Wired

Moat calls itself the “Nielsen of digital.” It’s a service advertisers use to make sure the right people are seeing and clicking on their ads. And those advertisers today have a problem: Because of the automated nature of so much online advertising, cash is increasingly flowing to sites that peddle fake news, often without the knowledge of the advertisers themselves. That’s not the kind of news brands want to be seen paying for. But Moat says it’s got a fake-news fix that could dry up ad dollars that keep fake news sites in busines

While abolishing network neutrality might initially increase profits for telecom and cable companies, long-term, it would harm both internet-focused companies and consumers. Telecom and cable companies claim that consumers will pay less if they abandon network neutrality, but economic models dispute that. Cable and telecom companies want to kill network neutrality to increase their profits, not decrease prices for consumers. Without net neutrality, consumers would be forced to access a distorted internet, where information is prioritized according to the financial interests of telecom and cable companies. Preserving network neutrality will help “make America great again.”

2015 was the year the Federal Communications Commission grew a spine. And 2017 could be the year that spine gets ripped out. Over the past two years, the FCC has passed new regulations to protect network neutrality by banning so-called “slow lanes” on the internet, created new rules to protect internet subscriber privacy, and levied record fines against companies like AT&T and Comcast. But this more aggressive FCC has never sat well with Republican lawmakers. Soon, these lawmakers may not only repeal the FCC’s recent decisions, but effectively neuter the agency as well. And even if the FCC does survive with its authority intact, experts warn, it could end up serving a darker purpose under President-elect Donald Trump.

2015 was the year the Federal Communications Commission grew a spine. And 2017 could be the year that spine gets ripped out.

Over the past two years, the FCC has passed new regulations to protect network neutrality by banning so-called “slow lanes” on the internet, created new rules to protect internet subscriber privacy, and levied record fines against companies like AT&T and Comcast. But this more aggressive FCC has never sat well with Republican lawmakers. Soon, these lawmakers may not only repeal the FCC’s recent decisions, but effectively neuter the agency as well. And even if the FCC does survive with its authority intact, experts warn, it could end up serving a darker purpose under President-elect Donald Trump.

The internet was supposed to alleviate media conglomeration. Instead, it may compound it. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and a handful of others are displacing media companies and telecommunication companies. They already host much of the content you consume, and produce more and more of it. They own much of the infrastructure carrying that data, and they’re starting to sell Internet access. These tech titans didn’t plan to take down the telecommunication companies. But they depend upon you having fast, reliable internet, so they’re bringing everything in-house. This promises to make things drastically better for you as a consumer, so if you hate big telecoms, you’ll feel schadenfreude at their demise. But you might end up with more of the same as the new guard becomes the old guard.

[Commentary] Not so long ago, the Internet represented a force for subversion, and Wired’s list of the most dangerous people on the internet mostly consisted of rebellious individuals using the online world’s disruptive potential to take on the world’s power structures. But as the internet has entered every facet of our lives, and governments and political figures have learned to exploit it, the most dangerous people on the internet today often are the most powerful people. List includes: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, James Comey, ISIS, Milo Yiannopoulos, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Julian Assange, and Peter Thiel.

In the waning days of Barack Obama’s presidency, his team has a new plan to shore up America’s protections from digital threats. Whether any of it happens, though, is up to President-elect Donald Trump.

Recently, the White House’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity released the results of a nine-month study of America’s cybersecurity problems. But as President Obama acknowledged in a statement accompanying those recommendations, actualizing them is largely out of his hands. He asked the cybersecurity commission to brief President-elect Trump’s transition team on its work as soon as possible. Whether the Trump team will in fact accept the commission’s advice—or even its briefing request—remains a mystery. “No one in Washington knows what he’s going to do,” says Alan Paller, the director of research at the security-focused SANS Institute and a former cybersecurity advisor to the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. Paller says that even Trump’s potential appointments for cybersecurity policy positions remain an unknown. “It’s very challenging to know who will be picked, and whether this [report] will have anything to do with their priorities.”

The second week of August isn’t ordinarily a time given over to novelty and ambition in New York. The air is a jellied vapor of sweat and refuse, and anybody who can afford to be elsewhere is. But the vast Queensbridge housing complex was an unlikely scene of neon-vested hustle. The six-story brown-brick apartment blocks along 41st Avenue had been encased in green scaffolding and draped with long, heavy bolts of cream burlap, which gave the blunt rectilinear forms a veil of anticipation. Queensbridge had been recently named the beneficiary of millions of municipal dollars for neighborhood development, and the attitude, a young press secretary from the New York City Housing Authority told me, was one of “all hands on deck.” Workers mended the leaky roofs and repointed the brick facades. Permanent LEDs had been ordered to replace the broken sulfur fixtures; in the meantime, mobile arrays of large klieg lights had been set up in the courtyards and along the thoroughfares. CCTV cameras were going to be ensconced along the perimeters and above the entryways, and layered-­access doors, like shuttle airlocks, were to be introduced along with key-fob admittance. Perhaps the most consequential upgrade, however, was invisible: the introduction of free, grounds­-­wide wireless broadband.

Facebook and several other Western companies tried to give away free Internet in India, but regulators wouldn’t allow it. The trouble is that the service provided free access to some online apps—including Facebook—but not others. This is called zero-rating, and regulators believe it harms online competition, giving certain companies an unfair advantage over others. So far, despite complaints from various public advocates, US regulators have just let zero rating happen. But the issue may soon come to a head, now that AT&T, one of the world’s biggest Internet service providers, has signed an $85.4 billion agreement to acquire Time Warner, one of the world’s biggest media companies.

The overarching problem here is that widespread zero-rating harms innovation. It prevents newer and smaller players from challenging the established companies, and that’s particularly true when those established companies start consolidating and getting even bigger. And companies of a certain size can have an influence on the rest of the playing field—as the Justice Department seeks to show with a new lawsuit against none other than DirecTV, accusing the company of colluding with other pay-TV companies to block content (before its merger with AT&T). Among public advocates, the hope is that regulators will bar a combined AT&T-Time Warner from practicing zero-rating, but that’s not enough. The bigger hope is that the AT&T deal leads to stiffer rules for the entire industry—a firm declaration that zero-rating harms competition wherever it’s practiced.

The October 9 debate attracted 63 million TV viewers, a 20 percent decline from the first. But on YouTube, debate content—including all videos related to the debate—garnered 124 million views, a 40 percent spike compared with the first. And that’s just on YouTube. Another 3.2 million tuned into Twitter’s livestream, and Facebook’s Live broadcast partnership with ABC News now has 7.4 million views.

Blame it on football season, blame it on the cord cutters, blame it on the gutter-level mudslinging driving some traditional viewers away, or blame it on humans’ technologically enabled short attention spans, but it seems Americans are increasingly interested in watching the debate in bite-sized portions, rather than sitting through the long slog. According to YouTube, viewers tuned into its livestream for an average of 25 minutes. Altogether, though, they watched 2.5 million hours of the livestream. That’s still smaller than the total TV hours watched, but it’s nearly six times more views than YouTube received in 2012. Of course, it can be a little tougher for campaigns to parse these online numbers to figure out whether likely voters actually tuned in.