Susan Crawford

Charter’s renaming of itself—after a megamerger with Time Warner Cable in 2018—as “Spectrum.” But changing your name doesn’t mean that you aren’t liable for misbehavior under your previous moniker. This is what Charter…er, Spectrum… found recently when, following a lengthy investigation, New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, filed an extraordinary lawsuit against the company. The company’s 2.5 million New York subscribers (of its 22 million nationwide) have been told they’re getting X (in terms of download and upload speeds) when actually they’re getting a lot less than X.

The tussle over "network neutrality" started 20 years ago in Portland (OR). Today, Portland and its region are poised to be Ground Zero for resolving the real issues behind public concern over “net neutrality”—the stagnant, uncompetitive, hopelessly outclassed state of internet access in America. Portland is taking seriously the idea of a publicly overseen dark-fiber network over which private providers could compete to offer cheap, ubiquitous internet access.

Fiber cities know the difference between publicly overseen networks, aimed at providing a utility service, and wholly private, “demand-driven” communications networks. There is no single meaning of the word utility, but the concept is familiar to many people. The basic idea is that a utility is a service that 1) relies on a physical network of some kind and 2) is a basic input into both domestic and economic life. A utility is not a luxury.

China is planning to deploy fiber-optic connections to 80 percent of the homes in the country. What’s new about China's massive deployment of fiber, both in its own territory and in its global market along its planned Belt and Road, is that China is likely to permit only 5G equipment made by Huawei and a handful of other Chinese companies to connect to that fiber. China, not America, will be the place where new online services are born. Although the US came up with the idea of the internet, we don't have a sandbox to play in, a giant market in which to test new high-capacity services.

Internet access is an indispensable determining factor when it comes to opportunities and resources. Susan Crawford, author and Harvard Law professor, reflects on the monopoly that companies hold over the service, quality and availability of fiber optic internet service. She points out that with little to no government regulatory infrastructure, or representatives with the necessary know-how, provider incentives rarely align with the public’s best interest. “My fear is that we’ve lost the idea that government actually helps people have better lives,” she wrote.

It seems counterintuitive that a phone line could be a "speaker." But the cable industry very much wants to ensure that the act of transmitting speech from Point A to Point B is protected by the First Amendment, so that making a cable connection carry any speech it isn’t interested in amounts to unconstitutional “forced speech.” The addition of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court roster gives the industry a significant boost.

This is a story that defies two strongly held beliefs. The first—embraced fervently by today's Federal Communications Commission—is that the private marketplace is delivering world-class internet access infrastructure at low prices to all Americans, particularly in urban areas. The second is that cities are so busy competing that they are incapable of cooperating with one another, particularly when they have little in common save proximity. These two beliefs aren’t necessarily true.

In Aug it was reported that T-Mobile was asking the small operators that resell T-Mobile's excess network capacity (Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs)) to write letters and opinion pieces in support of the company's proposed $36 billion merger with Sprint. By helpfully suggesting talking points to resellers —including Mint Mobile, Republic Wireless, and Ting, all of which lease access from the Big Four network operators (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile) in order to sell phone and data services to customers, T-Mobile is following the usual "air of inevitability" merger playbook

It's common knowledge that city curbs are fiercely contested places, what with Ubers and Lyfts hovering inconveniently and blocking traffic; piles of shared bikes and scooters being dropped off and picked up; rapidly climbing numbers of deliveries being made by double-parked trucks; and buses and taxis pulling up—not to mention all the private-car parking going on. These daily dramas will only get more boisterous and difficult in the years to come, when fleets of city-licensed driverless cars join the fray.

[Commentary] The Senate voted 52–47 to revive an Obama administration rule ensuring equal treatment for online traffic—the so-called “net neutrality” rule recently erased by the Trump Federal Communications Commission. But the vote wasn't really about "net neutrality." Instead, it was a deeply political, bipartisan call—three Republican Senators signed on—for internet freedom writ large. Here's why: "Net neutrality," these days, is shorthand for "We don't like how much unconstrained power Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink have over us."