Digital Content

The network neutrality debate is often framed as a fight by everyday citizens to prevent broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast from using their servers to throttle or slow the internet traffic of business rivals. But internet service providers’ opponents in the long-running Washington fight — major content “edge” providers like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix — don’t exactly have clean hands in the fight, according to analysts who say those firms have a way of favoring their content, in the form of content delivery networks.

CDNs are clusters of servers that cache data from content providers to reduce the delay before a transfer of data begins — a way for the prominent and deep-pocketed sites to load more quickly than others. The networks are often owned by third party companies like Akamai Technologies, while some of the largest content providers have built their own. Globally, 71 percent of all internet traffic will cross CDNs by 2021, compared with 52 percent in 2016. Those networks have the ability to discriminate against and interrupt content flows, according to Dan Rayburn, principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan and executive vice president of Streamingmedia. Rayburn suggested that the Open Internet Order enacted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015 was myopically focussed on ISPs. “If you’re thinking rationally about this, you’d address it with CDNs, with transit providers, with backbone providers,” Rayburn said. “You’d address it with everybody.”

LinkedIn may very well succeed in its effort to stop a San Francisco (CA) startup from using the data of its members. But the Sunnyvale (CA) company, now a division of Microsoft, has certainly lost the moral high ground. In fact, the job-hunting and networking site is guilty of blatant hypocrisy. HiQ Labs makes software that analyzes data from public LinkedIn profiles to help employers determine which workers are likely to leave or stay. But at a hearing at U.S. District Court in San Francisco, lawyers representing LinkedIn argued that HiQ was causing significant harm to its business because members expected LinkedIn to protect their privacy. LinkedIn’s most valuable currency is “trust with customers,” said Donald Verrilli, a partner with Munger, Tolles & Olson law firm in Washington. That sounds very noble. But the very idea of a social media giant serving as the champion of privacy rights seems suspect. When a service tells you it’s free, that means it’s making money another way. And more likely than not, you’re the product.

A questioner raised an interesting prospect at TechFreedom's Back to the Future of Policy Summit earlier this week: the chance that artificial intelligence could be used to aid lawmakers on Capitol Hill as they make decisions. Automation has already come to the legal field — which overlaps with policymaking — but it is for lower-level tasks and isn't totally phasing out lawyers. "I'm not saying it's 10 years from now, maybe it's 20 years from now," replied House Oversight Committee Counsel Mike Flynn. "But at some point I would imagine there's going to be a role for that in policy making."

One out of every seven people on the planet uses the messaging app WhatsApp every day, according a recent blog post from the company. A billion people a day send messages to their friends and family on a service that's end-to-end encrypted by default, up from a billion per month from 2016. That surge in growth stands in sharp contrast to Twitter, which added approximately no new monthly uses last quarter, and had in fact lost two million in the US. WhatsApp and Twitter don't just represent contrary growth curves; they're the polar opposites of messaging. Twitter is public. WhatsApp is private. Twitter has a huge problem with safety, while WhatsApp has made privacy and security the center of its mission. And it's now more clear than ever that people have made their choice.

The infrastructure we rely on every day to make sure our digital clocks are in sync or to protect our credit card information when we shop online is often maintained by a single volunteer. This means that often, just one person makes sure that the essential software code that powers so many of the products and services we use every day runs smoothly.

This is because the same free software code is used for the critical components in many different kinds of software: No one person “owns” it. This enables innovation, because everyone can build off what has come before, and makes it possible for more technology to be created at a lower cost, because no one needs to start from scratch. But this free, public code—which we refer to as open source software—needs regular upkeep and maintenance, just as physical infrastructure does, and because it doesn’t belong to any one person or party, it is no one person’s job to maintain it. Without maintenance, we see the digital equivalent of a crumbling road or a collapsing bridge. Some people call this phenomenon a “tragedy of the commons.”

Apparently, tech companies like Facebook and Google that have become essential elements of 21st-century life should be regulated as utilities, top White House adviser Steve Bannon has argued. Bannon’s push for treating essential tech platforms as utilities pre-dates the Democratic “Better Deal” that was released this week. “Better Deal,” the branding for Democrats’ political objectives, included planks aimed at breaking up monopolies in a variety of sectors, suggesting that anti-monopoly politics is on the rise on both the right and left.

Bannon’s basic argument, as he has outlined it to people who’ve spoken with him, is that Facebook and Google have become effectively a necessity in contemporary life. Indeed, there may be something about an online social network or a search engine that lends itself to becoming a natural monopoly, much like a cable company, a water and sewer system, or a railroad.

[Commentary] More than 50 percent of Google Play apps targeted at children under 13—we examined more than 5,000 of the most popular (many of which have been downloaded millions of times)—appear to be failing to protect data. In fact, the apps we examined appear to regularly send potentially sensitive information—including device serial numbers, which are often paired with location data, email addresses, and other personally identifiable information—to third-party advertisers. Over 90 percent of these cases involve apps transmitting identifiers that cannot be changed or deleted, like hardware serial numbers—thereby enabling long-term tracking.

We suspect that most of the developers whose apps fail to protect data do not have nefarious intent, but rather fail to configure their software properly or neglect to scrutinize practices of the third-party advertisers they rely upon to generate revenue. When building an app, developers import ready-to-use code from many different third-parties, including advertising companies. While this code “reuse” results in time savings and fewer errors, app developers likely do not realize that they are liable for all code included in their apps, regardless of whether or not they were the ones who wrote it.

[Serge Egelman is research director of the Usable Security & Privacy group at the International Computer Science Institute and an affiliated researcher at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity]

A bipartisan bill, the ECPA Modernization Act, has been introduced that would update communications privacy law to protect cloud storage. It is the latest effort by the Senate to address the issue after the House voted overwhelmingly to protect older data. In the previous Congress, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) pulled an Electronic Communications Privacy Act update bill from the committee's markup agenda after "poison pill" amendments threatened to expand the bill into areas that neither of its co-sponsors wanted it to go. That baseline bill, which passed the House 419 to zero, would have updated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to provide protections for cloud storage by requiring a probable cause warrant for accessing information in the cloud and extending the protections to emails and other content stored over 180 days (currently no warrant is required to access those).

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had settled it when he said President Trump's tweets “are considered official statements by the president of the United States.” But Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) doesn't agree. In an interview about Trump's (Twitter-driven) attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Rep Stewart said this: “I quit reading the president's tweets quite a long time ago. I don’t pay that much attention to them, and I'd recommend other people not pay a whole lot of attention to it because I don’t think it's policy.” And House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said, "I don't read that stuff."

The Federal Communications Commission is determined to be Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing’s (TDI) partner and meet this moment. I’d like to walk through the Commission’s multi-part strategy for improving the lives of Americans with disabilities through communications technology. The first part of this strategy is pretty straightforward: to uphold our legal obligations to promote accessibility and to advance new rules when appropriate. Part two of our accessibility strategy is encouraging the private sector to make accessibility a priority, rather than an afterthought. A third way that the FCC aims to promote accessibility is to lead by example. We are seeing real success with our direct video calling program—also called DVC. Bottom line: When it comes to accessibility, the FCC is practicing what we preach. The fourth and final piece of our accessibility agenda might not strike you at first as relevant to accessibility. But our work to bridge the digital divide is critically important to Americans with disabilities. We are aiming to connect every American with digital opportunity regardless of who they are or where they live.