Vox

A lot of people expected Aereo to lose its Supreme Court case. The real question has always been whether a ruling against Aereo would have implications for other online services.

Many of the arguments broadcasters made against Aereo could just as easily be made against conventional cloud storage services such as Google Music and Dropbox, which also transmit copyrighted content to consumers.

A legal scholar whose work was heavily cited by Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion says that the case will have cloud storage and consumer electronics companies "looking over their shoulders." "The court is sending a very clear signal that you can't design a system to be the functional equivalent of cable," says James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland. "The court also emphasizes very strongly that cloud services are different. But when asked how, it says, 'They're just different, trust us.'"

Cloud storage services have relied on this "volitional conduct" principle to avoid copyright liability. If you upload a pirated movie to your Dropbox account or fill your Google Music account with pirated music, you might be guilty of copyright infringement.

But Dropbox and Google don't have to worry. It's probably not a coincidence that cloud music services blossomed a couple of years after the 2008 decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to protect Cablevision from copyright liability, letting it rest on the customer when storing selected programs on a remote DVR cloud storage system. Now, Grimmelmann says, "the reasoning of Cablevision is dead."

Columbia University's Tim Wu has only been a law professor for 12 years, but he's accomplished a lot during that time. He has contributed frequently to Slate, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and the New York Times, written an influential book, and advised the Federal Trade Commission on Internet policy. Oh, and he coined the term network neutrality. Now he's hoping to add another item to his resume: Lieutenant Governor of New York.

Wu is running alongside Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor. In May, Teachout sought the endorsement of New York's Working Families Party.

New York's unusual election system allows a candidate to appear on more than one party's line on the ballot, and Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) ran on both the Democratic and Working Families lines in 2010. If Wu wins, he won't be able to do much about the tech policy issues he has focused on over the last decade.

Telecom regulation is primarily a federal issue, as are copyright and patent policy. But Wu has hinted that cracking down on Comcast could be on his agenda.

In 2013, Americans started learning about the true extent of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency. Now, a coalition of technology companies and civil liberties groups are taking matters into their own hands.

The one-day campaign is called Reset the Net, a campaign to encourage the use of technologies that make the Internet more resistant to NSA snooping. What does Reset the Net recommend I do to protect my privacy?

• For your cell phone, Reset the Net recommends ChatSecure, TextSecure, and RedPhone. As the names suggest, these products enable users to communicate securely over instant messaging, text messaging, and voice calling. Reset the Net also encourages users to set a password on their phone so its contents can't easily be accessed by criminals or the police.
• For your Mac or PC, the bundle includes secure instant messaging software (Adium for Mac or Pidgin for PC) as well as Tor, software that helps preserve your anonymity by allowing you to browse your address without revealing where you're browsing from.
• Finally, Reset the Net has tips for improving password security. You should avoid re-using the same password on multiple sites. Instead, keep track of your passwords with a password manager or just write them down on paper.

Apple's most important health news had nothing to with the major tech company getting into the world of fitness tracking. It had everything to do with a much-less noticed part of the announcement: Apple will partner with Epic Systems, the country's largest electronic health records company, a deal that has the potential to revolutionize how patients access their medical history.

An estimated 40 percent of Americans already have medical information digitally stored on an Epic Systems health record. And Apple's new HealthKit will integrate with those millions of patient records, the company announced. This kind of partnership is something that no other fitness apps have -- it's what could set HealthKit's other fitness tracking features apart from competitors like FitBit or Jawbone.

Here's how HealthKit could be different: by looping patients in with their providers through electronic health records, the app could hypothetically target people whose health is actually a problem, which is where real opportunity for improvement exists.

But there's a flip side: experts are already concerned by how much of the EHR market Epic controls. If Apple decides to keep its partnership with the company exclusive, health care providers could feel pressure from patients to adopt medical records that are iPhone-compatible.

Be honest: the last time you got your nails done or toilet repaired, did you ask your manicurist or plumber what kind of license they had? Those are just two of the many occupations that require a license. The system of getting those official government stamps of approval is hurting the economy, says Morris Kleiner, professor of public policy at the University of Minnesota and a visiting scholar at the Minneapolis Fed.

In a New York Times op-ed (see link below), Kleiner blasts what he calls the "national patchwork of stealth regulation" of state occupational licensing rules. As of 1970, he writes, 10 percent of American workers needed to be licensed to do their jobs. As of 2008, it was around 30 percent.

