April 2016

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association is pushing President Barack Obama to make opening up the 5.9 GHz band for more Wi-Fi a priority in his remaining days in office, saying the need is urgent and the spectrum deficit dangerous. It signed on to a joint letter to the White House from a group of tech and Internet companies, schools and libraries.

While NCTA is sparring with Google in the set-top sphere, and has butted heads with Free Press over consolidation, they are all together in their support of opening up the band. Cable operators have been pushing for more 5 GHz spectrum to fuel their Wi-Fi hotspots, the industry's primary mobile broadband play. "While Americans’ dependence on unlicensed technologies for Internet access continues to skyrocket," they told the President, "the spectrum resources that power our devices are perilously insufficient. As a result, our Wi-Fi bands are becoming dangerously congested. The problem has become so severe that Cisco and Apple have recently warned customers that the core 2.4 GHz unlicensed band has become so overtaxed that it 'is not considered suitable for use for any business and/or mission critical enterprise applications.' We must act now to find more unlicensed spectrum." The President has not been shy about wanting to free up more spectrum for broadband—it has been a tech centerpiece of his Administration—and the Federal Communications Commission has been looking to do so in the 5.9 GHz band, but there remain issues of possible interference with connected car technology that it is still working through.

[Commentary] Because I conduct research on how the Internet affects elections, journalists have lately been asking me about the primaries. Here are the two most common questions I’ve been getting: Do Google’s search rankings affect how people vote? How well does Google Trends predict the winner of each primary?

My answer to the first question is: Probably, but no one knows for sure. From research I have been conducting in recent years with Ronald E. Robertson, my associate at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, on the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME, pronounced “seem”), we know that when higher search results make one candidate look better than another, an enormous number of votes will be driven toward the higher-ranked candidate—up to 80% of undecided voters in some demographic groups. This is partly because we have all learned to trust high-ranked search results, but it is mainly because we are lazy; search engine users generally click on just the top one or two items. Because no one actually tracks search rankings, however—they are ephemeral and personalized, after all, which makes them virtually impossible to track—and because no whistleblowers have yet come forward from any of the search engine companies, we cannot know for sure whether search rankings are consistently favoring one candidate or another. This means we also cannot know for sure how search rankings are affecting elections. We know the power they have to do so, but that’s it.

[Robert Epstein is a Senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology]