Digital Content

Cable operator Internet service providers have been pushing hard against an opt-in regime for sharing user data with third parties, but there is another opt-in regime they are concerned about avoiding. In a phone call with the office of Commissioner Mignon Clyburn of the Federal Communications Commission, NCTA–The Internet & Television Association VP and deputy general counsel Diane Burstein argued against applying that regime to how broadband operators provide required notifications to their customers.

The FCC signaled it would be voting on a request for declaratory ruling by NCTA and the American Cable Association that they be allowed to e-mail those notifications rather than have to send out paper. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has signaled support for that ruling, so it is expected to pass, but how it is implemented is also important to ISPs. Burstein told Commissioner Clyburn staffers that though operators would continue to offer paper notices to customers who wanted them, the default should be electronic unless a subscriber opts out and chooses paper.

[Commentary] After 2016’s election, Facebook came in for a drubbing for its role in propagating misinformation — or “fake news,” as we called it back then, before the term became a catchall designation for any news you don’t like. The criticism was well placed: Facebook is the world’s most popular social network, and millions of people look to it daily for news. But the focus on Facebook let another social network off the hook. I speak of my daily addiction, Twitter.

Though the 140-character network favored by President Trump is far smaller than Facebook, it is used heavily by people in media and thus exerts perhaps an even greater sway on the news business. That’s an issue because Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious — for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker is delivering her annual rapid-fire internet trends report. Here’s a first look at the most highly anticipated slide deck in Silicon Valley:
Global smartphone growth is slowing: Smartphone shipments grew 3 percent year over year last year, versus 10 percent the year before. This is in addition to continued slowing internet growth, which Meeker discussed last year.
Voice is beginning to replace typing in online queries. Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016, while accuracy is now about 95 percent.
In 10 years, Netflix went from 0 to more than 30 percent of home entertainment revenue in the U.S. This is happening while TV viewership continues to decline.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when President Donald Trump refrained from flamethrowing messages on Twitter. That time is over. Never mind that his aides have asked him to stop. Never mind that now the lawyers have told him to stop. Even though his White House has been warned that tweets could be used as evidence against him, President Trump has made clear in the days after returning from a largely Twitter-free overseas trip that he fully intends to stick to his favorite means of communication. Throughout 2016’s campaign and into the early months of his presidency, the concern among Trump’s advisers was mainly political. Every time the president let loose with one of his 140-character blasts, it distracted from his agenda and touched off a media frenzy that could last for days. But now the worry has turned increasingly legal. With multiple investigations looking at whether the president’s associates collaborated with Russia to influence the election, any random, unfiltered tweet could become part of a legal case.

[Commentary] The BROWSER Act would establish affirmative consent (“opt in”) requirements for the collection and use of certain data, such as location and web browsing histories. In addition, the bill would restrict companies from conditioning access to their services on whether users choose to share their data. If adopted, these policies would be a disaster for Internet users and companies. First, obtaining consent is expensive. Second, requiring companies to obtain affirmative consent would make digital services less user-friendly without increasing privacy. Third, the bill requires providers to allow users to remove their data whenever they wish. Finally, the bill prohibits service providers from refusing to provide service as a “direct or indirect consequence of the refusal of a user to waive any such privacy rights.” Congress should reject this legislation, or any similar proposal that attempts to impose opt-in requirements on the digital economy.

Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) offered a head-slapping defense of a conspiracy theory he touted on CNN: It was something that he’d seen on the Internet.

Rep Farenthold was suggesting that questions about any link between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian actors was “deflecting away from some other things that we need to be investigating in.” “There’s still some question,” he said, “as to whether the intrusion at the server was an insider job or whether or not it was the Russians.” CNN’s John Berman interrupted. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The insider job — what are you referring to here? I hope it’s not this information that Fox News just refused to be reporting.” “Again, there’s stuff circulating on the Internet,” Rep Farenthold said. Co-host Poppy Harlow asked if it was responsible to cite Internet rumors as a rationale to launch a congressional investigation. Rep Farenthold replied that the media sometimes relied on anonymous sources for its reporting — so therefore it was.

What exactly is the web?

It seems like a stupid question because we all know the answer: the web is the thing Tim Berners-Lee invented in 1989. It's not the same thing as "the internet," which is what we use to access the web, apps, and streaming video. It's what we visit every day with our web browsers on our phones and laptops. Simple, right? Well, no. Traditionally, we think of the web as a combination of a set of specific technologies paired with some core philosophical principles. The problem — the reason this question even matters — is that there are a lot of potential replacements for the parts of the web that fix what's broken with technology, while undermining the principles that ought to go with it. The tech you think of as "the web" is HTML, Javascript, and CSS. (For simplicity, I'll just refer to it at the "HTML stack.") Those technologies are so open and flexible that they've taken over the world. That very flexibility also means that they've been abused, slowing down the mobile web with trackers that invade our privacy and deplete our batteries. So a lot of tech companies are flailing around looking for ways to fix this problem.