Free Press

[Commentary] “Predictive policing” sounds good on paper. After all, what could go wrong with a data-based approach to law enforcement? It turns out: plenty. That’s why Free Press joined a broad coalition of civil rights, privacy and technology groups in sounding the alarm about how predictive policing reinforces racial bias. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights mobilized the coalition, which counts the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, Color Of Change and the NAACP among the 17 signers. The statement released last Wednesday notes that “the data driving predictive enforcement activities — such as the location and timing of previously reported crimes, or patterns of community- and officer-initiated 911 calls — is profoundly limited and biased.” Indeed, a damning report from the tech consulting group Upturn, which surveyed the nation’s 50 largest police forces, confirms this view. Upturn found “little evidence” that predictive policing works — and “significant reason to fear that [it] may reinforce disproportionate and discriminatory policing practices.”

While the idea of using data to direct police resources sounds like an effort to remove human bias from the equation, that isn’t how it works in practice. In fact, predictive policing embeds police bias in an algorithm that then has the appearance of being neutral. The police response to low-income communities — in particular communities of color — is completely different from the response to wealthy white communities.

[Commentary] A key takeaway from the Alliance for Community Media’s recent conference in Boston (MA): Community media can and must help fill the gaps in local news coverage that are growing across the country thanks to rampant consolidation and newsroom cutbacks. Community media is an umbrella term that refers to noncommercial media that isn’t part of NPR or PBS. ACM is an organization composed primarily of public access, education and government (PEG) TV channels available on cable television, along with the digital media centers and training programs such stations offer. There are more than 3,000 community media outlets in the US, and they’re diverse in terms of the resources they have, the programming they produce, the way they’re organized, and the scale at which they operate. What they have in common is that we need them more than ever.

These requests for en banc review are sour grapes from industry dead-enders who are determined to dismantle the FCC’s successful Net Neutrality rules in spite of their many failed attempts to do so. The D.C. Circuit was abundantly clear when it upheld the FCC last month. The court found that the FCC had acted on its well-defined authority to prevent internet service providers from unfairly interfering with our communications. The D.C. Circuit deferred to the FCC’s determination that its authority to do so stands on bedrock communications law. And the judges recognized the vital role the open internet plays in our society. The broadband industry has been doing just fine since the FCC adopted the Open Internet Order a year and a half ago. Not one of the industry’s doom-and-gloom predictions has come true. The order didn’t dampen investment or revenues for broadband providers, and internet users have added confidence that their rights to connect and communicate are protected. Last-ditch efforts like these petitions are unlikely to succeed. Big phone and cable companies obviously have plenty of money to waste on high-priced lawyers. But they should give up their foolish quest to overturn rules that benefit internet users.

The Federal Communications Commission took a highly touted step toward the future of wireless communications by opening up huge blocks of spectrum for “5G” broadband uses. (5G stands for “5th Generation” technology, a generic term for the evolution to follow today’s 4G smartphones.) These next-generation networks promise to be faster, denser and more robust than what we have today. They could help usher in an era of innovative services and applications such as self-driving cars and smart-city technology. 5G technologies are still in the testing phase, but the FCC’s decision makes room for early deployment efforts that could offer enormous benefits to the national economy. Unfortunately, as advocates for Internet users point out, the FCC’s decision is by no means perfect. It doesn’t do enough to guarantee that shared use of spectrum — think Wi-Fi — will be a big part of the 5G equation. Giving exclusive use of these frequencies to carriers like AT&T and Verizon would strengthen their stranglehold on valuable spectrum assets, and it could prevent these new technologies from flowing to everyone, especially those who are on the wrong side of the digital divide: rural residents, low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Nonetheless, everyone agrees that the technological advances are crucial, even if there’s debate about how to make those leaps forward.

Free Press filed a “Petition to Deny” the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

The Petition, submitted to the Federal Communications Commission, presents a definitive account of how the merger fails both the public interest and the antitrust tests required for regulatory approval. The merger would create a telecommunications and pay-TV entity of unprecedented size and scope, reaching into six out of every 10 US homes and controlling nearly half of the current advanced broadband service subscribers. Its control over high-speed Internet services would eclipse the power once held by the monopoly Bell system.

Comcast’s resulting nationwide market reach and power would lead to direct consumer harms such as higher prices and fewer choices among competitors. The merged entity "would immediately control half of the nation’s bundled Internet access and pay-TV customers, a share that would quickly grow as DSL continues its now-accelerated decline into irrelevancy" according to the Free Press Petition. Moreover, mobile, fixed LTE and satellite broadband should not be considered competitive alternatives to Comcast's wired services -- at a time when more and more consumers are seeking higher bandwidth options.

[Commentary] For years a lineup of phone and cable industry spokespeople has called network neutrality “a solution in search of a problem.” In reality, many providers both in the US and abroad have a history of violating the principles of network neutrality -- and they plan to continue doing so in the future.

[Commentary] People around the country are calling on the five members of the Federal Communications Commission to hold public hearings in their communities on network neutrality -- and on the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, which could also strike a death blow for the open Internet.

The Federal Communications Commission has announced an enhanced review of the new access fees that Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon have recently demanded from sites and services such as Netflix.

Chairman Tom Wheeler announced at the monthly open meeting that the agency would gather information from ISPs about all such access-fee arrangements, but said the Commission would provide no further guidance or written notice of this inquiry.

Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood made the following statement: "Demanding more transparency from Internet service providers is a step in the right direction. But it's not enough. The FCC also needs to protect Internet users from abuse and arm them with any information it finds in this investigation. By slowing down content from some of their video competitors, phone and cable companies have duped untold numbers of consumers into purchasing faster and pricier tiers of service. But selling users more expensive services won't fix a problem that the ISPs create elsewhere in the network.”

[Commentary] AT&T just announced that it is buying DirecTV, the nation’s top satellite-TV company, for a total transaction value of $67.1 billion (that’s $48.5 billion in cash and equity, plus $18.6 billion in debt).

For this kingly sum AT&T gets a satellite-only company with declining profits and no physical assets located here on planet Earth. This is by far the dumbest, most wasteful deal ever. (Well, at least since Comcast announced its plans to buy Time Warner Cable.)

These two takeovers are a perfect illustration of everything that’s wrong with America’s telecommunications market. Case in point: For the total price of these two mega-deals, $67 billion, AT&T and Comcast could collectively deploy super-fast gigabit-fiber broadband service to every single home in America.

[Commentary] In many markets, Comcast and other big telecommunications companies don’t directly compete with each other, meaning consumers don’t have other options to turn to. The companies prefer to control their respective domains -- and our pocketbooks.

And this is all about to get worse. Much, much worse.

Comcast, the nation’s No. 1 cable and Internet company, wants to take over Time Warner Cable, the No. 2 cable provider. Put them together and you get one media giant controlling the vast majority of pay-TV and Internet access in America.

A bloated Comcast will likely engage in all kinds of shenanigans that hurt consumers -- everything from instituting totally unnecessary data caps to restricting what kinds of devices customers attach to the network to forcing folks to purchase expensive equipment. And though Comcast is obliged to adhere to the FCC’s now-overturned (and loophole-ridden) open Internet rules, this condition will expire in January 2018.

All of this will result in higher prices. This much power in the hands of one company is bad news for all US residents, including those who live in communities Comcast and Time Warner Cable don’t serve. Comcast would be able to use its market power to dictate the terms of broadband openness, cost and access at a time when the US is falling behind other nations on each of these measures. With Comcast in charge we’ll continue to sink in the ratings.