Strict licensing standards mobility, as a person licensed to practice her trade in, say, Utah might have to get re-licensed if she moves to Oklahoma. In addition, Kleiner argues, these rules restrict people from entering the professions they want to practice. That hurts both would-be workers and consumers; low-income people may not have the means to go through the licensing procedures, which can involve many hours of classroom training. And low-income people, facing this tighter supply of hairdressers and childcare workers, might not be able to afford those services. In other words, occupational licensing might in fact make inequality worse.

At times, Twitter users might feel like their feeds are a sea of misinformation and misleading rumors. But here's a bit of good news: new research suggests that young people are actually less likely to trust misinformation they got via Twitter, compared to information they read on a normal text interface.

[Commentary] Americans really dislike their pay-television and broadband Internet providers, according to a new report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

And the biggest companies, like Comcast, have the least-happy customers. Overall, pay television and Internet companies rank last in satisfaction out of forty industries. And it's no coincidence.

Market competition has its problems, but it is a relentless driver of customer satisfaction. Yet ISPs and cable companies operate in industries where market competition doesn't really work. That means profit-maximizing strategies don't require satisfied customers and it leaves policymakers with really tough problems. What happens to markets with weak competition? Three things:

• High prices
• Price discrimination
• Bad customer service

Prices are high in uncompetitive markets because they are constrained by your willingness to pay rather than by your ability to get a better deal from another provider. Because prices are driven by willingness to pay, sellers in uncompetitiveness markets try to charge different amounts to different people through complicated and non-transparent pricing schemes -- this is economically efficient but annoying and violates people's sense of fair play. Last but by no means least in an uncompetitive market there is little reason to invest in customer service. If you're calling to schedule an appointment with the cable guy, you by definition want cable so delivering it to you quickly and efficiently isn't a priority.

[Commentary] In the coming months, federal regulators need to decide on two big mergers: Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable and AT&T's proposed purchase of DirecTV. The deals are similar in size and both involve big pay-television companies getting even bigger. But the deals have produced strikingly different reactions.

The Comcast deal attracted immediate condemnation from a broad range of left-leaning groups such as Public Knowledge, which quickly condemned the merger and called on regulators to stop it. Public Knowledge's reaction to AT&T's proposed purchase of DirecTV also sounded a skeptical note, but it was much more muted.

What explains the difference? A big factor is the different ways the two deals would reshape the Internet. Comcast and Time Warner Cable are two of the nation's largest broadband providers, and the combined company would control a third of all home broadband subscriptions.

Given the way Comcast has been throwing its weight around in recent interconnection disputes, there's reason to worry about the nation's biggest broadband provider getting even bigger. AT&T is also a fairly big broadband provider -- it has 16 million subscribers compared with Comcast's 20 million.

But DirecTV has is not a significant broadband provider, so combining the two firms won't increase AT&T's leverage in negotiations with the rest of the Internet. And 5 million of AT&T's subscribers are on low-speed DSL connections, not the kind of connection consumers are likely to use for video streaming.

When someone leaked a copy of a New York Times report on innovation (that was shockingly good), it clearly identified the major problems facing the newspaper in an increasingly digital world, and it made some smart recommendations for transforming the Times into a "digital first" publication.

If the Times were to follow them, it would have a large and positive impact on the paper.

Nevertheless, translating the report's recommendations into action will be very difficult. As Ezra points out, the report includes an excellent summary of Clay Christensen's concept of disruption. The report correctly observes that publications like Buzzfeed are posing exactly the kind of disruptive threat Christensen wrote about.

But what the report doesn't mention is the sobering conclusion of Christensen's research: companies faced with disruptive threats almost never manage to handle them gracefully. And the reality is that most businesses threatened by disruptive innovation don't survive. So even if the senior leadership of the Times accepts the findings of the Times innovation report, they're going to find it a huge challenge to make the kind of dramatic changes that will be required for the Times to master the web.

[Commentary] Concurrent to the dramatic firing of top editor Jill Abramson, the New York Times has been in the news thanks to the leaking of a 96-page Innovation Report that offers a scathing internal assessment of the paper's digital strategy.

It is the most thorough look at the insides of the most important newspaper in the country that we have ever seen. What's more, in keeping with the high standards of the New York Times it's simply an excellent piece of reporting and analysis.

Managing disruptive technological change is really hard. Not only -- or even mostly or even partially -- because the people in charge don't "get it."

As the Innovation Report notes, the Times currently derives 75 percent of its revenue from its print operation. Under the circumstances, shifting to a digital-first mentality is genuinely difficult.

The good news for the Times is that in addition to its extraordinarily strong brand and currently profitable business it has an extremely clear-eyed look at the nature of that challenge.