June 2015

[Commentary] Here are some ways to keep your communications private. While these tips were designed for journalists and confidential sources, they're just as useful for protecting any private communications, such as a conversation between family members, or a confidential business dealing. The key is to figure out your communication strategy. First, decide if you are trying to hide WHO you are talking to (metadata) or WHAT you are talking about (content), or BOTH. In each case, there are both high-tech and low-tech ways to evade surveillance.

If you are trying to mask WHO you are talking to, consider three tactics that I call ACE -- which stands for "Add Noise, Cloak or Evade."

• Add noise means fuzzing the metadata by adding false connections or false content to the communications.
• Cloak means using alternate identities.
• Evade means avoiding metadata collection.

If you are trying to mask WHAT you are talking about, I suggest three strategies that I call HEM -- which stands for "Hide, Encrypt or Mask."

• Hide means hiding the existence of the content, by placing it in a secret compartment either physically or digitally.
• Encrypt means to make content unreadable to outsiders using cryptographic techniques.
• Mask means disguising the content as an innocuous other type of content.

European antitrust regulators have sent copies of their charges against Google to critics of the US tech giant and given them a month to comment, one of the complainants said. The move by the European Union competition watchdog may boost its case against the search engine, which it accuses of abusing its market power and cheating consumers and rivals by distorting search results to favor its shopping service.

Nineteen companies, including Microsoft, US online travel site TripAdvisor, British online mapping service Streetmap, French comparison site Twenga and lobbying group ICOMP, are expected to get the EU charge sheet. “We received the redacted statement of objections today. We are invited to comment within a four-week period. It comes with strict confidentiality, so we cannot disclose anything about it other than to our legal counsel,” one of the complainants said. The European Commission declined to comment. Google was not immediately available to comment. Complainants who triggered the commission’s investigation into Google nearly five years ago can also attend a closed-door hearing to argue their case, should Google ask for one. Google has been given until July 7 to respond to the accusations but can ask for an extension.

NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association represents rural broadband carriers, most of whom have roots as rural telecommunication companies. Broadband carrier is probably a better descriptive term these days, as many those ‘telcos’ also count cable TV, wireless (fixed and mobile), and cloud services as a part of their service portfolio. They recently published results from their annual Broadband/Internet Availability Survey, conducted in the Winter of 2014. Deploying fiber based services remains a priority for NTCA members, with 39 percent of survey respondents citing the use fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology in their networks today.

Among current FTTP providers, 25 percent say they can reach their entire customer base with the technology. A little less than half (45 percent) of current FTTP providers reach at least half of their customer base with the technology, according to the results. Rural customers, like their urban counterparts, are subscribing to faster broadband speeds. Roughly one-third (33.6 percent) of NTCA carrier member customers are taking a broadband tier of 10 Mbps or more, the highest subscribed to category. That’s a dramatic increase from a year ago, where NTCA reported that only 8.5 percent subscribed to a similar tier, an improvement of almost 400 percent. The survey report didn’t offer any additional detail of the actual speeds offered beyond “above 10 Mbps.”

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge may be known as a consummate cable operator, having led Cablevision Systems and Charter Communications through some rough waters, but he knows how to dance around an onerous regulatory framework as well, using something known back in his early days at Time Warner Cable as the “Texas Two-Step.” Charter agreed in May to purchase TWC in a deal valued at $78.7 billion. The transaction, which still needs approval from the Federal Communications Commission, is expected to close by the end of 2015.

Recently, Rutledge reminisced about his early career with Time Warner Cable -- his first job was with a predecessor company American Television Co. (ATC) -- and in particular, his first stint at corporate in the 1990s as a regulatory strategist. Rutledge took that job just as the 1992 Cable Act was imposed, the regulation that stymied industry investment and forced many operators to roll back rates. Rutledge said at the time the ‘92 Act was introduced he was working in Austin (TX) read the document in its entirety and “came up with an operational strategy to take the company forward.” “…And so we did a thing we called the Texas Two-Step, was the way it was named internally in Time Warner,” Rutledge said. “And it was a way of taking a la carte for some services and selling them under the rules, and at the same time being rate regulated under other parts of the rules. But it allowed us to continue to grow and fund the upgrading of the plant which we were doing then.” Whether that will work under an FCC Title II regime is anyone’s guess, but it could come in handy as the combined company moves ahead.