Internet/Broadband

[Commentary] The front-page story in The Wall Street Journal announced, “Walt Disney Co. just became the biggest cord-cutter Hollywood has ever seen.” The iconic company announced it was starting two online streaming services that will bypass its traditional cable television distribution. Thank you, Open Internet Rule!

The sine qua non that made it all possible was the Federal Communications Commission Open Internet Rule that the cable operators cannot deny, degrade or deprioritize Disney access to their broadband service, even when it is competitive to their cable service. This is the very same rule that the Trump FCC, at the request of the lobbyists for the big broadband companies, has announced an intention to eliminate. And the very same rule that Republican legislators are pushing content providers to help them scuttle. The Open Internet Rule – especially the General Conduct Rule portion – is like Disney’s famous character Jiminy Cricket, who acted as Pinocchio’s conscience. As the Jiminy Cricket of the Internet Age, the Open Internet Rule sits on the shoulder of broadband providers to make sure they do the right thing.

[Tom Wheeler is a visiting fellow with the Governance Studies, Center for Technology Innovation, and former Chairman to the FCC.]

Comcast Corporation announced that its acclaimed Internet Essentials program, the nation’s largest and most comprehensive high-speed Internet adoption program, has now connected more than four million low-income Americans, in one million households, to high-speed Internet service at home. The State of Florida is second to California with the most connected households in the country, having connected more than 120,000 low-income households benefitting nearly 500,000 Floridians.

The company also announced three key program enhancements:
For the fourth time in six years, Comcast will increase the program’s Internet service speeds, this time from 10/1 Mbps to up to 15/2 Mbps.
To help family members connect to the Internet on the go and save money on their wireless bills, Internet Essentials customers will now enjoy 40 hours of free out-of-home WiFi access per month to the company’s growing network of 18 million Xfinity WiFi hotspots.
Comcast is also expanding its pilot program for low-income senior citizens from five cities and metropolitan areas to 12, including today in Miami-Dade County (FL).

The Federal Communications Commission is seeking input on how it should gauge whether broadband is being deployed in a timely manner — a determination the commission makes annually in the FCC Broadband Progress Report. Under consideration is “whether some form of advanced telecommunications capability, be it fixed or mobile, is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.” Alternatively, the commission asked for input on whether it should consider an area to be served only if both fixed and mobile broadband are available there. Traditionally the report has only considered fixed service in gauging broadband deployment progress.

Though they received only a two-week extension to a deadline for public comments on proposed changes to network neutrality rules, rather than the eight weeks they had sought, net neutrality proponents say they remain focused on making sure the Federal Communications Commission continues to hear from the public.

On Aug 11, Daniel Kahn, chief of the Competition Policy Division for the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau, announced that the Aug. 16 deadline for comments had been extended until Aug. 30. Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said that while a longer extension would have bolstered net neutrality proponents’ arguments, the most important thing was ensuring the FCC actually listened to the public. “Most of us feel that while we’d like more time to make our arguments better, the truth is what’s most important is if the comments would be heard with an open and fair mind and not presumptively judged ahead of time — which seems to be the signals that are coming out of the leadership of the FCC,” Black said.

A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution.

“What we have is a sweeping request for every single file we have” in relation to DisruptJ20.org, said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost, which hosts the site. “The search warrant is not only dealing with everything in relation to the website but also tons of data about people who visited it.” The request also covers emails between the site’s organizers and people interested in attending the protests, any deleted messages and files, as well as subscriber information — such as names and addresses — and unpublished photos and blog posts that are stored in the site’s database, according to the warrant and Ghazarian.

[Commentary] Today, US technology companies adhere to a wide array of requirements from repressive governments that undermine Internet freedom and privacy. These demands violate international law, including the right to freedom of expression. But the enormous benefits of market access outweigh the relatively low costs associated with accepting repressive governments’ demands.

Undoubtedly, there are circumstances in which requests for information or access to accounts are reasonable, such as when investigating terrorism and major crimes. But the misuse and abuse of this power by authoritarian governments are routine. Unless the U.S. government stands in support of companies that refuse to comply with wrongful requirements, authoritarian regimes will feel emboldened to make ever-increasing and unreasonable demands. And while U.S. technology companies should be able to invest in Internet-restricting countries, if their choices directly facilitate the persecution of these governments’ political opponents, then they should bear the costs.

[Jared Genser is an international human rights lawyer based in Washington.]

In a recent perspective, I reviewed a report authored by Dr. Christopher Hooton of the Internet Association on the impact of Net Neutrality regulation on broadband infrastructure investment. My earlier review of the IA Report focused mainly on Dr. Hooton’s difference-indifferences (“DiD”) model, which from an empirical perspective is the only analysis he offered that could plausibly quantify the effects of the regulation since it involves a counterfactual.

In this perspective, I return to Dr. Hooton’s analysis. My interest in further analysis stems from Dr. Hooton’s claim that his evidence leans in the direction of a positive investment effect in that his “regression coefficients of interest were positive in all but one case.” (That negative case being his primary DiD analysis.) Closer inspection of these “positive” cases reveals errors as severe, if not worse than, the errors plaguing his DiD analysis, including the fabrication of much of his data.

[Commentary] The proposed witness list for a September network neutrality hearing at the House Commerce Committee betrays a dismaying ignorance about why net neutrality is an issue.

The committee set the hearing up as something of a clash of titans, inviting the chief executives of the largest broadband providers and the biggest Internet companies, such as Google, Facebook and Netflix. The only thing missing was a steel cage. The point of having net neutrality rules isn’t to protect multibillion-dollar Internet companies. It’s to give other companies a chance to join or topple them. The rapid pace of technological change makes even companies with enormous economies of scale vulnerable to disruption, especially when consumers can easily switch from one shiny online object to the next. Curiously, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and other Republicans have voiced less concern about the prospects of these smaller online businesses — the ones likely to inject a crucial dose of innovation into the 21st century economy — than the ability of giant, consolidating broadband providers to invest in faster, more widely available services. Better broadband connections in rural America, poverty-stricken inner cities and other underserved areas is a most worthy goal. But those connections shouldn’t come at the cost of net neutrality.

If Republican lawmakers don’t like applying decades-old utility-style regulation to broadband providers, they need to work with Democrats to give the commission explicit new authority to protect the open Internet from interference. Otherwise, the fight over how to do that will be always-on too.

Months before social-media company Snap publicly disclosed slowing user growth, rival Facebook already knew.

Late in 2016, Facebook employees used an internal database of a sampling of mobile users’ activity to observe that usage of Snap’s flagship app, Snapchat, wasn’t growing as quickly as before. They saw that the shift occurred after Facebook’s Instagram app launched Stories, a near-replica of a Snapchat feature of the same name. Facebook’s early insight came thanks to its 2013 acquisition of Israeli mobile-analytics company Onavo, which distributes a data-security app that has been downloaded by millions of users. Data from Onavo’s app has been crucial to helping Facebook track rivals and scope out new product categories.

By this Order, the Federal Communications Commission extends the deadline for filing reply comments in response to the Restoring Internet Freedom Notice of Proposed Rulemaking until August 30, 2017. The Restoring Internet Freedom Notice of Proposed Rulemaking set dates for filing comments and reply comments of July 17 and August 16, 2017, respectively. While it is the policy of the Commission that “extensions shall not be routinely granted,” we find that an extension of the reply comment deadline is appropriate in this case in order to allow interested parties to respond to the record in this proceeding. We find that permitting interested parties an additional two weeks in which to file their reply comments will allow parties to provide the Commission with more thorough comments, ensuring that the Commission has a complete record on which to develop its decisions.