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July 2017

Sen Wyden accuses Chairman Pai of being 'willfully ignorant' on net neutrality

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) accused Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai of mischaracterizing his position from nearly two decades ago to justify the agency’s repeal of network neutrality rules.

In a comment filed to the net neutrality docket at the FCC, Sen Wyden said that Chairman Pai was being “willfully ignorant” when he cited a letter that the Oregon Democrat wrote in 1998 arguing against the reclassification of internet service providers (ISP) as telecommunications companies, which, in 2015, became the legal framework for the net neutrality rules. “The internet and internet access service today both are wildly different than they were in 1998,” Sen Wyden wrote in the filing. “Back then, large numbers of consumers were starting to take advantage of the whole internet, rather than just a walled-garden service." "The key difference, however, was that in 1998 consumers largely accessed the internet through third-party ISPs like AOL, or Prodigy, and those consumers used the infrastructure of the common carrier telephone system to connect to that third-party ISP,” he continued.

Public Knowledge Files FCC Comments to Preserve Net Neutrality Rules

As Public Knowledge’s comprehensive filing of more than 100 pages makes abundantly clear, Chairman Pai’s proposal would remove consumer protections the Federal Communications Commission has explicitly and repeatedly identified as critical to protecting broadband subscribers. It would for the first time explicitly make cable companies the gatekeepers of the internet.

To attempt such a dramatic change of policy without even acknowledging the over 20 years of FCC past practice chronicled in these comments is the definition of arbitrary and capricious -- and leaves Pai’s proposal highly vulnerable to reversal in the courts. Twice opponents of Title II have pitched their alternate history of ‘light touch regulation’ to the D.C. Circuit in an effort to overturn the FCC’s existing net neutrality rules. Twice the D.C. Circuit has flatly rejected it. Chairman Pai apparently thinks that the third time will prove the charm. Hopefully, Chairman Pai will reconsider his unpopular plan to strip away net neutrality and critical consumer protections.

AT&T Statement on Supporting an Open Internet

AT&T filed comments in support of the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to return to a nearly two decades-old bipartisan commitment to a light-handed approach to internet services – a commitment the FCC abandoned for no good reason in 2015. Throughout this period, AT&T has supported an open internet as well as baseline requirements to ensure an open internet is protected without the regulatory baggage that comes with Title II.

We continue to support such requirements, and we continue to oppose Title II as an unprecedented regulatory overreach for which there was no economic or marketplace justification. By proposing to eliminate this abrupt and unwarranted departure from longstanding precedent, the FCC is taking an important first step. But we continue to believe that a bipartisan legislative solution is the best way to ensure an open internet that serves the interests of consumers while providing the regulatory certainty that investors demand.

Comcast says it should be able to create internet fast lanes for self-driving cars

Comcast filed comments in support of the Federal Communications Commission’s plan to kill the 2015 network neutrality rules. And while pretty much everything in them is expected — Comcast thinks the rules are burdensome and hurt investment, yet it says it generally supports the principles of net neutrality — there’s one telling new quirk that stands out in its phrasing: Comcast now says it’s in support of a ban on “anticompetitive paid prioritization,” which is really a way of saying paid prioritization should be allowed. Comcast doesn’t just see paid fast lanes being useful for medicine. It also thinks they might be fair to sell to automakers for use in autonomous vehicles. “Likewise, for autonomous vehicles that may require instantaneous data transmission, black letter prohibitions on paid prioritization may actually stifle innovation instead of encouraging it,” the filing says.

Librarians Read FCC Title II Riot Act

The American Library Association says the Federal Communications Commission under Chairman Tom Wheeler got the reading of the law right when it imposed strong network neutrality rules under Title II (common carrier) authority.

It said 120,000 libraries and their customers would be seriously disadvantaged by getting rid of the rules banning blocking traffic and degrading (the FCC's terminology is actually "throttling") traffic, and says paid prioritization is inherently unfair, especially for libraries without the money to pay for such prioritization. But the ALA breaks with some Title II fans in arguing for capacity-based pricing and excluding private networks from net neutrality rules. On capacity-based pricing of broadband service, it says ISPs "may receive greater compensation for greater capacity chosen by the consumer or content, application, and service provider." And on private networks, it says: "[T]he Commission should decline to apply the Open Internet rules to premises operators, such as coffee shops and bookstores, and private end-user networks, such as those of libraries and universities."

NATOA Announces Recipients of 2017 Community Broadband Awards for Outstanding Broadband Endeavors

The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) Board of Directors announced the recipients of NATOA’s 2017 Community Broadband Awards. Since 2007, NATOA has been recognizing exceptional leaders and innovative programs that champion community interests in broadband deployment and adoption in local communities nationwide. Recipients will receive their awards at NATOA’s 37th Annual Conference, to be held in Seattle (WA) from September 11 – 14 at the Grand Hyatt Seattle.

The 2017 Community Broadband Award recipients are:
Community Broadband Hero of the Year: Danna MacKenzie, Executive Director, State of Minnesota Office of Broadband Development
Community Broadband Project of the Year: Longmont Power & Communications, Longmont, CO
Community Broadband Strategic Plan of the Year: Seattle, WA “Strategic Plan for Facilitating Equitable Access to Wireless Broadband”
Community Broadband Digital Equity Project of the Year: Seattle, WA “Technology Matching Fund”
Community Broadband Innovative Partnership of the Year: Garrett County, MD & Declaration Networks Group, Inc.

The Dark Side of That Personality Quiz You Just Took

Personality quizzes have some sort of perennial appeal. Facebook newsfeeds are filled with BuzzFeed quizzes and other oddball questionnaires that tell you which city you should actually live in, which ousted Arab Spring ruler you are, and which Hogwarts house you belong in. But these new online quizzes have a dark edge that their analog predecessors didn’t.

In the wake of the US election, a secretive data firm hired by Donald Trump’s campaign boasted that it has been using quizzes for years to gather personal information about millions of voters. Its goal: the creation of digital profiles that can predict—and possibly exploit—Americans’ values, anxieties, and political leanings. Whether this firm, Cambridge Analytica, has actually used predictive profiles to influence people isn’t certain; reports suggest it hasn’t, at least not directly. But the company’s methods nonetheless expose the growing scale of personality analysis online—and the dangers that come with it. On the internet, anything you do is like taking a personality quiz: Everywhere you click reveals something about you. And you’re not the only one who sees the results.

Why it took more than a week to resolve the Verizon data leak

A communication breakdown and a vacationing employee were the reasons it took more than a week to close a leak that contained data belonging to 6 million Verizon customers, according to Chris Vickery, the cybersecurity researcher who discovered the breach. Verizon said recently that an employee at one of its vendors, NICE Systems, had accidentally made the data available to anyone who had the public link to the cloud.

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