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  2. May 2016

May 2016

Tom Wheeler In The Home Stretch

Last June, this blog noted that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler was at the halfway point of his tenure and that he understood that “[t]he template for an effective chairmanship is to identify major priorities and get them underway as quickly as possible.” The Wheeler era is nearing its end. [Even if a Democrat is elected President, she will appoint her own Chair soon after Inauguration Day.] Although the verdict of history will depend to a considerable degree on whether the courts uphold his decisions, Chairman Wheeler has successfully completed FCC action on several of his major priorities. And, far from letting up, Chairman Wheeler continues to press existing and new initiatives on a schedule that might allow action on them before the end of the year. As has been the case all along, he faces powerful opposition to almost everything he wants to accomplish. And, as the sand empties out of Wheeler’s hour glass, opponents are increasingly resorting to delay tactics in the hope that Wheeler’s successor may not wish to pursue the same goals – or may not do so as effectively.

Libraries need to Grow2Gig+

As many of you know, the American Library Association is a founding member of the Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition, which was created in 2009 to advocate for community anchor institutions as part of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. I also am proud to serve on the SHLB board of directors and to share the new “Connecting Anchor Institutions: A Vision of our Future” report and Grow2Gig+ campaign.

While public library broadband speeds have steadily improved over the last five years, less than 5 percent of libraries have yet reached the 2020 gigabit goal outlined for community anchor institutions in the National Broadband Plan. With growth in digital media labs that enable creation and sharing of content, video teleconferencing that collapse geographical distances, and the proliferation of mobile devices streaming more and more digital content from our virtual shelves, libraries need to Grow2Gig+. The new vision paper includes a section dedicated to library broadband that features insights from ALA President Sari Feldman, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Executive Director Dan Cohen and Bibliotech author John Palfrey (among others) talking about eSHLB’s new #Grow2Gig campaign and “Connecting Anchor Institutions: A Broadband Action Plan” provide new and needed resources to make the case for the robust broadband capacity needed to best serve our communities. The ALA will use these documents as a foundation for our work preparing for the upcoming Presidential transition, and we look forward to our continued collaboration with SHLB and its diverse members around the nation to achieve our common goals and vision.

A Hillary Clinton Telecom/Media Policy Overview

[Commentary] What would a potential Hillary Clinton telecommunication policy look like? Simple Answer: A Third Obama Term. Most, if not all, of the current Federal Communications Commission and Administration telecom/media policy initiatives would continue with the same implications in terms of corporate winners and losers. But that answer misses two big points.

Point One: The Agenda will Change. As is true in any administration, the environment changes. For example, there are the issues that most do not anticipate that, over time, matter more than what is apparent when the new Administration takes office. So in telecom policy, there are a series of things that we believe are likely to happen for which the Obama telecom policy does not provide an obvious direction. We will discuss what we think are the most likely such events in a note we will release next month on the issues, both commonly known and generally overlooked, that the next Administration may face. Point Two: Continuity as to which Obama Telecom Policy? The second way in which the simplistic answer of a third term is misleading is that there was a significant change during the Obama Administration between the first and second terms. There were initiatives, such as with spectrum, in which the first and second terms proceeded in a fairly straight direction. But a review of the history illustrates notable changes in approaching a number of subjects.

Breaking Down the FCC's Proposal to Protect Broadband Privacy

[Commentary] At its March 31 public meeting, the agency voted 3-2 in favor of releasing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (called an “NPRM”) on “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services.” The almost 150-page document -- containing more than 500 questions for public comment -- is the Commission's blueprint for broadband consumer privacy protections.

Initial public comments on these questions are due at the end of May. These rules are much needed for Internet users and long overdue. As the Commission notes in the NPRM, “absent legally-binding principles, those [broadband] networks have the commercial motivation to use and share extensive and personal information about their customers.” Companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon are the gateways to the Internet and everything on it. By virtue of their position, they have near unfettered access to data about the websites we visit, to our unencrypted online communications, and records of all the apps and services we use. The NPRM rightly takes the privacy protections afforded to customers of other types of common carriers, like telephone providers, and applies the core privacy principles of “transparency, choice, and security” to broadband. At its root the proceeding focuses on ways to give Internet users control over the private information collected by broadband providers.

Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance

[Commentary] One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.

We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate headlines; it permits the people of this country to learn about critical government actions, not as part of the historical record but in a way that allows direct action through voting — in other words, in a way that empowers an informed citizenry to defend the democracy that “state secrets” are nominally intended to support. When I see individuals who are able to bring information forward, it gives me hope that we won’t always be required to curtail the illegal activities of our government as if it were a constant task, to uproot official lawbreaking as routinely as we mow the grass. (Interestingly enough, that is how some have begun to describe remote killing operations, as “cutting the grass.”)

Women in Tech Band Together to Track Diversity, After Hours

Ellen Pao spent the last few years spotlighting the technology industry’s lack of diversity, in court and beyond. Erica Baker caused a stir at Google when she started a spreadsheet last year for employees to share their salaries, highlighting the pay disparities between those of different genders doing the same job. Laura I. Gómez founded a start-up focused on improving diversity in the hiring process. Now, the three — along with five other prominent Silicon Valley women from companies including Pinterest, Stripe and Slack — are starting an effort to collect and share data to help diversify the rank-and-file employees who make up tech companies. The nonprofit venture, called Project Include, was unveiled May 3.

“The standard mantra for every company on diversity statistics is, ‘We’re not doing well, but we’re working on it,’” said Pao, a former venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who sued the firm for accusations of gender discrimination and lost. “People don’t learn anything from that. Can you tell us what are you actually doing?” The group’s push is one of the more visible diversity efforts to come from women in Silicon Valley as tech companies grapple with criticism over the makeup of their work forces, which skew white and male. Over the last few years, tech entrepreneurs like Kimberly Bryant of Black Girls Code and Laura Weidman Powers of Code 2040 have promoted the inclusion of young women and minorities in early computer science education programs with their start-ups.

Remarks of Commissioner O'Rielly at Distributed Antenna Systems and Small Cell Solutions Workshop

Thank you for coming to the Federal Communications Commission to talk about a very important issue: Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) and small cell infrastructure citing. This is a topic that has been a priority of mine. In fact, there may be some at the Commission who would prefer that I not push so hard, but then again, what fun would that be? Sometimes the job of a Commissioner is to methodically move the ball forward; in other cases, such as this, we need to push for an up-tempo, high caliber outcome given the importance of the issue.

Despite the obvious need, the deployment of small cell technology has been somewhat slower than projected. In my meetings with industry participants, many have stated that the lack of progress is because of infrastructure siting challenges. This is why it is so important for the Commission to finish up the process to further exclude small cell and DAS systems from certain regulatory burdens before the upcoming fall. But, this proceeding alone is unlikely to fix all problems. I continue to hear legitimate complaints about localities placing hurdles in front of small cell deployments. Issues range from permitting problems and excessive fees to forced tolling agreements and de facto moratoria. Site approvals in rights-of-way, which are especially important for small cell systems, appear to be particularly problematic. Such cases are worthy of the Commission considering using its preemption authority.

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