Analysis

[Commentary] Silicon Valley is an extractive industry. Its resource isn’t oil or copper, but data. Companies harvest this data by observing as much of our online activity as they can. This activity might take the form of a Facebook like, a Google search, or even how long your mouse hovers in a particular part of your screen. Alone, these traces may not be particularly meaningful. By pairing them with those of millions of others, however, companies can discover patterns that help determine what kind of person you are – and what kind of things you might buy.

These patterns are highly profitable. Silicon Valley uses them to sell you products or to sell you to advertisers. But feeding the algorithms that produce these patterns requires a steady stream of data. And while that data is certainly abundant, it’s not infinite. To increase profits, Silicon Valley must extract more data. One method is to get people to spend more time online: build new apps, and make them as addictive as possible. Another is to get more people online. This is the motivation for Facebook’s Free Basics program, which provides a limited set of internet services for free in underdeveloped regions across the globe, in the hopes of harvesting data from the world’s poor.

Several research groups in the United States and Europe now see the white supremacist and jihadi threats as two faces of the same coin. They’re working on methods to fight both, together — and slowly, they have come up with ideas for limiting how these groups recruit new members to their cause. Their ideas are grounded in a few truths about how extremist groups operate online, and how potential recruits respond. After speaking to many researchers, I compiled this rough guide for combating online radicalization.
1) Recognize the internet as an extremist breeding ground.
2) Engage directly with potential recruits.

The recent rise of all-encompassing internet platforms promised something unprecedented and invigorating: venues that unite all manner of actors — politicians, media, lobbyists, citizens, experts, corporations — under one roof. These companies promised something that no previous vision of the public sphere could offer: real, billion-strong mass participation; a means for affinity groups to find one another and mobilize, gain visibility and influence. This felt and functioned like freedom, but it was always a commercial simulation. This contradiction is foundational to what these internet companies are. ]

These platforms draw arbitrary boundaries constantly and with much less controversy — against spammers, concerning profanity or in response to government demands. These fringe groups saw an opportunity in the gap between the platforms’ strained public dedication to discourse stewardship and their actual existence as profit-driven entities, free to do as they please. Despite their participatory rhetoric, social platforms are closer to authoritarian spaces than democratic ones. It makes some sense that people with authoritarian tendencies would have an intuitive understanding of how they work and how to take advantage of them.

In a conversation with Peter J. Boyer of The Weekly Standard, Steve Bannon said, “I have my hands back on my weapons,” the most important being his conservative website, Breitbart News — a “machine” he promised to “rev up” for what the site’s editor-at-large Joel Pollak described in a hashtag on Twitter as “#War.” The reported target list included President Trump’s opponents “on Capitol Hill, in the media and in corporate America,” Bannon said. If Bannon does move forward with a rival to Fox News, he will face the herculean task required to get a new channel onto cable systems, especially as people increasingly give up cable for online streaming services. If he were to acquire an existing channel, he would still have to persuade cable operators to carry it as Breitbart TV. Bannon could team up with smaller competitors on cable, Newsmax or One America News Network. This much is certain: With Bannon out, expect more informational chaos, more sound and more fury, but signifying what?

In recent months, industry pundits sat up and took notice when online advertising giant Google started doubling down on its TV advertising investment. The tech company more than doubled its TV ad spend during the 2016 holiday quarter, laying out $109.8 million for ads promoting its Google Pixel mobile device. Launching Google Home meant a further $5 million for a single 30-second spot in January.

What’s remarkable is that Google is one of the most prominent TV spenders. The company built on digital advertising seems to know something about TV advertising that other brands don’t: In many cases, there’s just no substitute for it.

[Commentary] It took the death of a young woman at the hands of one of the neo-Nazis she was protesting to force the ever-expanding media universe to face a question it has been evading for years: Where’s the line?

Unlike the last big communications revolutions — brought about with radio and then television — this one came with no barrier to entry in terms of expensive equipment like towers and studios. There have been no governmental limits like broadcasting standards and licensing requirements. But as the downsides of informational democratization become more evident — the opening it has provided for nefarious state actors, terrorists and hate mongers — those who have some control over the web’s content stream have had a hard time figuring out where to build some much-needed dams. The trouble has come in finding the line between what some may find offensive and what is objectively dangerous speech. But at this point, if we can’t set a line at neo-Nazis and white nationalists inciting hatred and violence, can we set any line at all?

