Digital Content

House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Greg Walden (R-OR) and Consumer Protection Subcommittee Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) announced the subcommittee’s agenda to ensure American leadership in emerging technology to beat China and other challenges to global competitiveness. The emerging technology agenda includes 15 bills designed to advance American leadership. The objectives of the legislation are "Advancing and Securing Emerging Technologies", "Global Data Innovation and Security", "Advancing Innovation Across the Country", and "Combating Harms Through Innovation". 

Hulu has been hit with a class action lawsuit that claims it deliberately throttles its service on web browsers. The suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on April 16, contends that Hulu is trying to force subscribers to use its app, so that it can more easily collect and sell their data.

Public Knowledge has been tracking the efforts of digital platforms to counter mis- and dis-information about the novel coronavirus pandemic since early March. This tracking has involved careful analysis of hundreds of articles, abstracts, research, and opinion pieces about how platforms are responding to the pandemic.

News organizations have long hoped that tech platforms would pay them for news. Now regulators abroad are moving to make that happen. A report by Australian regulators left little doubt about what they see as the cause of local journalism’s demise — the near-monopolistic power of Google and Facebook.

Social-media usage is blowing up, but will it crash when real-life invitations start flooding back in?

Children are accessing the internet at a younger age, spending longer online and are at greater risk of cyber bullying as the COVID-19 pandemic keeps them at home, said the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The United Nations agency estimates that 1.5 billion children are out of school due to lockdown measures to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, forcing them to go online for their schooling but also their social lives and hobbies.

The connectivity and services built by information capitalists have become too important to be left any longer without public participation in determining the rules they follow. Critical nature of these digital services warrants public interest representation in decisions about their practices. Here are four ideas to incorporate public participation in establishing the rules for the critical services of the information era:

CenturyLink’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew Dugan said that some European regulators asked two groups of internet content providers to slow down their traffic in response to increased network loads stemming from the COVID-19 crisis. The two groups of content providers are over-the-top (OTT) video companies and gaming companies. EU Industry Chief Thierry Breton had urged streaming platforms including Netflix and YouTube to cooperate with telecom providers and temporarily downgrade the quality of video streaming by offering standard definition rather than high definition video.

The public health crisis has exposed New York’s digital divide. Lawmakers representing communities in upstate New York have voiced concerns about the issue for years, fighting to increase access to high-speed internet in rural communities that often struggle to even get a bar of cell service. But despite repeated pledges by state officials to remedy the situation, access to high-speed broadband internet remains elusive in the state’s bucolic areas.

As lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, and social distancing threaten to stretch out into the weeks, months, and even years ahead, there is a scramble to collect, in real time, the overwhelming abundance of information being produced online. Without it, the record of how we lived, how we changed, and how we addressed the global pandemic would be left incomplete and at the mercy of a constantly shifting internet, where even recent history has a tendency to get buried or vanish.