Wired

The House of Representatives is set to vote as early as March 28 on a resolution that would reverse Obama-era regulations preventing internet service providers from selling your web browsing history on the open market. All of which means you’ll need to take your online privacy into your own hands. Several technical workarounds—especially virtual private networks, or VPNs—will return some semblance of control to you, the internet user. But even these solutions are far from perfect. When it comes to privacy, tech can help. But it doesn’t take the place of having the law on your side.

[Commentary] President Barack Obama more than any other president sought to apply Silicon Valley’s disruptive methods to government in an effort to make it work better for the people it’s supposed to serve. The White House has tapped President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to lead the newly christened White House Office of American Innovation, which will reportedly operate like an in-house management consultancy, bringing fresh business ideas to government. Destructive innovation can work well for a company like, say, Uber, which is accountable only to its customers. But government doesn’t have customers. It has citizens for whom the government theoretically works. In practice that means policymakers can’t cavalierly destroy something to build it anew. A functional democracy doesn’t pick winners and losers. It exists to serve everyone. Instead of winner-take-all disruption, Kushner and his team of tech A-listers should tackle broader issues of efficiency and collaboration, which can be solved with better technology or processes—things that add value without taking any away from somewhere else.

Network neutrality is in danger, and former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler isn’t pleased. Republicans’ go-to argument against the order is that it gave the FCC the authority to regulate the internet. Wheeler, who stepped down as FCC chair on Inauguration Day in 2017, calls the idea “ridiculous.” “This is no more the regulation of the internet than the First Amendment is the regulation of free speech,” Wheeler said.

Imagine a world where Comcast slows video streaming from Fox News’s website to a pixelated crawl while boosting Rachel Maddow—who happens to star on Comcast-owned MSNBC. What if Verizon, which owns the liberal Huffington Post, charged you more to visit right-wing Breitbart. Or maybe Google Fiber bans access to the alt-right social network Gab.

Today, it’s illegal to impose tiered pricing on any internet content, thanks to the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules. But if Republicans have their way, those rules will soon disappear, leaving companies like Comcast and Verizon free to block, throttle, or charge a toll to access your favorite websites and apps. Republicans may find trying to unwind net neutrality less popular than they think. Americans tend to see internet access as an extension of their First Amendment freedoms—they can say and see what they want online. If they have to start paying more for one kind of political speech over another, they likely won’t stay neutral at all.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai suggested that the reclassification and resulting restrictions have hindered telecoms from investing in improved infrastructure. It’s a tricky game—advocates on both sides can make the numbers say what they want.

But Pai’s gambit appears in part to hinge on convincing people that net neutrality, at least as currently enforced, will slow the spread of 5G, the next iteration of ultra-high speed wireless. Chairman Pai says his deregulatory strategy will help prepare the US for 5G. “It’s not a forgone conclusion that we will fully realize this technological potential,” he said in Barcelona. “After all, building, maintaining, and upgrading broadband networks is expensive.” In other words, he’s worried that if he doesn’t get rid of the Open Internet Order, carriers won’t upgrade their infrastructure to 5G. Ultimately, the bigger threat to the Open Internet Order may come from Congress, where Republicans have been trying to kill it since before the FCC passed it. Pai doesn’t seem likely to wait around for them, even if that means making his case in court.

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona saw the further rise of a movement that seeks to upend the traditional telecommunication business model, encouraging telecom companies to build common infrastructure they all can share. Why build three networks when you can build one? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone, telcos and consumers alike? Wouldn’t you get a 5G signal sooner—and for less money? The chief mover is not a telco. Rather, it’s a company that has made a habit of putting its name, money, and power behind efforts to democratize the development of new technology: Facebook.

On Feb 27, Facebook announced collaborations with two different telcos in Uganda to lay about 480 miles of fiber in the northwest region of the African nation. The three companies plan to share this fiber with any other interested telco, distributing the internet to countless wireless towers and then on to an estimated 3 million people in the process. Facebook hopes the project can serve as a template for telcos looking to more quickly and efficiently deploy fiber to places that don’t already have it. “Where operators can come together and leverage common infrastructure, there is more flexibility, lower cost, and a better time to market,” says Faceboook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh. And ultimately, that means more people will use Facebook.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s rise from relative obscurity to big headlines corresponds not just with the Trump’s arrival in Washington, but with the ever-greater centrality of the internet to American life, political and otherwise.

