June 2016

Google Fiber's new terms add a clause familiar to subscribers of other large Internet service providers: customers who want to sue the company must now instead submit to arbitration. The Google Fiber terms were updated recently with a note that they now "require the use of binding arbitration to resolve disputes rather than jury trials or class actions."

While the clause allows cases in small claims court, it otherwise forces customers to waive the right to bring legal actions against the Internet service provider. Arbitration must be sought on an individual basis, as the clause also prevents class arbitration. The previous terms of service did not have the binding arbitration clause, though they did limit Google Fiber's liability to the amount customers pay to use the services. The binding arbitration clause is similar to clauses implemented by Comcast, Charter, and AT&T, the three largest home Internet providers in the US.

[Commentary] What occurred with the recently disclosed breach of the Democratic National Committee servers, and the dumping of stolen data on a WordPress site, is more than an act of cyber espionage or harmless mischief. It meets the definition of an act of cyberwar, and the US government should respond as such.

The claims by “Guccifer 2.0”—that a lone hacker carried out this attack—are not believable. Of course, anything is possible, but the attack looks to be an operation conducted by Russian intelligence services. Had this been a “normal” operation—that is, covert intel gathering by Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service or any other foreign intelligence service (as the Chinese have done in past election seasons)—it would be business as usual. To be honest, the US government would not really be justified in denouncing it, as it does the same thing. But what makes this attack very different—and crosses the line—is the Russian team’s decision to dump the Clinton campaign’s opposition strategy on the public Web, presumably for the dual purpose of both spreading misinformation about the party responsible for the breach and interfering with the Clinton campaign.

[Dave Aitel is CEO of Immunity Inc., an offensive security firm that consults for Fortune 500s and government agencies.]

[Commentary] What motivates a politician to freeze out the press? In Harrisburg (PA), the poverty-stricken capital of Pennsylvania, Mayor Eric Papenfuse has barred his spokeswoman from speaking with reporters for PennLive, the area’s largest news outlet, and banned PennLive reporters from attending his weekly media briefings. The mayor says he’s taking a stand against a news outlet that has become an “illegitimate … gossip blog” fishing for clicks and cash. PennLive, meanwhile, says aggressive reporting on Papenfuse’s business and civic dealings led to the clampdown.

We’ve seen the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, similarly banish news organization he dislikes over the past year, most recently The Washington Post, which joins The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Politico, among others. Papenfuse, a Democrat who says PennLive caters to the right, is no Trump worshipper. But given the ease with which a man running for the country’s highest office blacklists journalists, it’s worth asking whether this could become the new normal in towns and cities across the country.

Imagine, for a moment, if it were possible to provide access not just to those books, but to all knowledge for everyone, everywhere. In fact, we don't have to imagine: it is possible today, thanks to the combined technologies of digital texts and the Internet. The former means that we can make as many copies of a work as we want for vanishingly small cost; the latter provides a way to distribute those copies to anyone with an Internet connection. The global rise of low-cost smartphones means that "anyone with an Internet connection" will soon include even the poorest members of society in every country. We have the technical means to share all knowledge, and yet we are nowhere near providing everyone with the ability to indulge their learned curiosity.

What's stopping us? That's the central question that the "open access" movement has been asking, and trying to answer, for the last two decades. Although tremendous progress has been made, with more knowledge freely available now than ever before, there are signs that open access is at a critical point in its development, which could determine whether it will ever succeed.