Grant Gross

Look for President Donald Trump's administration to push for increased cybersecurity spending in government, but also for increased digital surveillance and encryption workarounds. That's the view of some cybersecurity policy experts, who said they expect Trump to focus on improving cybersecurity at federal agencies while shying away from new cybersecurity regulations for businesses.

Trump is likely to look for ways for the National Security Agency and other agencies to assist the government and companies in defending against cyberattacks, said Jeffrey Eisenach, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a tech adviser during Trump's presidential transition. "Cyber has to be top of mind for any view of the United States' global strategy," Eisenach said. "If you're not thinking of cyber first, I don't know what you should be thinking about."

While the Federal Communications Commission may repeal the net neutrality rules, the Republican-controlled Congress may take a different path. Lawmakers will likely push for legislation, similar to a proposal from early 2015, that would write basic net neutrality protections into law, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) said recently. A law passed by Congress would supersede any actions taken at the FCC. Even though the FCC may move to repeal its reclassification, Chairman Thune called for a bipartisan agreement on some baseline rules.

Meanwhile, supporters of strong net neutrality rules vow to fight any effort to repeal the rules and rescind the classification of broadband as a regulated service "Chairman Pai's FCC cannot move quickly to dismantle protections supported by the vast majority of the American people," said Matt Wood, policy director at digital rights group Free Press. "While Pai's boss, Donald Trump, may have little respect for the rule of law, administrative law still binds the FCC." Congress could pass legislation, but that's not a given, Wood added. That's "assuming this Congress can get anything done, unlike its recent do-nothing predecessors," he said. "But the current rules are the common-sense floor for any new law, not the overreach that members of the current majority in Congress and the FCC preposterously make them out to be."

Engineers at Stanford University have invented a new technology that would give broadband customers more control over their pipes and, they say, possibly put an end to a stale network neutrality debate in the US. The new technology, called Network Cookies, would allow broadband customers to decide which parts of their network traffic get priority delivery and which parts are less time sensitive. A broadband customer could then decide video from Netflix should get preferential treatment over e-mail messages, for example.

The technology could put an end to the current net neutrality debate focused on whether broadband providers are allowed to prioritize some network traffic and block or degrade other traffic, said the researchers, Professors Nick McKeown and Sachin Katti and electrical engineering grad student Yiannis Yiakoumis. Network Cookies, first described at a conference in Brazil in August, would put broadband carriers and web content providers on a level playing field when catering to user preferences, they said. The technology puts the control in the hands of broadband users, Yiakoumis said. "Giving users choice is both feasible and beneficial," he said. The technology adds transparency and "audit-ability" to network management processes, he added.

Have you ever tried to read a website's privacy policy only to give up after slogging through paragraphs and paragraphs of dense, lawyerly language? Privacy-focused companies Disconnect and TRUSTe have released a new browser add-on that attempts to translate those policies into easy-to-understand terms.

The companies' Privacy Icons software, released for a pay-what-you-want fee, analyzes websites' privacy policies, breaking them down into nine categories, including location tracking, do-not-track browser request compliance, and data retention policies. The software then displays, as a browser add-on, nine color-coded icons, with green, yellow and red icons signifying the level of concern about the website's privacy policy in each area.

More transparency on privacy policies is needed, said Casey Oppenheim, co-CEO at Disconnect, which also makes software that blocks online tracking requests.

"The end goal is to help individuals regain control of their personal information online," he said. "As a means to that end, we definitely hope that this project will inspire companies to improve their data practices and compete, even more, on the basis of privacy and security."

All bits running over the Internet are not equal and should not be treated that way by broadband providers, despite network neutrality advocates' calls for traffic neutral regulations, Cisco Systems said.

A huge number of Internet-connected devices with a wide variety of traffic requirements, including billions of machine-to-machine connections, will come online over the next four years, Cisco predicted in its Visual Networking Index Global Forecast and Service Adoption.

Some Web-based applications, including rapidly growing video services, home health monitoring and public safety apps, will demand priority access to the network, while others, like most Web browsing and email, may live with slight delays, said Jeff Campbell, Cisco's vice president for government and community relations.

“We really have a multiplicity of applications and services that are now running across the network, some of which require dramatically different treatment than others," he said.

Some network neutrality advocates have objected to US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposed rules that would allow broadband providers to engage in "commercially reasonable" traffic management. It's important that the FCC ensure an open Internet, but it's also important that "we have a robust network," Campbell said. The FCC should allow broadband providers to maintain quality of service "to ensure that some applications will run properly and effectively on the Internet," Campbell said. "That means using the intelligence of the network to ensure that those bits receive the quality of service they need."

The transition from copper-based telephone systems to IP networks in the US could become swept up in political fallout as the Federal Communications Commission figures out how to regulate such networks in ways that will appease the courts.

A switch to IP-based networks has been progressing for years in the US, but a January ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit calls into doubt the FCC's authority in several areas, such as prohibiting voice-over-IP providers from degrading service or blocking calls from competing carriers, and requiring them to offer service to all customers who want it. And the technological changes are rekindling the debate over whether the FCC as an entity should continue to exist at all, or at the least whether it needs a major transition itself.

The IP transition, combined with the network neutrality ruling, puts several features of the traditional telephone network, long taken for granted by customers, in doubt, said Harold Feld, senior vice president at digital rights group Public Knowledge. After the net neutrality ruling, "the FCC can no longer require VoIP providers to complete phone calls [and] can no longer prohibit VoIP carriers from blocking calls," Feld wrote in a January blog post.

The copper-to-IP "revolution necessitates an equally fundamental transformation of the legacy regulatory framework," AT&T's lawyers wrote in a later FCC filing. "Today's rules were designed for a voice-centric world in which [incumbent carrier] ILECs owned 99 percent of access lines, and there is no rational basis for sustaining them in a world where ILECs have rapidly declining minority market shares and voice is becoming just one applications among many riding over converged, data-centric networks."

Verizon Communications is forcing customers in southern California to move from traditional telephone service to voice over IP or wireless services, The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a consumer advocacy group, said in a complaint filed with the state.

Verizon, in its "forced migration," is ignoring state and federal laws requiring it to provide telephone services to California residents, TURN said in a complaint with the California Public Utilities Commission. The telecom carrier is ignoring requests for repair of its existing copper-based network and forcing customers to VoIP service over Verizon's FiOS broadband service, TURN said in its complaint.

"Verizon is deliberately neglecting the repair and maintenance of its copper network with the explicit goal of migrating basic telephone service customers who experience service problems," Regina Costa, TURN's telecom research director, wrote in the complaint. "These migrations are often without the customers' knowledge or consent." A Verizon spokesman said the company is reviewing the complaint and will respond to the CPUC.