June 2015

Spotlight on NTIA: Edward Drocella, Chief of Spectrum Engineering and Analysis Division, Office of Spectrum Management

[Commentary] Ed Drocella, chief of the Spectrum Engineering and Analysis Division in the Office of Spectrum Management, has played a key role in helping to address some of the technical challenges associated with National Telecommunications & Information Administration’s work on the 500 megahertz spectrum initiative. Most recently, Drocella led the NTIA team that helped pave the way for commercial use of the 3.5 Ghz band. In a 2010 report, NTIA proposed the shared use by commercial and federal users of the 3.5 GHz band as long as geographic exclusion zones were included to protect critical high-powered radar systems operated by the Department of Defense (DoD). However, for the band to be commercially viable, the initial exclusion zones needed to be reduced. Drocella’s team at NTIA spearheaded groundbreaking analysis and modeling techniques and collaborated closely with DoD and Federal Communications Commission staff to significantly reduce the exclusion zones, maximizing the commercial market potential for new broadband services. This collaboration between NTIA, FCC and DoD paved the way for the new rules issued by the FCC in April creating a tiered system for shared use of the 3.5 Ghz band. Drocella has been at NTIA for more than two decades.

FCC says price counts in announcing new broadband plan

The Federal Communications Commission, concerned about the high cost of broadband, wants to put cell phones that can access the Internet in the hands of America’s poor in hopes of reducing the digital divide. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is proposing to beef up the $1.7 billion Lifeline program, funded by charges on phone bills, and originally created to subsidize the cost of landline phones. The program now reaches 12 million families and has been expanded to limited-use cellphones. The proposal is far from being a done deal -- still to come are comments on what a minimum service package should look like. For example, the amount of data usage and voice minutes to be permitted will need to be determined.

Chairman Wheeler also asked for comments on how to increase competition among mobile phone providers to reduce prices. Chairman Wheeler hopes to reduce fraud and abuse in the oft-criticized subsidy program, and shrink the digital divide. Whether that can be accomplished through a wireless connection is an open question. The program does nothing about wireline connections, which are faster, more robust and cheaper than wireless phones. Regardless, a disproportionate number of low-income families do not have Internet connections of any sort, and low-cost wireless access may be their best option. No connection means no easy access to the wealth of online information that most Americans enjoy, such as health research, job openings, education and training, and banking and government services. Chairman Wheeler, in his proposal to reform the Lifeline program, is coming down on the price side of the argument over how to reduce the divide. And he has data that supports his position.

The government might still see your phone data – but you won’t know it

[Commentary] With surveillance issues very much in the news, I want to follow up on my last post — which argued that it is possible that the new USA Freedom Act might actually broaden the government’s program of collecting and analyzing telephone metadata. The wording of the law might allow the program to shift from a tool linked only to counterterrorism to one that can be used to analyze such data for the broad purpose of conducting American foreign policy. The question is unsettled because the new law (in Section 104) explicitly gives the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) authority to impose additional “minimization procedures” on the government. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) could conceivably use that power to confine the metadata program to its original counterterrorism purpose. Ironically, though, we may not find out what, if anything, the FISC does with its power — that is, whether it is closing the curtains on Americans’ privacy or opening them even wider than before.

I fear we are once again likely to be in the dark about exactly what the National Security Agency is doing with our telephone metadata. Why? After all, the new law hoped to make FISC proceedings more transparent. It even requires the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), “in consultation with the Attorney General,” to conduct a declassification review of each decision, order, or opinion issued by the FISC that includes “a significant construction or interpretation” of any provision of law and make it publicly available “to the greatest extent practicable.” The USA Freedom Act aims to be a step in the direction of privacy and transparency, but I fear it is an insidious step in the other direction. Worse, the American people will be left in the dark about whether the government is analyzing international and domestic telephone metadata more, not less, than it did prior to its passage.

