Internet/Broadband

On April 18, 2017, Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep Mike Doyle (D-PA) wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai urging him to postpone the vote on the Business Data Services (BDS) Report and Order that was scheduled for a vote at the April 20, 2017 FCC meeting.

On July 17, Chairman Pai responded by saying, "In your letter, you suggest additional protections for small businesses and the need for a reasonable transition as well as a delay of the Commission's vote. Although the Commission was unable to accommodate your every request, I note that the Commission did deny incumbent carriers a catch-up adjustment to their existing rates in non-competitive areas and implemented a staged transition: In newly deregulated areas, price-cap carriers cannot raise their tariffed rates for special access services for a period of six months and have three years to transition to de-tariff their services. The Commission also emphasized that incumbents may not use the de-tariffng process to disturb existing contractual or other long-term arrangements-a contract tariff remains a contract even if it is no longer tariffed. Finally, the Commission adopted downward pricing flexibility in still regulated areas to ensure that small businesses in rural America have the opportunity to receive the same discounts now available in urban areas."

On June 22,2 017, members of Congress from Missouri, Sens Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO), and Reps Billy Long (R-MO), Sam Graves (R-MO), Vicky Hartzler (R-MO), Blaine Luetkemeyor (R-MO), Jason Smith (R-MO), and Ann Wagner (R-MO), wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai regarding completing the next steps under the Connect America Fund, and to state their opposition to any efforts or petitions to delay or alter implementation of the rules.

On July 18, Chairman Pai responded by saying, "The CAF 11 Auction Order adopted auction weights designed to give every bidder- no matter what technology they use-a meaningful opportunity to compete for federal funds, while ensuring the best value for the American taxpayer. With this Public Notice, we are seeking comment on the procedures to be used during this auction. Moving forward now will put us on track to conduct the auction in 2018."

Software made by foreign companies to help Chinese users skirt the country’s system of internet filters has vanished from Apple’s app store on the mainland. One company, ExpressVPN, posted a letter it received from Apple saying that its app had been taken down “because it includes content that is illegal in China.” Another posted a message on its official account that its app had been removed. A search showed that some of the most popular foreign virtual-private networks, also known as VPNs, which give users access to the unfiltered internet in China, were no longer accessible on Apple’s app store there. ExpressVPN wrote that the removal was “surprising and unfortunate.” It added, “We’re disappointed in this development, as it represents the most drastic measure the Chinese government has taken to block the use of VPNs to date, and we are troubled to see Apple aiding China’s censorship efforts.”

Millions of United Kingdom broadband customers who do not get the connection speeds they pay for should receive compensation. A new report calls on Ofcom, the UK media and telecommunications regulator, to get tough on broadband providers that promise fast speeds but fail to deliver. The British infrastructure group of Members of Parliament (MPs), led by former Tory party chairman Grant Shapps, estimates that as many as 6.7 million UK broadband connections may not hit the 10Mb minimum that the government wants to be the UK standard for a basic decent service. The Broadband 2.0 report, which is backed by 57 MPs, calls for automatic compensation for customers who do not get the level of speed promised from the internet packages they buy. “Although broadband is increasingly considered to be an essential utility, the quality of customer services has simply not caught up with demand,” said Shapps. “It is unacceptable that there are still no minimum standards in the UK telecoms sector to protect customers from protracted complaints procedures, and ensure that broadband providers are fully accountable to their customers.”

[Commentary] The current network neutrality regulations set forth in the 2015 Open Internet Order (2015 OIO) prohibit Internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or throttling lawful content or engaging in paid prioritization of Internet traffic. These three “bright line rules” cover a wide swath of ISP practices and are intended to promote competition and ensure quality service transmission for content providers and end users. At the same time, however, they fail to consider more nuanced issues that complicate achieving these outcomes.

Christopher Yoo, Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and founding director of the Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, makes the case for one such issue in his recent work, “.” This post is the sixth in a series featuring the contents of a recent special issue of the Review of Industrial Organization, organized by the Technology Policy Institute and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition. Yoo argues that, contrary to the FCC’s claim in the Order, practices like zero rating can stimulate competition among infrastructure providers and edge services. He contends that zero rating should not be prohibited but rather handled on a case-by-case basis. He supports these claims with economic theory, competition theory, and a number of case studies featuring zero rating.

[Romzek is a 2017 Google Policy Fellow and Research Associate at the Technology Policy Institute. Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at TPI]

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.

[Commentary] Microsoft recently made a Very Serious Announcement about deploying unused television airwaves to solve the digital divide in America. News outlets ate it up. Here's what's really going on: Microsoft is aiming to be the soup-to-nuts provider of Internet of Things devices, software, and consulting services to zillions of local and national governments around the world.

Microsoft doesn't want to have to rely on existing mobile data carriers to execute those plans. Why? Because the carriers will want a pound of flesh—a percentage—in exchange for shipping data generated by Microsoft devices from Point A to Point B. These costs can become very substantial over zillions of devices in zillions of cities. The carriers have power because, in many places, they are the only ones allowed to use airwave frequencies—spectrum—under licenses from local governments for which they have paid hundreds of millions of dollars. To eliminate that bottleneck, it will be good to have
unlicensed spectrum available everywhere, and cheap chipsets and devices available that can opportunistically take advantage of that spectrum.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.]

West Virginia’s largest cable companies have filed a lawsuit against Gov Jim Justice (D-WV) and Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, alleging that a new state law could ultimately cause internet service outages at customers’ homes and businesses. The state Cable Telecommunications Association is challenging new rules designed to make it easier for startup internet firms to secure access to utility poles. The cable companies don’t want competitors meddling with their equipment housed atop the poles. About 400,000 West Virginians have telephone and internet service through cable providers. “There could be significant damage to equipment and to customer relationships and outages and things of that sort when you have circumstances where there are no limitations at all on competitors moving other competitors’ equipment around,” said Mark Polen, spokesman for the cable group.

The companies say the new law allows the smaller internet companies to hire private contractors and rearrange existing equipment atop utility poles without permission. Federal rules already dictate how telecommunication companies share and access equipment on utility poles, according to the lawsuit. The new state law conflicts with longstanding federal law, the cable group alleges. The lawsuit characterizes the state law as “invalid” and “unconstitutional.”

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.”