Daily Digest 4/17/2018 (Paid Prioritization)

Internet service providers celebrated  when the Federal Communications Commission voted to eliminate nationwide net neutrality rules that prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. But now Internet service providers in California are terrified that they could end up facing even stricter rules being considered by the California legislature. AT&T and the lobby group that represents Comcast, Charter, Cox, and other cable companies have been making their displeasure known to lawmakers in advance of hearings on a bill that could impose the toughest net neutrality law in the nation. The California bill implements the FCC's basic net neutrality rules from 2015, but it also bans paid zero-rating arrangements in which home or mobile Internet providers charge online services for data cap exemptions. AT&T and the California Cable & Telecommunications Association (CCTA) have privately distributed documents to lawmakers describing the ways in which the proposed bill is allegedly too strict compared to the FCC rules that are slated to be taken off the books.

Steve McCloud’s farm is in a black hole on the Kansas prairie. On the map, the Harvey County farm is connected to the superhighway of information that has become a necessity in today’s society. But travel down the dirt road to his farmstead just 4 miles north of Newton and a different reality emerges. The McClouds have slow and somewhat sporadic access to the World Wide Web. A mile to the north Moundridge Communications is running new fiber. But the small-town telephone company can’t help him because he is not in its territory. Cox Communications covers Newton but doesn’t extend past the city limits. “So, I have satellite, which is better than nothing but not much—and it is expensive,” he said. McCloud and about 100 Kansas Farm Bureau members addressed this during a mid-March leadership trip to Washington. Besides talking farm bill, global trade and immigration, McCloud told his story to lawmakers and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. “My fear is, according to the maps, we are covered, and we told Chairman Pai that,” McCloud said. “My fear is we are in this hole.”

The Incentive Auction Task Force and the Media Bureau announced the issuance of a further allocation of the TV Broadcaster Relocation Fund in the amount of $742 million to reimburse eligible full power and Class A broadcasters and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) (together, Eligible Entities) for expenses related to the construction of station facilities on reassigned television channels. With this further allocation, Eligible Entities have access to a total of $1.742 billion. This represents approximately 92.5 percent of their currently verified cost estimates, but we stress that individual invoices that are approved for payment are being paid in full (i.e. 100 percent), up to the total amount of the station or MVPD’s allocation.

Thousands of free, popular children's apps available on the Google Play Store could be violating child privacy laws. Seven researchers analyzed nearly 6,000 apps for children and found that the majority of them may be in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.  Thousands of the tested apps collected the personal data of children under age 13 without their parent's permission, the study found. “This is a market failure,” said Serge Egelman, a co-author of the study and the director of usable security and privacy research at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “The rampant potential violations that we have uncovered points out basic enforcement work that needs to be done.” The potential violations were abundant and came in several forms, according to the study. More than 1,000 children's apps collected identifying information from kids using tracking software whose terms explicitly forbid their use for children's apps, the study found. The researchers also said that nearly half the apps fail to always use standard security measures to transmit sensitive data over the Web, suggesting a breach of reasonable data security measures mandated by COPPA. Each of the 5,855 apps under review was installed more than 750,000 times, on average, according to the study. Unfortunately for parents, there's little consumers can do to protect themselves since the policies and business practices of app developers and ad tracking companies are often opaque, Egelman said. The study also points to a breakdown of so-called self-regulation by app developers who claim to abide by child privacy laws, as well as by Google, which runs the Android platform, he said.

Here are just some of the issues as the capital and the nation focused on how better to protect online users' data in a world of almost universal collection and sharing. 

• Does there need to be a government digital consumer protection agency with powers to regulate privacy?
• How can social media sites in general balance the need to weed out terrorists, hate speech, and threats of violence without straying into censorship of non-threatening speech?
• Do consumers have a fundamental right to control their online data and can that co-exist with the social media business model?
• How will new European Union General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) going into effect next month dovetail with U.S. policies? (Facebook, for example, has pledged to provide those data control tools and options to its U.S. users.)
• If social media platforms are expected to police their content, as legislators have made clear, who decides what gets blocked, and how is that decision made?
• Should the edge be more regulated, or internet service providers be less regulated? Or do both need more “regulatory motivation” to protect privacy?
• Should all the members of the virtuous internet circle be mandated to require opt-in consent from users to collect their data, to share their data, to sell it to third parties, or any or all of the above?
• Who owns and controls our online personas, and what control do we have over them?
• How do Facebook and other social media define hate speech and is there a bias against conservative and religious speech given Silicon Valley's liberal bent?
• How can social media sites protect against being weaponized in election meddling, or is a site like Facebook too big (billions of communications per day) to prevent such weaponization?
• Will opt-in restrictions on data sharing with marketers threaten the ad-supported model that allows for free online content, and will that need to be a trade-off for securing users' control over their data?
• Has Facebook become a "self-regulated superstructure for political discourse," and is that a good or bad thing?
• Is there tension, as lawmakers saw it, between the business interests of the edge and users’ interests, or between users' desire to share info with various apps and their desire, on the other hand, to "lock down" that info? Zuckerberg suggested it was more the latter.
• Did the Cambridge Analytica incident violate the 2011 Federal Trade Commission privacy settlement? (If so, then Facebook could face hefty fines.)
• Is Facebook a publisher, a media company, a tech company or some amalgam of all of those?
• If Congress concludes that edge providers should be regulated like a utility, does that mean ISPs will be reclassified under Title II of the Communications Act, alongside websites?

The US and British governments accused Russia of conducting a massive campaign to compromise computer routers and firewalls around the world — from home offices to Internet providers — for espionage and possibly sabotage purposes.  The unusual public warning from the White House, US agencies and Britain’s National Cyber Security Center results from monitoring the threat dating back more than a year. It was the two countries’ first such joint alert. “We have high confidence that Russia has carried out a coordinated campaign to compromise ... routers, residential and business — the things you and I have in our home,” said Rob Joyce, the White House cybersecurity coordinator. Officials say millions of users worldwide have been targeted.

Elizabeth Ann Pierce, the former chief executive of an Alaska telecommunications company, has been arrested after federal prosecutors accused her of forging contracts to induce firms to make more than $250 million in investments. As CEO of Quintillion Networks LLC, Pierce allegedly convinced two investment companies that the firm had secured contracts for a high-speed fiber-optic system that would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in future revenue, the Manhattan US attorney’s office and FBI said. The system was pitched as one that would provide service in Alaska and connect it to the lower 48 states, authorities said. As it turned out, those sales agreements were worthless because the customers had not signed them,” US Attorney Geoffrey Berman said. “Instead, as alleged, Pierce had forged counterparty signatures on contract after contract. As a result of Pierce’s deception, the investment companies were left with a system that is worth far less than Pierce had led them to believe.” Pierce was charged with wire fraud and surrendered in New York to FBI agents. She faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. In April 2017, Pierce was picked by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to chair the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) . Pierce resigned from Quintillion in August 2017 and she stepped down from her BDAC role in September.