1. Monthly archive
  2. January 2016

January 2016

New York to Appoint Monitor to Review Police’s Counterterrorism Activity

New York will appoint an independent monitor to scrutinize the Police Department’s counterterrorism activities, lawyers said in court documents as they moved to settle a pair of lawsuits over surveillance targeting Muslims in the decade after the Sept. 11 attacks. The agreement would restore some of the outside oversight that was eliminated after the attacks, when city leaders said they needed more flexibility in conducting investigations.

In the years that followed, the Police Department secretly built files on Muslim neighborhoods, recorded sermons, collected license plates of worshipers, and documented the views of everyday people on topics such as drone strikes, politics and foreign policy. The settlement does not explicitly prohibit any methods that are currently allowed, and the city does not admit any wrongdoing. Police officials said that many of the provisions of the agreement — such as barring investigations based solely on religion, race and ethnicity — simply codified changes that had already been in place. But civil rights lawyers say some tactics that investigators used over the past decade violated the Constitution and probably would not have been allowed if anyone outside the Police Department had been reviewing the investigative files. The city agreed to place a civilian lawyer, appointed by the mayor, inside the Police Department to review intelligence files and report potential wrongdoing to the police commissioner, the mayor or a federal judge.

Will the US fall behind in the global broadband race?

[Commentary] To many, if not most, Americans, the phrase “regulatory humility” sounds like an oxymoron. Yet, for the last two decades, this has been the almost uniquely American approach to telecommunications and technology policy. Adopting a posture of regulatory humility did not mean that government had no role — it still pressed for universal service, an open and secure Internet, protection of intellectual property and improved use and management of spectrum needed for existing and emerging wireless technologies. The administration recognized, however, that its job was to “steer, not row,” as the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown put it. Title II regulation could stifle investment and deter innovation.

There are options to preserve an open Internet and to spur growth and competition that are less archaic and destructive. Creating regulatory uncertainty as we seek investment in more capacious broadband networks makes little sense. We have witnessed what happened in Australia over the past decade when government and politics became too involved in the development of a nation’s infrastructure, and we are watching Europe move to reform outdated, Title II-like regulation to accelerate sluggish investment in its broadband networks. The United States, on the other hand, has led the world in Internet innovation over the last 20 years, helping to spur investment with its deliberately chosen regulatory model. Now is not the time to reverse course. With more and more users and endless possibilities for innovation thanks to high-speed IP networks, investment is needed now, more than ever. “Regulatory humility” and “first do no harm” — these sound like the right recipe for the next 20 years of broadband growth.

[Larry Irving is a founding co-chairman of the D.C.-based Internet Innovation Alliance]

The FCC and the 'second side of the market'

[Commentary] In Dec, the DC Circuit heard oral arguments in the appeal of the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality order. At the heart of the appeal is the FCC's controversial decision to reverse nearly two decades of bipartisan policy by reclassifying broadband Internet access from a lightly regulated "information service" under Title I of the Communications Act to a heavily regulated common carrier "telecommunications service" under Title II of the Communications Act. The appellants argued that given the way the Internet works, the plain language of the Communications Act prohibits reclassification; the FCC, in turn, argued that as the expert agency, it has wide latitude to change its mind so long as it provides a reasonable explanation.

Without getting into the merits of this debate, let's assume for the moment that the D.C. Circuit agrees with the FCC and finds the commission's reclassification decision to be lawful. What is important to understand is that this ruling is not the end of the story: The next legal question to be resolved is whether the FCC properly applied Title II to the Internet in accordance with the plain terms of the statute and established case law. While this question will be ultimately decided by the court, there is no dispute that great pressure from the White House forced the FCC to engage in some serious legal gymnastics to reach a predetermined political outcome. However, by taking various legal liberties and shortcuts, the commission may have left itself vulnerable to remand (if not outright reversal).

[Lawrence Spiwak is the president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies]

CES 2016: Why the IoT needs fiber-optic broadband to succeed

A panel of fiber broadband experts speaking at CES 2016 in Las Vegas (NV) said the Internet of Things (IoT) will not only benefit from fiber-optic broadband, it will require it. Katie Espeseth, vice president of new products for – the Electronic Power Board (EPB) in Chattanooga (TN), responsible for building and maintaining one of the country's most famous fiber-optic networks – explained that the country's first gigabit-speed municipal broadband network was built to support an IoT application. Tasked with maintaining power supply to the city, the EPB sought to deploy a series of supercomputers that would constantly monitor the power grid throughout the city. This called for an always-on, gigabit-speed internet service. Today, the organization has 1,400 devices operating in the field, diagnosing problems on the power grid and re-routing power to resolve outages. Espeseth said the system has reduced power outage duration time by 55% to 60% since it was deployed. This would not be possible without a 100% fiber-optic support network, she said.

Lev Gonick, CEO and co-founder of OneCommunity, pointed to a common theme at CES in 2016 – the importance of the network to handle 4K high-definition video.

Incompas to FCC: Copper retirement rules need to be harmonized

Competitive telecommunication industry association Incompas agrees with TelePacific's observation that the Federal Communications Commission needs to bring harmony to its rules related to copper retirement and service discontinuance. In an earlier petition, TelePacific asked the FCC to provide clarity on what will happen when the loss of access to retired copper by an incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) like AT&T or Verizon leads to a discontinuance of retail service by a competitive carrier that had been leasing the copper. "Specifically, the Commission needs to ensure that a timely filed discontinuance application from a competitor that relies on the retired copper unbundled network element is granted prior to, or simultaneously with, the effective date of the copper retirement," Incompas said in a FCC filing. "Whether the Commission determines "timely filed" to be 30, 40 or, at most, 60 days, the time clock should not start when the Commission releases a Public Notice of the filing, but be measured from the date the competitor submits its discontinuance application to the Commission."

Under the current FCC copper retirement rules, the "application to discontinue, reduce or impair service, if filed by a domestic, non-dominant carrier, shall be automatically granted on the 31st day after its filing with the Commission ..." Incompas says competitive providers like TelePacific, which rent ILEC copper loops to deliver Ethernet over Copper services, have no control over when the FCC will issue the automatic grant for discontinuing service. At the same time there's no rule in place to delay an ILEC from retiring copper in the event that it could interrupt an existing business customers services. A number of ILECs, including Verizon which recently filed an opposition to TelePacific's request, say that they will replace copper with fiber-based facilities.

Cellphone plans are getting cheaper -- thanks, President Obama! (and T-Mobile)

[Commentary] Next time you go shopping for a new cellphone plan, you're likely to find that the options are a lot better than they were a couple of years ago. Prices are lower. You don't have to sign up for one of those annoying two-year contracts. You'll probably get unlimited phone calls and text messages as a standard feature — and a lot more data than before. If that happens to you, you should thank the Obama Administration — specifically, the antitrust watchdogs at the Department of Justice.

Many of the positive developments of the past four years have been driven by T-Mobile, which until recently was the smallest of the nation's four national wireless providers. Back in 2011, AT&T was on the verge of gobbling up T-Mobile, which would have turned the industry's Big Four into the Big Three and eliminated the industry's most unpredictable company. "Even prior to the merger, T-Mobile was known as being this maverick competitor," says Brent Skorup, a researcher at the Mercatus Center. If the merger had gone through, the industry's maverick would have disappeared. But then the Obama Administration intervened to block the merger. With a merger off the table, T-Mobile decided to become a thorn in the side of its larger rivals, cutting prices and offering more attractive service plans. The result, says Mark Cooper, a researcher at the Consumer Federation of America, has been an "outbreak of competition" that's resulted in tens of billions of dollars in consumer savings.

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