their businesses and ship their goods out to customers while dealing with slow, spotty or at times nonexistent Internet service are rallying behind a bill moving through the Legislature. The concept draft of the measure, LD 826, seeks to increase funding to the state’s ConnectME Authority from $1 million to $5 million in order to expand universal broadband and high-speed Internet into the 6 percent of the state that has no access to such service.

David Bright, who operates BrightBerry Farm in Dixmont (ME) with his wife, Jean Hay Bright, said that the bill could make a big difference for growers in rural Maine who are considered unserved by high-speed Internet service. “The purpose of this bill is really to say that we need to get everyone connected to broadband Internet service,” said Bright, who also is a member of the Maine Farm Bureau. “We need to look at the places that are unserved and get them connected to the grid.” “They are on the Internet quite a bit,” he said. “But they were told it would cost between $20,000 and $30,000 to get real Internet coverage out there. That is a tremendous amount of money for a small dairy farm.”