January 2016

After complying with a federal judge’s order on Jan 27, the city of Berkeley (CA) will now be allowed to go forward with its cell phone radiation warning law, as it has cut out one controversial line. It is not clear when the new notice will go into effect.

In 2015, the city passed a municipal ordinance requiring that a retailer provide, either in the form of a mounted poster or as a printed handout, this message: "The City of Berkeley requires that you be provided the following notice: To assure safety, the Federal Government requires that cell phones meet radio frequency (RF) exposure guidelines. If you carry or use your phone in a pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is ON and connected to a wireless network, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation. This potential risk is greater for children. Refer to the instructions in your phone or user manual for information about how to use your phone safely." Shortly thereafter, the city was sued by CTIA, the wireless trade group, in an attempt to halt the law on the grounds that it was in violation of the First Amendment—the government was compelling speech by requiring retailers to display the notice. That language was based on warnings and notices already provided by the Federal Communications Commission. The case, known as CTIA v. City of Berkeley, pitted two giants of the legal world against one another. On the side of the plaintiffs is Ted Olson, a former solicitor general under the George W. Bush administration. Meanwhile, the defendants are armed with former presidential hopeful and rockstar Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. In September 2015, United States District Judge Edward Chen found in favor of Berkeley, saying that the above language could stand, but only if the city struck the line: “This potential risk is greater for children.” He then granted a preliminary injunction until the change was made, stopping the law from taking effect. Two months later, Berkeley gave the court the new city council-approved language with the relevant changes and asked the judge to lift the injunction. Judge Chen did so in his Jan 27 order, and he denied the CTIA’s request to stay the legislation pending an appeal.

Mobile use is growing so fast that cells added for a big event like the Super Bowl are now worth keeping just for daily life. Verizon Wireless is installing nearly 100 cells to make sure its network can handle the crush of a million or more fans around 2016's big game in the San Francisco (CA) Bay Area. Almost all will stay up after the game's over.

The volume of phone calls, selfies, social media posts and videos spikes around an event like the Super Bowl. Verizon expects its traffic to double next week in downtown San Francisco, where several city blocks will be closed to cars for a fan gathering area called Super Bowl City. Keeping up with that kind of demand forces carriers to plan ahead and get creative finding sites for their radios all over the urban landscape. Verizon started scoping out its US$70 million Super Bowl strategy two years ago and began installations in 2015. Along the way, it was thinking all the way ahead to 5G, the next generation of mobile networks. In San Francisco alone, the carrier is installing 46 small cells and 10 traditional "macro" cells for the week of the game. One of those is a so-called COW, or cell on wheels, a tower that can be towed to different sites when demand spikes. It already looms near San Francisco Bay, next to COWs from AT&T and T-Mobile and just down the street from a Sprint mobile tower.

[Commentary] How can you possibly impose a single moral framework on a vast and varying patchwork of global communities? If you ask Facebook this question, the social-media behemoth will deny doing any such thing. Facebook says its community standards are inert, universal, agnostic to place and time. The site doesn’t advance any worldview, it claims, besides the non-controversial opinion that people should “connect” online. Facebook has modified its standards several times in response to pressure from advocacy groups – although the site has deliberately obscured those edits, and the process by which Facebook determines its guidelines remains stubbornly obtuse. On top of that, at least some of the low-level contract workers who enforce Facebook’s rules are embedded in the region – or at least the time zone – whose content they moderate. The social network staffs its moderation team in 24 languages, 24 hours a day.

In response to recent criticism that Facebook has mishandled takedown requests from users in the Middle East, Facebook’s policy director for the region assured users that “all reports are assessed by teams of multilingual, impartial and highly trained people” – including native speakers of Hebrew and Arabic, who presumably understand the region’s particular issues. And yet, observers remain deeply skeptical of Facebook’s claims that it is somehow value-neutral or globally inclusive, or that its guiding principles are solely “respect” and “safety.” Facebook will never make everyone happy, of course; nor does anyone suggest it should. But in a better world, the largest social network would at least admit that it’s not an impartial, value-neutral observer. After all, every single thing Facebook does reshapes the public space of its users.