July 2015

Verizon's NYC government contracts face scrutiny over claims of not meeting FiOS goals

Verizon's troubles in New York City continue to mount as Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-New York City) is requiring City Hall to approve any business local agencies do with the service provider, a measure focused on getting it to fulfill its goal to wire the city with FiOS fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) service. Mayor de Blasio told NYC commissioners and government agency leaders in June that they have to tell the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications about any major contract negotiations they conduct with Verizon and other service providers that do business in the city.

Maya Wiley, de Blasio's general counsel, who is in charge of the city's broadband strategy, will make the final approval of any discretionary deal. Such a requirement is a big hit to Verizon, which has generated nearly $650 million in voice and data revenues with NYC's government agencies since 2010. Wiley said that they would like to work with Verizon, but they want assurance that the company will be a good corporate actor. "We'll treat Verizon fairly," Wiley said. "But where we have the power to make decisions, we will make decisions that benefit good corporate actors. They have to demonstrate to us that they are good corporate actors if they want us to use our discretion in ways that benefit them."

NTCA critical of additional backup power mandate on rural telcos

NTCA, an industry forum focused on rural telecommunication companies, says that the Federal Communications Commission should not place larger mandates on service providers, because the fact that many consumers shift to using cell phones during power outages shows that they don't see standby power for voice service a priority.

According to FCC figures, 41 percent of American consumers have "cut the cord" and rely on a mobile phone to get their voice service. At the same time, the majority of homes that still have a landline voice service use cordless phones, with few users expressing an interest in having backup power. "There is little indication in the record that those American consumers that continue to subscribe to a wireline voice service have a desire for backup power," wrote the NTCA in an FCC filing. "As several nationwide and cable voice providers have stated, only a small percentage of consumers choose to purchase a backup power battery when offered to them."

Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure targets one-third Hispanic, African-American employment

Sprint Corp chief executive Marcelo Claure set a target that one-third of the company’s employees and management team should be Hispanic or of African-American descent. Claure, a Bolivian immigrant to the United States, made the pledge during an address to the National Council of La Raza’s national convention in Kansas City. “I have made it a very clear point that I want one-third of our employees and our management team to be Hispanic or of African-American descent,” he said. “It’s not because we need to fill a quota. It’s because I’m certain that we will understand the needs of our customers better.”

More than a third of Sprint’s customers, Claure said, are Hispanic or of African-American descent. The Overland Park-based company had about 31,000 employees at the end of March. A Sprint spokeswoman said Claure’s comments reflected his “vision” for the company’s workforce better understanding its customers rather than specific hiring goals. “It’s not a policy,” Melinda Tiemeyer said. Nor did she have a report on the percentage of Sprint’s employees or its management team who are Hispanic or of African-American descent.

Three ways to begin fixing Silicon Valley's 'pipeline' problem

[Commentary] There's a lot of talk about the "pipeline" as the root cause for technology's lack of diversity -- the idea that women and minorities aren't seeking out relevant education, therefore they cannot be hired for technical or executive jobs. This ignores the fact that the lack of diversity in non-technical roles like administration and sales mirrors a shortfall in technical positions in Silicon Valley. Further evidence shows that current diverse candidates graduating with technical degrees are still not seeing the wealth of opportunities that the technology industry promises. If you're a CEO, hiring manager, or decision maker at your company and you'd like to do your part, here are three ways to get serious about diversity:

End employee referral programs: By doing this, you're instantly considering a more diverse pool of applicants.
Start a residency program: This is a low-risk move that allows companies to hire people that might be otherwise be passed over for a perceived (or real) lack of experience. Now you have no excuses.
Listen to us: There's no shortage of people doing their best to speak up. Yet, what I see time and time again is a dismissal of these people's experiences or qualifications, including my own. Addressing Silicon Valley's lack of diversity truly starts by listening to the stories we are trying to tell you. If you ignore us, if you think you know better than us about how to develop an inclusive environment, if you think you can uncover the "real" reason why we aren't getting hired at the rates we deserve: You are wrong. Sharing our experiences does not invalidate your own. So just listen.

[Andy Newman is a filmmaker, writer, and works for Big Cartel]

Authors Guild demands ISPs monitor, filter Internet of pirated goods

The Authors Guild, one of the nation's top writer's groups, wants the US Congress to overhaul copyright law and require Internet service providers (ISPs) to monitor and filter the Internet of pirated materials, including e-books. The guild, in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee as it mulls changes to copyright law, says the notice-and-takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act favor large corporations like Google over individual writers. The group said that ISPs purge the Internet of infringing content on their own. As the law now stands, ISPs are not legally liable for pirated content, and they get "safe harbor" immunity from infringement allegations as long as they remove infringing content at the owners' request. The guild's executive director, Mary
Rasenberger, believes that ISPs have the technology and resources to remove pirated works without being notified that pirated content is on their networks.

In the letter to the committee, Rasenberger wrote, "Technology that can identify and filter pirated material is now commonplace. It only makes sense, then, that ISPs should bear the burden of limiting piracy on their sites, especially when they are profiting from the piracy and have the technology to conduct automates searches and takedowns. Placing the burden of identifying pirated content on the individual author, who has no ability to have any real impact on piracy, as the current regime does, makes no sense at all. It is technology that has enabled the pirate marketplace to flourish, and it is technology alone that has the capacity to keep it in check."

