Susan Crawford

This report provides detailed accounts of planning carried out in connection with community fiber networks in Washington (DC), San Francisco, and Seattle.

It includes information about existing fiber assets that the cities identified, funding mechanisms that were considered, and roadblocks that were encountered. Our hope is that this report will be helpful to other cities that are considering launching fiber optic networks. The cities profiled in this report have each approached the question of community fiber differently.

• Washington, DC made concessions and arrangements that allowed it to build a robust public-safety-quality fiber network, but limitations on the use of that network have made it unavailable to residents and businesses. Additionally, prices charged non-profits for use of the network are currently too high to be competitive with incumbent products.
• San Francisco has been highly innovative in expanding fiber to public housing, aggressively leasing dark fiber to community anchor institutions such as libraries and schools, and ensuring free public Wi-Fi, but has not yet cracked the nut of alternative community residential or business fiber access.
• Seattle has had an extensive city fiber loop in place since 1986, but regulations limiting use of poles and approvals for cabinets have slowed the rollout of competitive last-mile service. Seattle’s recent negative experience with Gigabit Squared (which was unable to execute on its last-mile promises and subsequently vanished from the scene) casts a shadow. Seattle’s current mayor appears to be determined to ameliorate both the regulatory burdens and the information asymmetries that have dogged the city.

[Commentary] Just when you thought the information infrastructure industry in America couldn't be consolidated any further, AT&T has announced another merger.

It's one more megadeal that promises to provide the giant carrier with more opportunities to increase its profits, while not moving the country any closer to being competitive on the global informational stage.

What's really going on is that companies are recognizing that the satellite industry can't survive. Given this reality, DirecTV needs to be rescued. Meanwhile, AT&T wants to maintain the status quo. Although it is primarily a wireless company, AT&T still has some wired operations, and is looking to hang on to the customers it already has in a quarter of the country for U-Verse, its bundled pay TV and data product. At the same time, it plans to abandon (rather than upgrade) many of its other wired customers, sell them on its more-profitable wireless services instead, and cede wired subscriptions in the rest of the country to the dominant cable operators.

We'll become two Americas: poorer people and people in rural areas depending on wireless smartphones, and richer people paying through the nose for expensive bundled services.

[Crawford is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law]

[Commentary] When most human activities involve screens and sensors that automatically save data on remote computers, what legal standards should constrain law enforcement's access to that distant information?

It's essential that we get this right, because mobile phones are just plastic boxes that gather and generate data for distant use.

What's important about the handset is the link it provides between a person and all that data. Beyond accessing immediate, on-the-spot communications to protect the safety of arresting officers, any further examination of a phone at the time of an arrest should be made by law enforcement only under the supervision of a judicial officer.

Law enforcement officials often maintain that the advent of the digital era means they need broad new authority to track and apprehend criminals. They call the digitization of information "going dark."

But the reality of mobile-phone technology, and the power we humans allow mobile phones to have over our life patterns, belies this claim. Rather than going dark, these digital times are allowing law enforcement to shed more light on human lives than ever before. We shouldn't let this happen without independent judicial oversight.

[Crawford is the John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property, Harvard Law School]

[Commentary] Among the many threats to the future of Internet access in the United States, nothing tops Comcast’s proposed $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. The combined company would be in a position to provide high-capacity data services to almost two-thirds of American households and to tightly control everything flowing over its pipe.

An episode from Comcast’s past shows why this plan is worrisome. Just two decades ago, Comcast distrusted the idea of giving one company the sort of power that Comcast now aims to amass. The consolidation and geographic clustering that swept the cable industry in the late 1990s eventually destroyed the compact among TCI, Comcast, and Cox that had made @Home possible. Comcast and Cox grew big enough that they didn’t feel the need to cooperate with TCI any more, and by 2002 the @Home company was no more.

But now the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable can be understood as the execution -- at long last -- of the @Home business plan. The result might feel just like the Internet -- but it won’t be the Internet. It will be AOL and @Home all over again. But this time there will be no .Com Committee constraining how ComcastTimeWarner treats different streams of bits.

Comcast’s recent interconnection tussle with Netflix, its strong support for Streampix, and the rumor that it is planning to license its X1 platform for free to all other cable operators foreshadow the curated walled garden that we have to look forward to.

[Crawford is a professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law]