July 2015

[Commentary] In June, the Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines to update the Lifeline program for the digital age. Established in 1985, Lifeline was designed to help low-income consumers afford telephone service, access to which “has been crucial to full participation in our society and economy.” Now that the Internet has displaced the telephone as the nation’s primary communications network, the agency has decided that the Lifeline program should evolve as well. The FCC is right to focus on broadband access and to work towards narrowing America’s digital divide. But its proposed order is notable for how little the agency has dared to dream. The change to Lifeline should not be evolutionary -- it should be revolutionary.

The better solution would be to craft a new broadband-specific program from the ground up. Which segments of the population are at risk of being left behind in the digital revolution, and therefore need a subsidy? What services do they need in order to meaningfully participate in digital society? What type of broadband plan do those services require? And how much of a subsidy is needed to help the target population secure that plan? Only after these questions are answered can we design a revolutionary new broadband Lifeline program that assists those truly in need at minimal cost to the public.
[Daniel Lyons is an associate professor at Boston College Law School]

Public Knowledge, New America's Open Technology Institute and the Center for Democracy and Technology submitted joint comments to ICANN, urging the organization to protect user privacy rights. The comments come as part of a process that has proposed changes to the way the personal information of domain name registrants is made available to the public. Currently, users who want or need to protect their privacy can register domain names through a proxy service, which shows the public contact information for the service, instead of the user's personal contact information. Proposed changes to ICANN's rules, however, may make it easier for that personal information to be uncovered.

Sherwin Siy, Vice President of Legal Affairs for Public Knowledge, said, "No one should be required to give up their privacy -- and in many cases, their security -- simply to have their voice heard. Registering a domain name should not be the sole province of those secure from harm; in fact, the ability to speak freely and anonymously is one of the characteristic benefits of the Web. Although there are many reasons for people to want to contact anonymous domain name owners, this doesn't mean that we want to create a world where the price of online participation is giving up your privacy, or allowing it to be given up easily. ICANN needs to realize the global risks of potentially denying Internet users reliable privacy services."

[Commentary] Uniques are what most people mean when they talk about a website’s traffic. Show up once and you count as one unique visitor -- show up again in the same month, or even visit the site every day in that month, and you still count as one unique visitor (or at least that’s the idea). Uniques are the big-picture number -- the Nielsen rating, the Blue Book value, the GDP -- that’s supposed to show how well a website is doing. People used to talk about pageviews, a simple count of how many pages were loaded over a certain amount of time.

But uniques have taken over, because uniques measure people, not pages. Advertisers care about the former when they’re planning an ad buy. If uniques are people, how do 4 million, or 125 million, or 253 million people go missing? In an age when we assume our phones and laptops are tracking our every move, taking an actual head count of how many people go to a website is still almost impossible. There’s a blind spot at the center of the panopticon, and it’s roughly the size and shape of a cookie.

[Commentary] As is often the case with the media's Clinton excesses, the tone and tonnage of the e-mail press coverage tells us more about the media than it does about Hillary Clinton; about the brazen and unapologetic double standard the press applies to Clinton.

Why the giddy, overboard coverage? Part of it is because there's a standing army of Clinton-assigned journalists who are responsible for producing reams of content for the next 16 months. Consequently, the traditional guidelines of what qualifies as news now seem to be ignored. In essence, much of the press has written itself a blank check to over-indulge in Clinton minutiae in the name of "news" because the DC press is now pretending that Bill and Hillary Clinton are the King and Queen of the United States. That, of course, makes no sense. But it does represent a creative bout of self-justification from an armada of Clinton reporters who have reduced themselves to writing, en masse, about the former secretary of state's scheduling missives to her aides and doing it under the guise of breaking news.