1. Monthly archive
  2. May 2016

May 2016

Microsoft/Facebook to lay massive undersea cable

A 4,000 mile undersea cable deal announced by Microsoft and Facebook is just the latest of a dozen high capacity trans-oceanic cables being built by tech companies to deal with their insatiable demand for bandwidth. The two companies plan to build a cable that will run from Virginia Beach (VA) to a data hub in Bilbao, Spain. The cable will join a cat's cradle of cables that criss-cross the ocean floor, an increasing number of which are owned or funded by large tech companies.

Internet Access Isn’t Just A Tech Issue. It’s A Civil Rights Issue.

In major metropolitan areas across the US, unequal access to the Internet is cutting some people off from a better future. Citizens on the wrong side of the digital gap are losing out on economic, educational and social opportunities. It’s not just a technical problem for the 21st century. “This is a civil rights issue,” said Bill Callahan, director of Connect Your Community. “Low-income people, people with less than a high school education and older people are the groups in any population who are least likely to have an Internet connection at home,” he said.

Callahan’s group advocates for digital access and literacy in greater Cleveland (OH) and Detroit (MI). In those cities — and others from Baltimore (MD) to New Orleans (LA), from Miami (FL) to Glendale (AZ) — as many as 30 to 40 percent of residents can’t easily get online, according to 2013 data. Rural areas have a fairly well-known set of digital access problems that include high cost and sluggish speeds due to the lack of broadband infrastructure. But in suburban and metro areas, libraries are typically cited as a the saving grace for residents who lack online access at home. That’s not good enough in our wired world. “If the best someone can do is point you to the library, that’s basically ‘separate but equal,’” said Callahan, making a pointed reference to the very argument that the Supreme Court once declared didn’t justify segregated schools.

Inclusion in the Digital Age

[Commentary] In their groundbreaking book, The Second Machine Age, Professor Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee described digital technology’s revolutionary impact on business, the economy, and society. As director and co-director, respectively, of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) (and, in the interest of full disclosure, my colleagues), their argument was that, with productivity, wealth, and profits at historic highs, digital innovation has created unprecedented bounty for a great number of people. And yet, while the pace of economic change is exceptional, and wealth has been generated for society and for innovators, the authors also say that progress and societal benefits are not equally distributed. We at MIT’s IDE propose there are four ways we can enable more people to meaningfully engage in work and to fully experience the prosperity of the Second Machine Age:

  1. Skills: We re-skill members of our workforce to prepare them for the future.
  2. Matching: We connect qualified individuals with open opportunities for work.
  3. Humans + Machines: We augment human labor with technology.
  4. New Models: We create new operational practices and business models to revolutionize the existing labor market.

[Devin Cook is the Executive Producer of the MIT IDE Inclusive Innovation Competition]

Senate Homeland Security Committee Advances Measure Letting Agencies Crack Down on Personal E-mail

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to advance the Federal Information Systems Safeguard Act, a bill that would allow federal agencies to bypass employee unions in order to block access to webmail and other websites deemed security risks. The committee unanimously voted to approve the measure May 25 along with more than a dozen other bills relating to government management. The legislation "puts us on a path forward to ensure that federal agencies can act quickly to address any vulnerabilities and secure their IT networks,” said Sen Joni Ernst (R-IA), who introduced the Senate version of the “Federal Information Systems Safeguard Act.” The bill allows agency heads to bypass federal rules requiring them to consult with unions about workplace matters in order “to limit, restrict, or prohibit access to any website the head of the agency determines to present a current or future security weakness.”

The Senate bill’s language is less expansive than that included in a similar bill passed out of a key House committee earlier in 2016. The House version, which would allow agency heads to "take any action" necessary to remediate security vulnerabilities, came under fire from Democratic Reps who called the bill “dangerously overbroad” and ripe for abuse by agency heads. "No matter what you believe about blocking employee access to e-mail, this bill goes so far beyond that it loses the point," said Rep Elijah Cummings (D-MD), in a statement at the time.

Surveillance technology has advanced far beyond the laws that govern it

We had a tremendously interesting conversation with University of California Davis law professor Elizabeth Joh, who researches surveillance technology and policing. Right out of the gate, Joh made it clear that the problem isn't surveillance per se—governments "need surveillance," she said, to figure out what its citizens require in terms of benefits, help, and security. The problem is when this surveillance becomes invasive, and the government inhibits freedom of expression and punishes unconventional behavior. How do we balance the need for surveillance and the need for free expression and privacy in a democratic society?

Joh talked a lot about the future legal landscape we're creating with cutting-edge technologies like self-driving cars, facial recognition, and body cams. When you're talking about law and policy, the issue is always that adoption of devices like body cams tends to precede careful thought about what rules will govern them. After the Ferguson (MO) protests, for example, police departments started using body cams as an accountability measure. But there are no federal guidelines for how cops will use these cams. Will they be able to turn them off whenever they want? Who has access to the data they collect? Can they use facial recognition in body cams? All of these questions remain unanswered, yet body cams are in widespread use across the US.

Voluntary industry agreement promotes competition among mobile networks

[Commentary] The recently-released Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) Issues Brief, Benefits of Competition and Indicators of Market Power, provides a useful snapshot of current government thinking on the economic and social benefits of competition, such as economic growth and job creation. Conversely, the report asserted that “[w]hen there is little or no competition, consumers are made worse off if a firm uses its market power to raise prices, lower quality for consumers, or block entry by entrepreneurs.” The CEA also presented three sets of trends that it says are “broadly suggestive” of a decline in competition—increasing industry concentration, increasing profits accruing to a few firms in each industrial sector, and lower levels of firm entry and mobility. With this narrative foundation, the report then presents examples where government intervention has preserved and in some cases expanded competition.

According to the CEA, enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) represent “front-line defenses against these abuses.” But in extending its analysis into the realm of regulatory policy, as opposed to the narrower focus of antitrust policy, the CEA seems to venture onto much shakier ground. For example, it gives the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) too much credit for achieving a pro-competitive outcome in the area of cell phone unlocking. By elevating the importance of the FCC’s role in this process, the CEA downplayed the potential that voluntary industry agreements can produce pro-competitive outcomes without assertive regulatory policies. Viable private sector alternatives that achieve competitive results comparable to government intervention deserve further analysis by government policymakers. The CEA itself should research this as it explores the benefits of competition and recommends the best course of action.

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