Washington Post

[Commentary] Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wants to engineer a United States takeover of a key Internet organization, ICANN, in the name of protecting freedom of expression. Cruz’s proposal is one of the key sticking points in finalizing the government spending bill necessary to avert a government shutdown on Sept. 30. But the misguided call for the United States to exert unilateral control over ICANN does nothing to advance free speech because ICANN, in fact, has no power whatsoever over individual speech online. ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — supervises domain names on the Internet. The actual flow of traffic, and therefore speech, is up to individual network and platform operators. We hope Congress will avoid the risk of breaking apart the extraordinary technical platform that connects the whole world.

[Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, is professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding director of the World Wide Web Foundation. Weitzner is director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative and was deputy chief technology officer in the White House from 2011-2012.]

[Commentary] Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who blew the cover off the federal government’s electronic surveillance programs three years ago, has his admirers. After the inevitably celebratory Oliver Stone film about him appears this weekend, he may have more. Whether Snowden deserves a presidential pardon, as human rights organizations are demanding in a new national campaign timed to coincide with the film, is a complicated question, however, to which President Barack Obama’s answer should continue to be “no.”

New York City's free Internet kiosks are getting a big downgrade after the company that operates them said users were hogging the on-street machines to watch movies and pornography. A spokesperson for LinkNYC said that no filter is perfect and that it's difficult to strike a balance between blocking content that some people might deem innocuous and maximizing the kiosks' usefulness to members of the public. The spokesperson said that LinkNYC faced a bigger problem: People are overturning newspaper boxes and pulling up chairs in front of the kiosks to settle in, keeping others from using the devices. The company said it is weighing policies that might prevent the nuisance, such as time limits and cooldown periods where the kiosk's Web browsing feature becomes inactive. While that could deter some from abusing the tablets, it may also make life more difficult for the next people who want to use them.

Three of the four major candidates for US president have responded to “America’s Top 20 Presidential Science, Engineering, Technology, Health and Environmental Questions” from ScienceDebate.org, a nonprofit advocacy group. One question is about the Internet:
Clinton remarks: “The next President will be confronted with these challenges, and will need common sense approaches to balance cybersecurity with personal privacy. The next president must be able to thoughtfully address these nuanced issues.”
Trump says: “The United States government should not spy on its own citizens. That will not happen in a Trump administration.”

[Commentary] There is now a consensus that the United States should substantially raise its level of infrastructure investment. Economists and politicians of all persuasions are increasingly concluding that higher infrastructure investment can create quality jobs and provide economic stimulus without posing the risks of easy-money monetary policies in the short run. They are also recognizing that infrastructure investment can expand the economy’s capacity in the medium term and mitigate the enormous maintenance burden we would otherwise pass on to the next generation. The issue now is not whether the United States should invest more in infrastructure but what the policy framework should be. Here are the important questions and my answers.

Some infrastructure priorities, such as replacing coal-fired power plants with renewables, expanding broadband Internet networks and building pipelines, are clearly the responsibility of the private sector. Policy frameworks that streamline regulatory decision-making and reduce uncertainty could help spur investment in these sectors.

[Summers is a professor at and past president of Harvard University. He was treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and an economic adviser to President Obama from 2009 through 2010.]

At a military town hall meeting, Donald Trump was asked to expand on his strategy for dealing with the Islamic State militant group. "You have described at times different components of a strategy," the moderator — retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a Trump supporter — asked, according to a transcript from CBS News' Sopan Deb. "Military, cyber, financial and ideological. Can you just expand on those four a little bit?" Trump dove right into the second one, cyber. “Well, that's it. And you know cyber is becoming so big today. It's becoming something that a number of years ago, short number of years ago, wasn't even a word. And now the cyber is so big. And you know you look at what they're doing with the Internet, how they're taking and recruiting people through the Internet. And part of it is the psychology because so many people think they're winning. Any you know, there's a whole big thing. Even today's psychology — where CNN came out with a big poll. Their big poll came out today that Trump is winning. It's good psychology, you know. It's good psychology. I know that for a fact because people they didn't call me yesterday, they're calling me today. So that's the way life works, right?” And that's how we will beat the Islamic State at cyber.

US intelligence and law enforcement agencies are investigating what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in US political institutions, apparently. The aim is to understand the scope and intent of the Russian campaign, which incorporates ­cyber-tools to hack systems used in the political process, enhancing Russia’s ability to spread disinformation.

The effort to better understand Russia’s covert influence operations is being coordinated by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence. Officials also are examining potential disruptions to the election process, and the FBI has alerted state and local officials to potential cyberthreats. The official cautioned that the intelligence community is not saying it has “definitive proof” of such tampering, or any Russian plans to do so. “But even the hint of something impacting the security of our election system would be of significant concern,” one official said. “It’s the key to our democracy, that people have confidence in the election system.”

SpaceX is reeling after an early-morning explosion took out its rocket on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. The incident is a major setback for chief executive Elon Musk. But odds are the tragic news is disappointing another U.S. tech billionaire, too. The rocket destroyed Sept 1 was bearing a satellite that Facebook intended to use to beam Internet access to developing nations. When the rocket went up in smoke, so did the cargo inside, according to SpaceX.

In 2015, Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said he was eager to use the AMOS-6 satellite to deliver broadband connectivity to hard-to-reach parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Facebook has some 84 million users in the region. "As I'm here in Africa, I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. "Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well."

Companies such as Google and Facebook thrive on your personal data — the bits of information that tell advertisers how old you are, what brands you like and how long you lingered on that must-see cat video. Historically, how these companies use this data has been subject to oversight by the Federal Trade Commission, the government's top privacy watchdog. But a big court defeat for the FTC is putting the agency's power to protect your online privacy in jeopardy, analysts say. The ruling could wind up giving Google and Facebook, not to mention other companies in the Internet ecosystem, the ability to escape all consumer-protection actions from the FTC, and possibly from the rest of government, too, critics claim, unless Congress intervenes.

In the wake of the setback, the FTC is mulling an appeal — which would mean either asking for a rehearing at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, or escalating to the Supreme Court, according to a person close to the agency. But unless regulators can persuade the courts to overturn Aug 29's decision, the result will be "a fatal blow" to consumer protection, said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

[Commentary] The Internet is celebrating some important milestones. The week of Aug 22 marked both the 40th anniversary of the first mobile connection and the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Millennials can’t even remember what life was like without it and, even for us baby boomers, the changes to everyday activities have been at once profound and subtle. But the information revolution is far from finished. Indeed, for many living in the developing world, and even for some Americans, the Internet still hasn’t arrived.

Over the past 25 years, the Internet has steadily absorbed every network and every technology imaginable — or, more to the point, unimaginable. Once-separate radio, TV, voice and data all travel over the same systems, a virtual Postal Service now delivering a sextillion bytes a year. For the remaining digital holdouts, however, availability and cost are no longer the main obstacles. While the rest of us find ourselves unable to look away from our screens even for a few minutes, the unconnected — primarily older, rural, or less educated — consistently tell researchers that their principal reason not to go online is that there’s nothing there for them. Given the Web’s growing importance for education, health care and jobs, non-adopters are wrong about relevance. So the focus now needs to be on persuading them to join us. And join us they must. The Internet’s gravity is such that the more users who join the network, the faster each added connection increases its value, exhibiting what economists call network effects. That means the communities absent from the Internet’s global village are as valuable to us as we are to them, if not more.

[Larry Downes is a project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy]