Daily Digest 3/20/2018 (AT&T-Time Warner; Facebook-Cambridge Analytica)

The Federal Communications Commission is now accepting applications from broadband providers of all kinds to participate in Summer 2018's Connect America Fund Phase II reverse auction.  Providers must submit their applications by March 30, when the application window closes. The auction will make available up to $1.98 billion in support over the next decade to help build out high-speed Internet access to up to 1 million homes and small businesses in rural areas across the country that lack service. The auction will provide opportunities for new and existing providers using a variety of technologies to compete for support, including phone companies, fixed wireless providers, satellite providers, cable companies, and rural electric utilities. The auction is scheduled to begin on July 2.

A former Cambridge Analytica employee said that the data firm met with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in 2015, before President Donald Trump declared his candidacy. Christopher Wylie, a self-described whistleblower on the company’s data harvesting practices said that he left Cambridge Analytica before it formally teamed up with the Trump campaign. However, he said the company had been in talks with the campaign before Trump announced his candidacy, including a 2015 meeting with Lewandowski. Wylie claimed that he was suspended from Facebook for shedding light on the practices.“I think what’s really important for people to understand is that this company misappropriated data from upwards of 50 million people from Facebook,” he said. “We need to step back for a second and depoliticize this because this is about the safety of Americans and the integrity of the American democratic process."

The Fixed Wireless Communications Coalition (FWCC) says a study backed by the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm and others is badly flawed and should not be relied upon to allow for an array of unlicensed devices in the 6 GHz band. Earlier in 2018, representatives from Apple, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Facebook, Google, Intel, MediaTek, Microsoft and Qualcomm met with Federal Communications Commission representatives where they presented a study, prepared by RKF Engineering Solutions, that analyzed sharing between unlicensed operations in the 6 GHz band and existing services. The upshot: The study showed that unlicensed services can successfully coexist with the primary services present in the 6 GHz band. And that’s about where the FWCC says it went off the rails. The FWCC’s analysis showed that the uncontrolled distribution of unlicensed devices—in the numbers and at the power levels RKF studied—would indeed cause widespread harmful interference to fixed microwave receivers.“If our results are correct, it follows that RKF’s analysis went badly off the rails,” the coalition said in its March 13 filing.  “Unfortunately, RKF’s report is convoluted and hard to read in ways that make its assumptions and methods impossible to reverse-engineer.”

The US can still win the race to 5G—but it’s got to pass some significant reforms like those being considered by the Federal Communications Commission to make it happen. That’s the message from CTIA (a large wireless industry trade group) President and CEO Meredith Attwell Baker, who’s calling 2018 the year for action, because, as she puts it, “The stakes are huge.” Baker said she wholeheartedly agrees with Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri’s assessment of the situation, where the US and China are neck-and-neck when it comes to 5G. Baker said she’s encouraged by the item on the FCC’s March agenda that seeks to clarify and modernize procedures for National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews of wireless infrastructure deployments.

Consumers have long wondered just what Google and Facebook know about them, and who else can access their personal data. But internet giants have little incentive to give straight answers.  On May 25, however, the power balance will shift towards consumers, thanks to a European privacy law that restricts how personal data is collected and handled. The rule, called General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, focuses on ensuring that users know, understand, and consent to the data collected about them. Under GDPR, pages of fine print won’t suffice. Neither will forcing users to click yes in order to sign up. Instead, companies must be clear and concise about their collection and use of personal data like full name, home address, location data, IP address, or the identifier that tracks web and app use on smartphones. Companies have to spell out why the data is being collected and whether it will be used to create profiles of people’s actions and habits. Moreover, consumers will gain the right to access data companies store about them, the right to correct inaccurate information, and the right to limit the use of decisions made by algorithms, among others.