January 2016

Verizon announced a new sponsored data offering dubbed FreeBee that will enable wireless customers to view some mobile content without having it count against their monthly data allotments. Verizon FreeBee sounds a bit like the sort of offering network neutrality advocates hoped to prevent. But at the time Verizon announced its own Go90 content offering, a Verizon executive said the company also would offer a sponsored content option for the service and that it expected to avoid net neutrality issues by offering sponsorship options to other content providers as well.

Verizon likely will argue that the service isn’t paid prioritization because it doesn’t involve traffic engineering in the network. And because Verizon is offering the service to Go90 competitors, the company likely expects to avoid running afoul of the net neutrality guideline that prevent carriers from favoring their own content offerings.

[Commentary] We now find ourselves in a new surveillance debate — and the lessons of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr FBI surveillance scandal should weigh heavy on our minds. A few months after the first Edward Snowden revelation, the National Security Agency disclosed that it had itself wiretapped Dr King in the late 1960s. Yet what happened to Dr King is almost entirely absent from our current conversation. In NSA reform debates in the House of Representatives, Dr King was mentioned only a handful of times, usually in passing. And notwithstanding a few brave speeches by Sens such as Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) outside of the Senate, the available Senate record suggests that in two years of actual hearings and floor debates, no one ever spoke his name.

There is a myth in this country that in a world where everyone is watched, everyone is watched equally. It’s as if an old and racist J. Edgar Hoover has been replaced by the race-blind magic of computers, mathematicians, and Big Data. The truth is more uncomfortable. Across our history and to this day, people of color have been the disproportionate victims of unjust surveillance; Hoover was no aberration. And while racism has played its ugly part, the justification for this monitoring was the same we hear today: national security.

[Alvaro Bedoya is the founding executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law]

[Commentary] When the Republican National Committee levels a threat, take note. Last October, it expressed dismay with the work of CNBC moderators at the third GOP presidential primary debate. Those folks, said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, messed up. “While debates are meant to include tough questions and contrast candidates’ visions and policies for the future of America, CNBC’s moderators engaged in a series of ‘gotcha’ questions, petty and mean-spirited in tone, and designed to embarrass our candidates,” Priebus wrote in a letter to NBC News Chairman Andy Lack. Commentators liberal, conservative and ideologically quirky sided with Priebus’s judgment.

The RNC, accordingly, suspended NBC News’s participation in the Super Tuesday GOP debate in Houston (TX) on Feb 26. For a couple of months, the event’s status hung in limbo. Jan 18, the RNC resolved things, dropping NBC News and handing the event to CNN, which has already produced two GOP debates — one in Simi Valley (CA) in September, and another in Las Vegas (NV) in December — and which is scheduled to do another debate in March. Apparently the RNC didn’t pay too much heed to the argument that CNBC and NBC News are overseen by different management teams. The switcheroo will leave a tangled alliance at the center of the debate: CNN will partner with original debate co-hosts Telemundo (a property of NBCUniversal) and National Review; Salem Communications, which has partnered with CNN in its previous dates, will also participate.