May 2015

New America Foundation Joins Fight to Defend Net Neutrality in Court

New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) filed a motion in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to intervene in the legal challenge to the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 Open Internet Order. The move allows OTI to protect network neutrality as a formal party in the case, defending the order alongside the FCC and numerous other intervenors. Senior Policy Counsel for New America's Open Technology Institute Sarah Morris said, "The FCC’s network neutrality rules are strong, clear, and necessary to preserve the Internet’s role as a level playing field for innovation and an open portal for communication, commerce, education and civic engagement. OTI was deeply engaged in the FCC’s proceeding to enact those rules, detailing the significant consumer harms that result from interconnection disputes as well as the need for a common regulatory regime that applies to both wired and wireless networks. We are pleased to join the growing group of public interest and industry groups who have moved to protect the FCC’s rules from a recent wave of legal challenges. We look forward to defending the sound, bounded rules and the clear authority on which those rules are based.”

The Internet .Sucks

[Commentary] The US government wants to relinquish control of the Web. But the alternative really dot-sucks. Going back almost to the days when Al Gore invented the Internet, the federal government has been in charge of online addresses through its contract with the California-based nonprofit the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Now, responding to growing international complaints because of the Edward Snowden affair, the feds are extricating themselves from this Series of Tubes. But, as is usually the case with deregulation, installing private-sector foxes as guards of public-good henhouses can get messy. Thus did a House Judiciary subcommittee find itself holding a hearing May 13th on “The .Sucks Domain.”

The whole concept seemed to trouble Rep Blake Farenthold (R-TX). “If I have to register blake.com, blake.net, blake.org, blake.biz, blake.us, blake sucks, you know, where does it stop?” he asked, arguing that it was essentially “extorting companies to register potentially thousands of variations of their domain names." House Judiciary Subcommittee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) worried aloud that businesses would have to buy thousands of sites to protect themselves, including “dot-saugt,” German for “dot-sucks.” “I have no idea what it would be in Italian, in Chinese,” he added, aghast that destructive domain names might proliferate “simply to gain more money.” That’s what happens when the government gives the free-market free rein, Mr. Chairman. Now, how much are you going to pay me for darrellissasucks.org?

Surveillance Hawks and Privacy Advocates Agree: House NSA Bill is a Flop

The House just passed a White House-backed National Security Agency reform bill (USA Freedom Act), but it faces an uphill battle in the Senate, where lawmakers say the legislation would make America less safe, and an key electronic privacy group is pulling its long-time support for the proposal. The issue for both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the Electronic Freedom Foundation is Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a provision that allows for the bulk collection of American phone records by the NSA. A federal court ruled the program illegal, but left the door open for Congress to allow it with new legislation.

The House bill removes Section 215, while the legislation being considered by the Senate contains it. Majority Leader McConnell’s problem with the House version of the disingenuously-named USA Freedom Act is that it doesn’t give the government the authority to continue mass collection of American data. He maintains eliminating the program would make the United States less safe, despite little evidence that the data collected by the government has stopped terror attacks. The EFF, a group that has been advocating for electronic privacy since 1990, supported the bill as recently as the week of May 4th. Now, though, it’s singing a different tune, saying the court ruling finding the surveillance program illegal changed their position. EFF’s civil liberty director, David Greene, and its legislative analyst, Mark Jaycox, argued the ruling should compel Congress to revert to a 2013 version that contained stronger provisions outlawing mass surveillance. Other privacy advocates are also opposed to the bill. Daniel Schuman, policy director of the progressive group Demand Progress, said the legislation does not address the controversial Section 702 provision allowing the government to collect e-mail and Internet traffic information “Taking a bite of a poisoned apple is not going to address the underlying issues,” he said. “You don’t ask for the bare minimum.”

Is student privacy erased as classrooms turn digital?

[Commentary] When parents and school officials in New Jersey discovered that educational publisher Pearson recently monitored students' Twitter accounts during standardized testing periods, an uproar ensued. Parents were alarmed and one superintendent called it "disturbing." But Pearson maintained it was doing what was necessary to make sure students weren't cheating on the Common Core test it administers. The debate highlights the evolving nature of student privacy in the Digital Age. As schools rely more apps and educational software inside and outside the classroom, massive amounts of data are being collected on students. More often than not, parents are in the dark about how this data is being used -- and how their kids are being monitored -- by schools and software companies. I recently spoke with Elana Zeide, a privacy research fellow at New York University's Information Law Institute, about privacy concerns in education.

[Evan Selinger is an associate professor of philosophy at Rochester]

Why I make my kids read privacy policies

[Commentary] I -- the mom -- am a lawyer. In fact, I am a lawyer who has been helping Internet companies write privacy policies and terms of service and generally navigate global regulations for almost 20 years. More recently, I served as President Barack Obama’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer focused on Internet, privacy (yes, including big data), and innovation. My teen’s particular dislike of privacy policies is borne of our household rules for accessing Web services or downloading new mobile applications. We have three basic rules:

1) You have to read the privacy policy before you create an account or download an app.
2) You have to explain to Mom what gets shared and with whom.
3) Mom and Dad have final say.

My kids hate these rules. Yes, I know that most of the population doesn't read the small print of privacy policies. It makes their eyes glaze over. I don’t love privacy policies either, notwithstanding the fact that I have drafted scores of them over the years. But teaching kids to read a privacy policy is like teaching them to look both ways before they cross the street. It’s a basic safety rule that instills both caution and judgment. Whether you are helping your younger child set up a kid’s account or talking with your teen about what’s on her ever-present phone, the privacy policy opens an opportunity for both of you to talk about what they may encounter online.

