Monday, April 29, 2019
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The Federal Communications Commission has approved SpaceX’s request to fly a large swath of its internet-beaming satellites at a lower orbit than originally planned. The approval was a major regulatory hurdle the company needed to clear in order to start launching its first operational satellites from Florida in May 2019. Under SpaceX’s original agreement with the FCC, the company had permission to launch 4,425 Starlink satellites into orbits that ranged between 1,110 to 1,325 kilometers up. But then SpaceX decided it wanted to fly 1,584 of those satellites in different orbits, thanks to what it had learned from its first two test satellites, TinTin A and B. Instead of flying them at 1,150 kilometers, the company now wants to fly them much lower at 550 kilometers. And now the FCC is on board.
SpaceX argues that by operating satellites at this orbit, the Starlink constellation will have much lower latency in signal, cutting down transmission time to just 15 milliseconds. The lower orbit also means SpaceX can get the same coverage with 16 fewer satellites, and the company argues the change will help cut down on space debris. At 550 kilometers, satellites are more affected by Earth’s atmosphere and are pulled out of orbit much more quickly than vehicles that are higher up. So if any of the Starlink satellites happen to fail and become inoperable, they should fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere fairly quickly.
Why is it important whether broadband internet access service (BIAS) is considered a common carriage service or not? Because if BIAS is a common carriage service, then BIAS providers bear the fundamental obligations of common carriers. These common carriage obligations are:
- To provide service upon reasonable request (i.e. the carrier may not selectively refuse to serve),
- Without unreasonable discrimination (i.e. similarly situated customers must be treated similarly),
- At just and reasonable rates, and
- With adequate care.
If BIAS is deemed an information service, then the above-described common carriage obligations do not apply — and the FCC does not have the authority to impose them. Furthermore, the scope of permissible regulatory authority over information services is unclear as a legal matter, and resultant efforts to test that scope can fluctuate over time as the political party (Democrat or Republican) maintaining a majority of Federal Communications Commission commissioners shifts back and forth. Thus, the differential impact of legal classification on BIAS’s providers’ regulatory obligations is the key to understanding what is really at stake. In essence, the legal classification battle leads us to a fork in the road – one traversed by classification as a telecommunications service, and the other traversed by classification as in information service.
[Barbara A. Cherry is a Professor in the Media School at Indiana University]
Comcast said its customers' monthly Internet data usage increased 34 percent between Q1 2018 and Q1 2019, rising to a median of 200GB. The rise is being driven by streaming video, and, in particular, 4K video. The median customer is using only about 20 percent of Comcast's 1TB data cap, which is enforced in 27 of Comcast's 39 states. But the rise in median usage almost certainly means that more Comcast customers are exceeding the 1TB cap. Comcast used to reveal the percentage of its customers that exceed its data cap, but the company seems to have stopped making that data public. In late 2013, when the cap was 300GB, Comcast was saying that only 2 percent of its customers used more than that. By late 2015, that was up to 8 percent.
The “brain drain” from rural areas has been a problem across the country for decades. Since 2000, Emporia's population has declined more than 7 percent. It's now home to 24,724 people.
“We understood that nobody was going to invest in us if we didn’t,” says Casey Woods, executive director of Emporia Main Street, a non-profit that advocates for local businesses and heritage. Woods and other city leaders think they have a solution. They plan to make Emporia (Kansas) a rural tech hub built with local investment in a fiber network, assistance from the Rural Innovation Initiative, and a long-held entrepreneurial spirit. Emporia was, after all, “named after the marketplace, the emporium,” says City Commissioner Rob Gilligan said. “Business and enterprise was always that founding idea.” That idea dates back to the end of the Civil War, when Emporia become a big railroad hub. “Broadband is the new railroad,” Woods says. “Broadband is that new iteration. It represents commerce, just in a digital format.”
