June 2016

Growth of Internet users worldwide is essentially flat, and smartphone growth is slowing, too. Those sobering insights were among the hundreds packed into the much-awaited Internet Trends report, an annual tech industry ritual led by Mary Meeker, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The number of global Internet users hovers around 3 billion, with new ones slow to come online. She attributed the slowdown to stagnating gross domestic product. Global GDP growth in six of the last eight years was below the 20-year average. Developing countries have proven harder to capture than expected because Internet access remains inaccessible or unaffordable for many, the report said. Here are some other highlights from the report:

• India is the one country where Internet usage is growing, up 40 percent compared with 33 percent a year ago. India passed the US to become the No 2 global market behind China in 2015.
• The Asia Pacific region represented 52 percent of smartphone users globally in 2015. The rapid growth in recent years has begun to slow, dropping to 23 percent in 2015 from 35 percent in 2014.
• North America, Europe, and Japan represented 63 percent of global GDP in 1985. By 2015, their contribution dropped to 29 percent. China and emerging markets in Asia represented 63 percent of global GDP last year.
• Online advertising is still not very effective. Advertisers are spending an outsize amount on legacy media.
• Global birth rates are down 39 percent since 1960. So where will technology growth come from? Who knows, but at least there's this: Global life expectancy is up 36 percent since 1960.

Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers are heading back to work after a six-and-half-week strike. Recently, Verizon reached a tentative agreement with the Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to end a strike that began April 13th. The new contract still needs to be voted on by union members, but workers agreed to return to work. Once the contract is ratified, Verizon plans to hire another 1,400 union workers. It’s easy to think of the Internet as consisting mostly of fiber optic pipes buried deep underground and anonymous data centers full of computer servers and networking gear. But despite advances in automation and artificial intelligence, all of this infrastructure takes real human workers to build and maintain. As Verizon has learned, those workers are still hard to replace.

[Commentary] On May 31, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the government does not need warrant to track the location of more than 200 million Americans with smartphones. It's an astonishing decision. Basically, according to the court, because the vast majority of us use cellphones and apps that track our locations, we've opted out of 4th Amendment privacy protections. Even more alarming, the court's ruling opens the door for the government to get access to all of our Internet-connected apps and software that have knowledge of our whereabouts.

The court reasoned that since we – the hundreds of millions of cellphone users in the US – have voluntarily disclosed our geolocation to a third party (our cellular providers), the third party can share that information with the government. But that reasoning really only make sense if we disclose our geolocation voluntarily. But as anyone who has ever attempted to opt-out of such tracking knows, there's nothing voluntary about it. In fact, this location tracking is mandatory – extending not just to our smartphones but even to other people's cellphone and devices. Keep in mind, our devices regularly connect to other phones, computers, and cars to collect their location and data. The court's ruling sets a remarkable precedent: Utilizing mobile technology is now a blanket opt-out of fundamental 4th Amendment privacy protections. I'm worried that we are headed along a dark trajectory – a dystopian future whereby everyday devices spy upon us more and more while privacy protections are whittled away to meaninglessness. We have the capacity to correct these egregious wrongs, but protecting our civil liberties in the 21st century requires bold leadership and a deeper understanding of today’s technological realities.

[Sascha Meinrath is Director of X-Lab]

It is great news that a unanimous Federal Communications Commission approved the 5.9 GHz Public Notice, setting the stage for opening up this spectrum band for unlicensed use. Through a record refresh and rigorous, but timely, testing of prototypes, we expect to be able to fully protect vital Dedicated Short Range Communications safety-of-life functionality while promoting innovation and expanding the unlicensed services that American consumers seek.