[Wong is the former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer, focusing on Internet, privacy, and innovation policy]

The Battle for the Living Room

[Commentary] First, it was for the little screens. Now, it's for the big ones. In living rooms across America, an epic clash is looming for the hearts, minds and eyeballs of US consumers as major device platform providers, as well as cable companies and telecommunications carriers, again try to reinvent the big-screen television viewing experience. While smart TVs, streaming boxes and gaming consoles have attempted to alter our viewing habits, most people continue to get their TV content the same way they always have -- through cable or satellite providers.

Now, however, the environment around TV viewing has begun to shift because of one profoundly important development: the growing popularity of over-the-top (OTT) video services, such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, YouTube and others like them. The stakes for this living room battle are huge. Not only do we all spend a lot of time viewing TV and video, we spend a lot of money to access this content as well. So sit back and grab some popcorn, because seeing how all these companies maneuver their businesses to tap into this new opportunity is going to be a fun show to watch.

[Bob O'Donnell is founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research]

AT&T-Hulu Deal Brings OTT Video to Mobile and Broadband

It seems like every week lately there has been an announcement of a multi-play service provider adding an over-the-top (OTT) video subscription service to its offerings. The latest such news comes from AT&T, which said it has made a deal to bring the Hulu subscription streaming service to AT&T customers later in 2015. For now the deal doesn’t include putting Hulu on AT&T’s U-Verse platform. Instead the deal appears more mobile-focused, with customers gaining the ability to watch Hulu programs on mobile devices through an AT&T app. Customers also can watch on AT&T’s website over a broadband connection. But the announcement also notes that AT&T and Hulu are “exploring the possibility of bringing a Hulu app to TV.”

Customers apparently don’t need to subscribe to AT&T’s U-verse video service to get the AT&T Hulu offering. Hulu offers current and past episodes of television programming from a wide range of networks including ABC, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Fox, MTV, NBC, Nickelodeon and TNT as well as classic films and a library of original Hulu programming. Now that pay TV providers have taken the plunge on OTT video, the focus increasingly will be on how to differentiate those offerings and make them more user-friendly. The fact that AT&T offers both mobile and broadband service could be a differentiator moving forward. Integrating OTT video interfaces with existing programming guides, search engines and the like also is likely to be an important area for potential differentiation.

The search for media reality in the Arab Middle East

[Commentary] As the cascade of chaotic events in the Arab Middle East continue to unfold, it becomes increasingly important for policymakers in Western government, including the United States, to expand their focus beyond just managing the latest series of current crises. Although still in its infancy, researchers are building the necessary media infrastructure to accurately assess public opinion in several Middle Eastern countries. Combining rigorous methodologies with large sets of historical information generates data that provides a necessary complement to impressions gained primarily from monitoring public Internet chatter or sorting out what is being heard on the Arab “street.”

The research efforts of Northwestern University in Qatar (where I served as Professor of Communication in Residence during the 2012-13 academic year) are a case in point. In April, it released the latest edition of Media Use in the Middle East, a comprehensive survey that provides a window into the changing political and social climate in six countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the UAE. The survey, the largest annual study of its kind in the region, was conducted in collaboration with Harris Poll. Fieldwork took place between February 3 and March 9, 2015, and involved 6,093 interviews that allowed for nationally representative samples of adults over the age of 18 in each country. 2015's report explores how attitudes and behaviors have changed since NU-Q's first region-wide survey in 2013. The findings suggest that the glow of the heralded Arab Spring has faded significantly. Perhaps most important, these latest figures remind us that although a regional perspective of the Arab Middle East is essential, so too is the need to assess Arab media with a sharper focus on individual countries. Clearly, there still is an upward slope to our learning curve here

Here’s Jesse Jackson’s Plan for Diversity in Silicon Valley

Jesse Jackson is the first to admit he is not technologically inclined. “I have a rotary dial phone,” he tells me. But if you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, you also don’t need an iPhone to understand the dismal state of diversity in the tech industry. He has charts and graphs. They aren’t pretty. "This is not reflective of our capacity,” Jackson said by phone ahead of a conference on diversity in tech. “That’s not a talent deficit. That’s an imagination deficit. It does not reflect the marketplace.” Not surprisingly, Jackson has a definite point-by-point plan, and describes it so efficiently, it’s like a verbal infographic.

First of all, he wants to know, why are they not recruiting at colleges beyond Stanford and USC? “At the tech levels, black colleges have been most proficient at training youth in these sciences, but [those students] are not recruited. Part of what we’ve worked out with Intel is to create a pipeline [between] Silicon Valley and black college campuses.” In addition to engineering jobs, Jackson pointed to numbers regarding support jobs at tech companies, which also lag behind national averages. “Overwhelmingly, there are non-tech jobs -- secretaries, advertising and marketing, legal work, accounting work -- we are fully capable of fulfilling. There’s been no plan for inclusion at non-tech levels.” And then there are corporate campuses. Why not build them in areas like Detroit (MI) that could use the boost and have underemployed populations? “Given what’s happening in Baltimore, it’s a great opportunity not just to rebuild a CVS but to build a tech center. We represent talent, location and growth.” Diversity is a trendy topic and, so far, the response from the Silicon Valley luminaries who attended the conference seems genuine -- the exclusion not a result of resistance, but of ignorance. “They were like one-eyed quarterbacks that can’t see half the field,” Jackson said of tech companies. “Silicon Valley has been looking eastward, [to the Far East -- Asia and India], not westward [America]. It was just a failure of imagination.”

How Google is Tackling Diversity

In a series of videos, USA Today explores how Google is trying to diversify its workforce and suppliers.

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