Rock Falls is a gigabit city and the backbone to its fiber network is in place. Now it's time to get residents connected to its broadband, which can provide speeds up to 1,000 megabits per second. As part of its marketing campaign, city officials held their final informational meetings for a packed council chamber at City Hall. City Administrator Robbin Blackert retraced the process, started in earnest in 2015, that has made broadband the newest city utility. The city took out a $4 million bond to complete the backbone, which is along the U.S. 30 and state Route 40 corridors, including the industrial parks. Wayne Shafer, the city's broadband department director, explained how the residential areas will be built out. The service areas are divided into 26 potential "fiberhoods," each with about 250 homes. To mitigate the financial risk, a fiberhood won't be done until 45 percent of its prospective customers sign up for the service.
Of the new priorities Bozeman city commissioners added to their strategic plan recently, perhaps none will prove to be more consequential than declaring broadband internet service to be essential infrastructure – just as important as streets, bridges and water and sewer systems. It was a logical next step in the city’s broadband policy evolution. It started six years ago with the formation of committee of professionals and business owners that identified a demand for high-speed internet service in the city. That was followed by the creation of Bozeman Fiber, a non-profit organization tasked with constructing a broadband network. The basic mid-city network has been completed and connects the city, county and the Bozeman School District with high-speed service. The city has spent a little over $1 million on this project so far. The county and school district pay about $50,000 a year for access to the network. The city should be able to recoup its investment through those fees and fees paid by future users. The city’s involvement in this venture has been forward thinking.
A recent Morning Consult survey reports that over half of Americans today (55 percent) say they are interested in subscribing to gigabit speed internet service. The same survey asked consumers about the attributes they see important for future internet services, and perhaps not surprisingly, speed and security rose to the top. Eight-six percent of those surveyed said “unparalleled speed” was critical while 89 percent said that greater encryption, privacy and protection is necessary in broadband internet to keep their information and online activity safe online.
The persistence of broadband user behavior: Implications for universal service and competition policy
In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but consumer attention. We examine user priorities over the allocation of their time, and interpret that behavior in light of policy discussions over universal service, data caps, and related policy topics, such as merger analysis. Specifically, we use extensive microdata on user online choice to characterize the demand for the services offered online, which drives a household's supply of attention. Our data cover a period of time that saw the introduction of many new and notable sites and new devices on which to access them. In our analysis, we assess “how” households supply their attention along various dimensions, such as their concentration of attention across the universe of sites and the amount of attention expenditure per domain visit. Remarkably, we find no change in “how” households allocated their attention despite drastically changing where they allocated it. Moreover, conditional on total attention expenditure, demographics entirely fail to predict our key measures of attention allocation decisions. We highlight several important implications, for policy and beyond, stemming from the persistence and demographic orthogonality of our novel attention measures.
Over the past few years, news of 5G – fifth generation wireless technologies – has grabbed too many headlines to count. As carriers start to rollout services in cities around the U.S., however, we’re now reading about some of the limitations of a service that policymakers have promised would improve lives. A recent announcement by President Donald Trump commits the United States to build out 5G infrastructure on a high-band spectrum swath -- known as millimeter wave (mmWave), between 24 and 300 gigahertz -- which is “inferior in range and penetration capability to the ‘sub-6’ (below 6 gigahertz) spectrum being used for 5G by most other countries, especially China.” There’s a difference between mmWave spectrum and low and mid-band spectrum. And that difference matters a lot for 5G and the future of wireless broadband in America. We saw so this week.
Amid public sparring in Trumpworld about how best to advance next-generation wireless technology, the issue has been a field day for federal lobbyists. Some 50 tech and telecom firms lobbied on 5G issues in the first stretch of 2019, more than double the number over the same period in 2018. The Chamber of Commerce and Qualcomm were the top-spending 5G advocates during the first quarter.
Two dozen entities, including several broadband associations, are stepping up their T-Mobile Sprint merger opposition, sending a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and to a Department of Justice official arguing that the proposed merger would harm rural areas and reduce wireless competition. Most of the entities signing the letter to the FCC and DOJ are in the 4Competition Coalition, an alliance formed to oppose the merger. That includes all the broadband associations that signed the letter: NTCA – The Rural Broadband Association, the Rural Wireless Association (RWA), the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) and INCOMPAS, which represents competitive carriers. Other entities that are in the coalition and that signed the letter include the Communications Workers of America, DISH Network, broadband advocacy group Next Century Cities, and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which advocates for municipal broadband networks, among others.