[H.L. Pohlman is a professor of political science at Dickinson College]

Glenn Greenwald says Australia is 'one of most aggressive' in mass surveillance

Australia is one of the most aggressive countries in the world in terms of mass surveillance and its techniques could be the subject of future leaks, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who first reported on the Edward Snowden revelations for the Guardian, has said. Greenwald, who now works for The Intercept, said that Australia is “probably the country that has gotten away with things the most in terms of the Snowden revelations”. “Australia is one of the most aggressive countries that engage in mass surveillance as a member of the Five Eyes partnership,” he said, referring to a security sharing arrangement between the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

“There has been less reporting on Australia than the other four countries. We intend to change that. There are interesting documents about what Australia is doing to privacy rights – not just to their own citizens,” Greenwald said. “We are working on the reporting,” he continued. “We will definitely get that done as soon as we can.” New Australian laws ushered in in 2014 could see journalists jailed for up to 10 years if they reveal details of special intelligence operations. The changes to the Asio Act have been roundly criticised by Australian news outlets. Greenwald criticised Australian politicians for overstating the terror threat.

Facebook privacy exec: Ads are not ‘a tax on users’

A Facebook official tasked with user privacy says that one reason the company isn’t inclined to offer an ad-free version for users who pay is that they want users to find ads on the site useful, rather than viewing them as a burden. “One of the points that you made is that advertising is effectively a tax on users. We disagree with that,” said Steve Satterfield, manager of privacy and public policy. “We think you can create an advertising experience that can actually create real value for people.” In general, though, company representatives at the event -- sponsored by Facebook -- stayed mum. Facebook and other startups that target advertising at their users are under increasing pressure to show that they are stewards of customer data. “I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it.”

What Silicon Valley Can Learn From Seoul

Like most young people in the Bay Area, Mike Kim grew up believing that the future of technology was being forged in Silicon Valley. “When I was in San Francisco, we called it the mobile capital of the world,” he said. “But I was blown away because Korea is three or four years ahead.” Back home, Kim said, people celebrate when a public park gets Wi-Fi. But in Seoul, even subway straphangers can stream movies on their phones, deep beneath the ground. “When I go back to the U.S., it feels like the Dark Ages,” he said. “It’s just not there yet.”

Tim Chae, who runs small funding organization 500 Kimchi, said that American investors have begun to think of Seoul as a sort of crystal ball. In it, they can glimpse a future where the most ambitious dreams of Silicon Valley — a cashless, carless, everything-on-demand society — have already been realized. Nearly all of Seoul’s residents use smartphones, and many of the services just now gaining in popularity in the United States have been commonplace in South Korea for years. Much of this was made possible by two decades of enormous public investment. Seoul is blanketed with free Wi-Fi that offers the world’s fastest Internet speeds — twice as fast as the average American’s. Back in 1995, the government began a 10-year plan to build out the country’s broadband infrastructure and, through a series of public programs, to teach Koreans what they could do with it. South Korea also eased regulations on service providers to ensure that consumers would have a multitude of choices — in marked contrast to America, where a handful of cable and telecommunications monopolies dominate the market. Such healthy competition in Korea keeps the cost of access low.

A New York State of Megabits

[Commentary] Here’s a parallel for you: When it comes to high-capacity Internet access, Cuba is to the US as the US is to Norway, Korea, and a bunch of other places in northern Europe and Asia. So it was great to get back to New York and be able to report on what is called the “New NY Broadband Program.” It involves a $500 million expenditure to help ensure that New Yorkers across the state have access to current-generation Internet capacity. There’s lots of potential in the plan, targeted at providing every New Yorker with access to 100 megabit per second (Mbps) service (10 Mbps uploads) by the end of 2018. Because New York expects a 1:1 match from the private sector for each grant or loan it makes, that means the state hopes to be deploying at least $1 billion on high-speed Internet access infrastructure.

