Brian Fung

[Commentary] Like Hollywood, Silicon Valley has an idea of how politics works. And that idea is generally wrong. But some tech startups are finding that they can't get ahead without grappling with bureaucrats and lobbyists -- a dirty, petty business that reminds us more of the fading 20th century than the sleek, futuristic promise of the 21st.

Most of the time, tech companies would simply rather disengage from the squabbling that's characteristic of Congress and city hall. George Mason University researcher Adam Thierer calls this the principle of "permissionless innovation": When businesses don't have to justify their experiments to anyone, they can simply focus on building the next great tool or platform. This is the bedrock of startup culture, in which low barriers to entry allow the best ideas to bubble to the top whether you're a college dropout or have a Ph.D hanging on your wall.

A belief in permissionless innovation is what gives the tech industry its libertarian streak. Silicon Valley is in the throes of another tech bubble. Only this time, instead of ballooning stock prices, the bubble is one of political culture. Insulated from the challenges facing more established companies, the Bay Area's youngest have been socialized to believe that most problems can be fixed with enough money and engineering. As some companies are discovering, the reality is less straightforward.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus want to save a controversial rule whose critics say makes it impossible for sports fans to watch their local teams.

In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, over a dozen black lawmakers said repealing the sports blackout rule, as at least one FCC commissioner has suggested, would hurt the business model that supports sports leagues like the NFL, as well as broadcasters.

"Without this rule in place," the lawmakers wrote, "cable and satellite television providers would potentially be able to undermine contractual agreements between professional sports leagues and broadcast networks that both support attendance at games and improve the viewing experience for fans in the stadium, as well as those watching at home."

Aereo's just waiting for a court to determine if it'll be allowed to make a backup legal argument for its survival -- but television broadcasters are determined to shut that effort down before it even gets started.

Aereo's best hope of survival is if it qualifies for a special kind of content license called "Section 111" as a cable company in the eyes of the Copyright Office.

But broadcasters are arguing that Section 111 is irrelevant and calling for a nationwide ban on Aereo. They're also demanding that any injunction address not just Aereo's retransmission of content in near real-time, but also even content that's played back online hours or days after the original broadcast.

Google and a British newspaper are currently embroiled in a confusing cycle of link deletion and reporting on said deletions, which has led to still more deletions.

In recent days, Google's been removing links from its European search results that point to stories published on the Web site of The Telegraph. That's in deference to the right to be forgotten, a European law that requires search companies to scrub links to Web sites if members of the public submit a request.

California's public utility commission published a memo laying out questions for Comcast as part of a merger review, adding California to the number of states looking critically at the merger from New York up to two.

"The ultimate test of a proposed change of control is whether or not it is in the public interest," California officials wrote. To that end, the California commission is requiring that Comcast explain how a merger with Time Warner Cable would benefit California voice and broadband customers, as well as to prove that the deal will improve Internet access among students and the poor.

Findings from the California review will be submitted to the FCC ahead of the federal government's decision on the deal, officials said.

[Commentary] A sliver of light may have just appeared at the end of Aereo's long legal tunnel. A Senate proposal is aiming to rewrite the economics of TV. If the idea moves forward, Aereo might be spared its demise -- and the company might even be able to keep the business model that got it into trouble with the Supreme Court.

The Senate proposal, known as "Local Choice," would ease the pressure on cable companies who currently pay rising fees to broadcasters to get their content. This idea could work in Aereo's favor; if the courts accept its new argument that Aereo is a cable company, Aereo might find itself lumped in with the other firms that would be affected by Local Choice, too.

Local Choice would benefit Aereo by letting it avoid paying those expensive content fees itself, landing it back where it began before it was laid low by litigation. Voila -- Aereo emerges more or less intact, though the details are a little more complicated.

Two of the most powerful senators in Washington have an idea that could change the economics of TV for good.

The plan, proposed by Sens Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and John Thune (R-SD), would let TV viewers individually decide which broadcast channels they want to receive in their cable subscriptions. You could, for example, opt to receive ABC and NBC but not CBS. Consumers would then be billed directly for those individual channels, essentially establishing an a la carte system for broadcast TV.

First, ending the cable companies' role as a middleman between viewer and broadcaster would eliminate the contracting disputes behind programming blackouts like the CBS-Time Warner Cable outage in 2013. Second, by paying for broadcast content themselves, consumers would have a better idea of how much that programming is actually worth. Third, consumers could more easily compare broadcast fees against the cost of cable programming.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler doesn't much like Verizon's latest attempt to justify slowing down 4G LTE for a select group of its customers.

Just because Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T all slow down mobile data for users who go over their monthly limit -- or who account for a disproportionate share of consumption -- doesn't make it okay for Verizon to do the same, he said.

"'All the kids do it' is something that never worked with me when I was growing up, and it didn't work for my kids," said Chairman Wheeler. "We have to be careful about attempts to reframe the issue."

Today, federal standards help 911 call centers find victims within minutes if they're calling from outdoors or from a landline. In most cases, help arrives on the scene with no complications at all. But for people calling 911 on a cellphone indoors, it's often a different story.

Being inside thwarts GPS signals used by cellphones and dispatchers to locate people in an emergency. For this reason, the Federal Communications Commission has announced a breakthrough in developing a plan that everyone can get behind.

Consisting of four guidelines, the roadmap puts the country "on track" to improving location accuracy for wireless 911 calls, which account for 70 percent of all calls to 911, according to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. Key to the guidelines is a requirement that wireless carriers provide 911 dispatchers with the exact floor and room of a caller.

[Commentary] With so much riding on the upcoming auction of wireless spectrum -- an event Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has described as "once-in-a-lifetime" -- and with so few obvious competitive benefits of approving a merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, it comes as no surprise that the FCC has opposed the deal.

Now that the merger has fallen apart, the FCC can turn its full attention to the other mergers on its plate, involving Comcast and Time Warner Cable on the one hand and AT&T and DirecTV on the other. "The big winner here is the FCC," said analyst Craig Moffett.