The groups say the merger threatens to “undermine the services that rural Americans currently enjoy.” Sprint currently “stands out for its willingness to wholesale its network to rural wireless carriers – making roaming services possible for their customers” but T-Mobile has shown no interest in such partnerships. And “the merged parties’ spectrum would not be particularly well suited for rural coverage.”
Platforms
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called Rep. Ilhan Omar after Trump’s tweet sparked a flood of death threats
Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey phoned Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and stood by the company’s decision to permit a tweet from President Donald Trump that later resulted in a flood of death threats targeting the congresswoman. The previously unreported call focused on an incendiary video that President Trump shared on April 12, which depicts Rep Omar discussing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks interspersed with footage of the Twin Towers burning. The clip did not include the full context of Omar’s remarks, which were taken from a public event on the broader issue of Islamophobia. Rep Omar pressed Dorsey to explain why Twitter didn’t remove Trump’s tweet outright. Dorsey said that the president’s tweet didn’t violate the company’s rules. Dorsey also pointed to the fact that the tweet and video already had been viewed and shared far beyond the site. But he did tell Rep Omar that Twitter needed to do a better job generally in removing hate and harassment from the site.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced an investigation into Facebook’s unauthorized collection of 1.5 million Facebook users’ email contact databases. While Facebook claims that 1.5 million contact databases were directly harvested by its email password verification process for new users, the total number of people whose information was improperly obtained may be hundreds of millions. Email verification is a standard practice for online services such as Facebook. Typically, when a consumer signs up to a new service, they are asked to provide an email address, where they then receive an email with a link to verify that the email account belongs to them. Facebook's procedure requested certain users to hand over their password to their personal email account. Additionally, reports indicate that Facebook proceeded to access those user’s contacts and upload all of those contacts to Facebook to be used for targeted advertising. While Facebook has admitted that 1.5 million people's contact books were directly harvested, the total number of people whose contact information was improperly obtained by Facebook may be hundreds of millions, as people can have hundreds of contacts stored on their contact databases.
Facebook is banning personality quiz apps, which have for years been able to collect and store a great deal of information about their users. The ban comes a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it came out that the data firm had acquired information on up to 87 million people through the quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife.”
To be clear, personality quizzes themselves were not the problem here. While they offer an easy way for unscrupulous developers to gather masses of data — after all, they’re premised on handing over personal information — the problem was that Facebook allowed developers, for many years, to collect information on friends of friends and never thoroughly enforced policies to ensure that the data was kept secure and only used for intended purposes.
The ban on personality quizzes is part of a broader crackdown by Facebook on what developers are able to do and access across its platform. Facebook is locking down a number of older APIs for accessing user data, and it’ll prevent developers from accessing new data if a person hasn’t used the app in the past 90 days.
As Congress and other relevant stakeholders debate how to protect Americans’ privacy, a key concern is making sure that new legislation doesn’t entrench the power of big tech incumbents. In this post, we argue that incorporating data interoperability into privacy legislation is essential to empowering consumers’ data rights and fostering a competitive marketplace. In a nutshell, interoperability means enabling different systems and organizations to communicate with each other and work together. We outline a policy approach for interoperability built on the lessons of the Cable Act, the Telecommunications Act, and the United Kingdom’s Open Banking initiative.
Education
Ed-Tech Supporters Promise Innovations That Can Transform Schools. Teachers Not Seeing Impact
According to a new, nationally representative survey conducted by the Education Week Research Center, K-12 educators remain skeptical that new technologies will transform public schooling or dramatically improve teaching and learning. Fewer than one-third of America's teachers said ed-tech innovations have changed their beliefs about what school should look like. Less than half said such advances have changed their beliefs about how to improve students' academic outcomes. And just 29 percent felt strongly that ed-tech supports innovation in their own classrooms.
Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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