February 2016

Network neutrality isn’t the only consequence of the Federal Communications Commission reclassifying broadband as a Title II service, and a new fight is taking shape around a relatively overlooked portion of the ruling. The fight centers around customer data, and how much providers are allowed to collect. Gathering customer data can be extremely lucrative in the age of Google and targeted ads, but bringing providers under Title II means they have a whole new set of rules to follow when doing it. Those rules have never applied to companies like Comcast or Time Warner before, and wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon have never had to apply them to mobile data. Suddenly, those companies are dealing with new restrictions, just as many of them are doing more ad-tracking than ever.

It’s still unclear what kind of policy the FCC will set — or if it will set a policy at all — but the issue is already drawing fire from both sides. The FCC can afford to play it cool because, for the moment, it’s holding all the cards. The core legal question is how the commission will interpret Section 222 of the Communications Act, which deals with the privacy of customer information and, as of last March, applies to both broadband providers like Comcast and mobile internet companies like AT&T. The broad strokes of the law are clear — carriers can’t share anything without customer permission, and the data must be stripped of personally identifiable information. But the language is ambiguous in a number of places: how can permission be collected? How much data counts as personally identifiable? The broad strokes restrict sharing to either aggregate or anonymized data — but "aggregate" can mean a lot of different things. If the FCC doesn’t set an explicit policy, companies will be free to experiment with data-mining programs similar to those already in place at online ad companies. On the other hand, if the FCC does set a policy and start to answer those questions, companies may not like the answers.

While tech companies and startups were early adopters of landline-free offices, the benefits of cutting the cord have become so great that bigger companies are following suit. Leo Burnett ditched its physical phones in November. The ad agency's 1,600-plus Chicago workers now have Bluetooth headsets, and voicemails are immediately transcribed to e-mail. Many employees automatically forward their work numbers to their cellphones. Even old-line professional services and law firms have moved away from traditional landline phone systems, prompted by updates to their buildings' cabling, their executives' need for secure communication channels outside the office and the desire for such extra capabilities as voicemail-to-email transcription. The first baby step toward ditching a desk phone involves switching from traditional copper cables, which for decades composed the backbone of telephone service, to fiber that allows voice-over-IP systems to connect landline phones via the Internet.