In “,” Bob Crandall conducts a series of event studies to explore how investors view the effects of the rules on the firms most likely to be affected. Crandall tracks daily equity prices to measure how investors believe the net neutrality regulations will affect Internet service providers (ISPs) and new and traditional media companies (edge companies, or ECs). Overall, Crandall’s analysis identified a limited market response to net neutrality, suggesting that investors did not expect net neutrality regulations to effect significant change in the market. In addition, the small changes in EC equities suggest that investors also believed that net neutrality regulations might not be the boon to EC growth and success that net neutrality proponents expect it to be. This result is particularly notable given the fervor that has developed around this issue. Both proponents and opponents of the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet order argue that regulations or lack thereof will have dire consequences. Crandall’s analysis suggests that the reality may be far more modest.

[Commentary] “The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said in a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York. He believes that journalists must state their biases up front and not pretend to be magically free of the beliefs or assumptions that everyone has. If objectivity is a “view from nowhere,” it may be out of date. What’s never out of date, though, is clear truth-telling. Journalists should indeed stand for some things. They should stand for factual reality. For insistence on what actually happened, not revisionism. For getting answers to questions that politicians don’t want to answer. Can journalism be both impartial and forceful? That’s not only a possibility but, more than ever, a necessity. In dealing with the false-equivalency president they helped to get elected, the news media may have learned something. The best way to be fair is not to be falsely evenhanded, giving equal weight to unequal sides. It’s to push for the truth, and tell it both accurately and powerfully.

The current network neutrality fight is really a wide-ranging power struggle between internet service providers and internet activists, between Republicans and Democrats. The battle is only partly about the ends—a free internet—and much more about the means: potential heavy regulation of ISPs as monopolies. Classifying ISPs as “common carriers,” under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, means they could be regulated like monopolies.

That could go as far as setting rates for broadband, like public utilities commissions do for electricity, according to ISPs and other critics. Tom Wheeler’s FCC promised not to go this far, by forbearing, or refraining, from utilizing most of Title II. ISPs aren’t buying it. “Even if the FCC decides to forbear from regulating [ISPs] from certain or many provisions of Title II in the near term, the fact that at any time it could implement additional rules under Title II jurisdiction creates uncertainty in the industry,” says Comcast. Verizon and Comcast now advocate Section 706 regulations almost identical to what they fought against because they are so spooked by the prospect of Title II monopoly regulation—and perhaps because they know they can beat it in a lawsuit.

In arguing against the FCC’s net neutrality regulations, ISPs, Republicans in Congress, and the FCC chairman are saying that Title II is overkill. The previous FCC majority’s goal was to set some standards for equal access to the internet. Those who oppose the decision say it went overboard by pulling out a big club used to smash 19th- and 20th-century monopolies, not to nurture and fine-tune modern tech providers. But what if those modern tech providers are, in fact, acting like monopolies from 100 years ago?

We measure households’ willingness-to-pay for changes in key home broadband Internet connection features using data from two nationally administered, discrete choice surveys. Both surveys include price, data caps, and download and upload bandwidth, but only one includes latency. Together, these surveys allow us to measure tradeoffs between bandwidth and other connectivity features such as price and data caps, and perhaps most notably, provide the only empirical evidence to date of tradeoffs between bandwidth and latency. We find that households' valuation of bandwidth is highly concave, with relatively little added value beyond 100 Mbps.

For example, households are willing to pay about $2.34 per Mbps ($14 total) monthly to increase bandwidth from 4 Mbps to 10 Mbps, $1.57 per Mbps ($24) to increase from 10 to 25 Mbps, and only $0.02 per Mbps ($19) for an increase from 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps. We also find households willing to pay about $8.66 per month to reduce latency from levels obtained with satellite Internet service to levels more common to wired service. Household valuation of increased data caps is also concave as caps increase from 300 GB to 1000 GB, although consumers place a significant premium on unlimited service. Our findings provide the first relative valuation of bandwidth and latency and suggest that current U.S. policy may be overpenalizing latency relative to reductions in bandwidth and data caps. For example, we find that in its CAF Phase II Auction, the FCC is imposing a bidding penalty for latency that is about five times higher than what our WTP estimates suggest it should be relative to bandwidth offered.