From its start in 1934, the FCC has played a crucial role in determining how Americans communicate and gather information. But for most of its existence, it’s been a boring, technocratic agency tasked with granting broadcast licenses and divvying up the wireless spectrum. It occasionally waded into controversies like obscenity laws, media consolidation rules, or the Fairness Doctrine, but even when decisions followed party lines, they rarely became political firestorms. But these days, the FCC has grown increasingly polarized—and polarizing. The agency that regulates the internet is becoming as sharply divided as the internet itself. You can’t blame petty politics alone for the mess the FCC finds itself in. Debates over net neutrality and cable boxes stem from an ideological shift in Washington. In earlier days, it was “good regulation versus bad regulation,” says Chris Lewis, vice president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. Now it’s “more regulation versus less regulation.” The Trump administration has signaled a hard shift in the direction of deregulation, though it may occasionally come down in favor of government intervention when politically desirable.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s outlook is clearly in line with administration. But he, like the president and Congress, have an obligation to the public, not just to the Republican base or to free market ideology. No one, not even the telecommunication industry, is well served by regulations that yo-yo back and forth as the political seasons change. The internet, at least in this case, should really be above politics.

A set of internet privacy rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission has become a target for Republicans.

Though it’s received far less attention than healthcare or immigration, the rollback would affect millions of consumers and bring basic changes to how they use the internet—though they might not ever know it. Companies like Google and Facebook can learn an awful lot about you based on what you search for, what pages you “like,” and who your friends are. But your wireless company and in-home broadband provider could learn much more. Although Google uses encryption to protect your searches from prying eyes, these companies can potentially see what sites you actually end up visiting and when you visit them. Mobile carriers track your location and could keep tabs on how much time you spend using different apps. And they can sell that information to the highest bidder.

Now Sen Jeff Flake (R-AZ) plans to introduce a resolution to overturn the FCC rules, enabling internet providers and wireless companies to sell your data unless you explicitly opt out. “The FCC’s midnight regulation does nothing to protect consumer privacy,” Senator Flake said. “It is unnecessary, confusing and adds yet another innovation-stifling regulation to the internet.”

President Donald Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly met recently with Time Warner executives to complain about CNN’s coverage of the president. Any visit from a White House official seeking to stifle journalists is disturbing. But Time Warner, which owns CNN, has another problem that’s all tied up in presidential politics.

The cable and entertainment giant is seeking to sell itself to AT&T, a mega-merger that would require federal approval. At this point, thanks to Kushner’s visit, any move by the Department of Justice or the Federal Communications Commission to block the merger would end up looking political. That’s too bad, because there are plenty of good reasons to be skeptical of the deal. AT&T could hike the rates that other pay TV providers have to pay to provide channels like HBO and CNN. It could refuse to license that content to streaming video services. It could give Time Warner an edge over competitors on its wireless network by exempting its content from data caps. All that stands to get lost in Trump’s petty war on the press.

Google Fiber is getting a lot smaller. Alphabet is sending hundreds of employees at Access—the division that runs the high-speed internet service—to work at other parts of the company. It’s not the end of Fiber, not exactly. But the slimming-down likely signals a future for Alphabet’s broadband ambitions that involves less fiber. Google first announced Fiber in 2010 with a widely publicized contest to see which city the company would first grace with its ultra-fast service. Since then, Fiber has spread to several US cities and metropolitan areas. But Access said in October that it was curtailing plans to expand to new locations, and Alphabet has clearly lost faith in the idea of running fiber optic cables right into people’s homes, at least in the traditional way.

Instead, Access has hired a new CEO, tech and broadband veteran Greg McCray, to figure out new ways to bring faster—and presumably cheaper—high-speed internet access to the rest of the country. McCray used to be chief executive officer of telecom services provider Aero Communications Inc. He also sits on the board of CenturyLink Inc., one of the biggest U.S. providers of internet and phone services for businesses.