Update on Process Reform at the FCC

[Commentary] In early 2014, we embarked on an ambitious initiative to improve how we do business at the Federal Communications Commission with the release of the Process Reform Report. The 154 recommendations in the report focused on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of how the agency conducts business, handling items more quickly and more transparently (especially backlogged matters), improving our interactions with external stakeholders, and eliminating or streamlining outdated rules, procedures, and processes. There’s much work left to be done, but we’ve made a lot of progress, and I’m very proud of the team effort. Notable accomplishments include:

Improved Public interfaces
Increasing Speed of Disposal
Backlog Reduction
Promoting Efficient and Effective Internal Operations
Additional Rule and Process Changes to Promote Effective Regulation in Bureaus/Offices

This is good progress, but there’s much more to be done -- internal process reform initiatives will continue over the months to come. We plan to deploy new IT tracking and collaboration tool capability, more electronic filing and automated processes, and adopt many more proposals that would eliminate or streamline outdated rules. I look forward to working with you all to realize even more of the tangible benefits flowing from process reform initiatives over the course of 2015.

Mozilla says Flash is too dangerous to run automatically in Firefox

For Flash, the writing may finally be on the wall. Mozilla has blocked Flash on its popular Firefox browser. A message now appears saying that Flash -- the plug-in that enables animation, browser games, and other graphics online -- is vulnerable, along with a message that Mozilla reserves the right to block software that "seriously compromises Firefox security."

The ban is temporary -- it will stay in place as long as there's a version of Flash with publicly known security problems, Mozilla said. (Adobe is working on a fix.) If users really want to run Flash to view videos or use other Flash-based Web tools, they can do so -- as long as they read a security warning from Mozilla first. But Mozilla is also advocating for a general end to using Flash as a Web standard. Facebook's chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, also said that he wants Adobe to set a deadline to kill Flash once and for all, so that developers will move quickly off the old standard.

Google accidentally reveals data on 'right to be forgotten' requests

Less than 5 percent of nearly 220,000 individual requests made to Google to selectively remove links to online information concern criminals, politicians and high-profile public figures, with more than 95 percent of requests coming from everyday members of the public. This information comes from new data hidden in source code on Google’s own transparency report that indicates the scale and flavour of the types of requests being dealt with by Google -- information it has always refused to make public. The data covers more than three-quarters of all requests to date. Previously, more emphasis has been placed on selective information concerning the more sensational examples of so-called right to be forgotten requests released by Google and reported by some of the media, which have largely ignored the majority of requests made by citizens concerned with protecting their personal privacy. These include a woman whose name appeared in prominent news articles after her husband died, another seeking removal of her address, and an individual who contracted HIV a decade ago.

The data, which has not been revealed publicly until now, was found during an analysis of archived versions of Google’s transparency report and details the numeric breakdown of each request and associated link by country and issue type. The underlying source code has since been updated to remove these details. This data covers the majority of requests received by Google, which have now exceeded 280,000 since the company first started to process requests in May 2014 as a result of a ruling by the European Court of Justice.

It Could Soon Be Easier For The Media To Expose Dark Money Donations By Government Contractors

[Commentary] In the years since the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, political spending has skyrocketed, much of it in secret. The ruling has kept the media and public from knowing where this "dark money" comes from and what conflicts of interest exist. However, if President Barack Obama decides to issue an executive order requiring contractors to disclose their political donations, as he is reportedly considering doing, journalists will soon be able to expose the hidden relationships between contractors and elected officials.

Requiring contractors to disclose donations would not only affect companies that survive off of federal contracts, like many defense firms, it would also shed light on companies for whom contracts are only part of a larger business model, such as the billionaire Koch brothers-controlled Koch Industries, which has a history of winning federal contracts.

The Evolving Role of News on Twitter and Facebook

The share of Americans for whom Twitter and Facebook serve as a source of news is continuing to rise. This rise comes primarily from more current users encountering news there rather than large increases in the user base overall, according to findings from a new survey. The new study, conducted by Pew Research Center in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, finds that clear majorities of Twitter (63 percent) and Facebook users (63 percent) now say each platform serves as a source for news about events and issues outside the realm of friends and family. That share has increased substantially from 2013, when about half of users (52 percent of Twitter users, 47 percent of Facebook users) said they got news from the social platforms. Although both social networks have the same portion of users getting news on these sites, there are significant differences in their potential news distribution strengths. The proportion of users who say they follow breaking news on Twitter, for example, is nearly twice as high as those who say they do so on Facebook (59 percent vs. 31 percent) -- lending support, perhaps, to the view that Twitter’s great strength is providing as-it-happens coverage and commentary on live events.

Among other key findings in the report:

Twitter news users are more likely than their counterparts on Facebook to report seeing news about four out of 11 topics.
The rise in the share of social media users getting news on Facebook or Twitter cuts across nearly every demographic group.
When it comes specifically to news and information about government and politics, Facebook users are more likely to post and respond to content, while Twitter users are more likely to follow news organizations.

Benton

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