February 2016

[Commentary] Rarely is there a moment in time when just five people hold in their hands the destiny of millions, but such is the case for the Federal Communications Commission. In the next few weeks, the five commissioners will decide on a Broadband Lifeline Program and the corporate consolidation application by Charter Communications to acquire Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Hanging in the balance is whether or not more than one fifth of America’s poorest and most disadvantaged populations will be able to get online and participate in the digital economy. Will the FCC take bold steps to make the Internet affordable for low-income Americans?

If the administration wants to get everyone online, the FCC must encourage broadband companies to partner with community organizations, schools and libraries to accelerate broadband adoption through outreach, digital literacy training, acquisition of affordable computing devices and assistance with signing up for service. While federal law may restrict subsidies to the Internet service companies themselves and not allow direct payment for outreach and digital literacy, the program can be designed to foster and reward sincere company-community partnerships, which will be even more financially feasible if most customers pay something for Lifeline. The $67 million Charter-TWC-BHN corporate consolidation is the last opportunity in this administration for a company to step up with tangible public benefits in a mega merger. New Charter will be the second-largest Internet provider in the nation with 19 million subscribers in 40 states. The FCC needs to send a clear message and strong signal that only the five commissioners can do: .

[McPeak is the president and CEO of the California Emerging Technology Fund and former secretary of the California Business, Transportation and Housing Agency.]

A recent finding by the Pew Research Center that half of Americans support the FBI over Apple in an ongoing duel over iPhone security produced a very lopsided response in my Twitter feed. And it looked nothing like the actual poll results. As I said, the discrepancy between Pew's results and the opposite reaction on social media could simply be a result of the kinds of people who follow tech writers on Twitter, a social network whose audience is pretty tech-friendly to begin with. But that isn't an argument for dismissing that reaction. In fact, I want to argue that there's something else at play here, and nothing sums it up better than this tweet: "No, Apple is fighting a war most Americans don't understand." What we're witnessing here is a peculiar artifact of technology polling that you don't get on social issues like abortion or religion, where convictions tend to remain rooted in ideology. Opinions about technology turn out to be very malleable, and in more ways than just how a survey question is phrased or how big the sample is. But how do we evaluate that?

Facebook says it has mapped almost 2 billion people better than any previous project. The company’s Connectivity Labs announced that it created new, high-resolution population-distribution maps of 20 countries, most of which are developing. It won’t release most of the maps until later in 2016, but if they’re accurate, they will be the best-quality population maps ever made for most of those places. The maps will be notable for another reason, too: If they’re accurate, they’ll signal the arrival of a new, AI-aided age of cartography.