On the other hand, if the plan is not nurtured by aggressive leadership and implemented with skill, it won’t change much at all in the State of New York, much less set the pace for the rest of the nation. Our top officials must find the courage to require competitive markets and make policy changes that open the way for new entrants. Otherwise the plan could end up allowing the existing players to dig in and hold on to their territories -- leaving upstate New Yorkers not much better off than they are now, albeit with “access” to unreasonably priced higher-capacity connections. For a Cuban, US Internet access is miraculous; for someone from South Korea or Seoul, coming here feels like a rural vacation because life is so disconnected and slow. It’s time the Empire State raised our American expectations.

[Susan Crawford is co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University]

Merger spree by phone carriers poses threat to net neutrality

[Commentary] Big phone companies are swallowing up video partners. How long until subscribers get “free TV” data offers? Will this upset network neutrality? In February, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that Internet providers can’t use throttling, paid prioritization, or other tactics to favor some websites over others. The ruling affirmed the idea of “net neutrality,” but soon that principle could be tested as the result of a recent trend: phone carriers acquiring TV and content companies. None of these proposed mergers—specifically AT&T-DirectTV, Verizon-AOL, and T-Mobile-Dish -- are final for now. But if they go through, it likely won’t be long until the combined companies begin to explore internet plans that undercut net neutrality with offers of “free” data for certain types of web video.

Indeed, there’s already a precedent for such offers: T-Mobile’s “Music Freedom” plan lets subscribers stream songs without regard to their paid data caps. Will we soon see the same for TV? Using their sway over data pricing, carriers could prod subscribers into various video “walled gardens” and away from the open Internet. The real question is whether the carriers and the FCC see it this way too. At the agency’s epic February vote, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler deflected questions about whether T-Mobile’s “Music Freedom” is a net neutrality violation, and suggested the question would be considered later under the agency’s “general conduct” rules.

How Net Neutrality Invites the Feds to Ignore the First Amendment & Censor the Internet

If the Federal Communications Commission had admitted the Internet offers communications capabilities that are functionally equivalent to the printing press, mail carriage, newspaper publishing, over-the-air broadcasting, and cable television combined, it would have been too obvious that classifying broadband Internet service providers (ISPs) as common carriers is unconstitutional.

Like all other means of disseminating mass communications, broadband Internet access is a part of the “press” that the First Amendment protects from common carriage regulation. The unprecedented restrictions imposed by the open Internet rules eviscerate the freedom of the press without regard to scarcity. In the Second Internet Order, the FCC expressly disclaimed any intent to find that ISPs have market power. It instead relied on the ideology of “gatekeeper control” to justify its total ban on the editorial discretion of ISPs. This ideology presumes that all content providers who wish to use a particular system for disseminating mass communications require a government-mandated right of free access to all other users of such systems at all times in order to survive, innovate, and compete.[6] Its corollary presumption is that the operators of mass media communications systems have no recognizable interest, constitutional or otherwise, in exercising editorial discretion.

While I Was Sleeping, Momentous Developments for Cable's Future

[Commentary] Sometimes the onslaught of daily deals and lush forecasts obscures their real importance: They are collective indicators of the industry's direction, overshadowing the big picture (a version of the forest/trees conundrum). While May included a stunning array of "big deals" in telecommunications and media, their significance looms even larger when, as I've just done, you absorb the whole month's news in a single dose. Obviously, the biggest deals, especially Charter-Time Warner Cable-Bright House Networks plus Altice-Suddenlink, underscore the consolidation of the industry, especially with Altice's appetite for more acquisitions on this side of the Atlantic.

The "internationalization" of domestic cable also pokes through, notably with the role that Liberty Media/Liberty Global can play in bringing content deals across the ocean; Altice may do the same. Maybe it was just my overwhelming, sudden immersion into so many aspects of the business that instilled a sense of a "pivotal moment." The merry month of May 2015 could someday be identified as a changing point for the industry, or maybe it was merely an accelerator for all the daily developments that we see unfolding but can rarely put into context.

Benton

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