Ownership

[Commentary] Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should publicly testify under oath before Congress on his company’s capabilities to influence the political process, be it Russian meddling or anything else. If the company is as powerful as it promises advertisers, it should be held accountable. And if it’s not, then we need to stop fretting so much about it. Either way, threats to entire societies should be reckoned with publicly by those very societies and not confined to R&D labs and closed-door briefings. If democracy can be gamed from a laptop, that shouldn’t be considered a trade secret.

Google has appealed a record $2.9 billion fine from the European Union over its comparative shopping service, the EU Court of Justice announced. The EU’s enforcement wing, the European Commission, issued the massive penalty in June, accusing Google of boosting its own comparative shopping tool in its search results at the expense of other services. “What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules,” said EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager at the time. “It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation."

Public interest watchdogs are concerned about a proposed merger that could have big implications for rural broadband as it nears the regulatory finish line. CenturyLink’s $34 billion deal to acquire Level 3 Communications would create a potentially formidable competitor to AT&T in the telecommunications market to handle heavy internet traffic for businesses. But opponents say it would hurt broadband access for rural providers by eliminating access to wholesale rates for critical fiber connections to the internet backbone — the high-speed transmission lines that connect users’ various internet service providers to each other.

Level 3 Communications is the sixth largest provider of fiber in the United States by volume and has a broad footprint, with availability across the country. It’s also, notably, a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC). If approved, the merger would give CenturyLink, one of the largest incumbents, ownership of Level 3’s valuable fiber assets, which are currently available at wholesale rates — but may not be if they come under CenturyLink’s control.

CenturyLink said in its semiannual report to the Federal Communications Commission that 53% of urban-area customers in the former Qwest territory can get speeds of 40 Mbps or higher. However, the number of customers that can get higher speeds in rural areas is far lower, showing again the divide between these markets. While the telecommunication company has seen some improvement over the past year, only 24.1% of its rural-area Qwest customers can get access to a 40 Mbps connection. A key contributing factor to this disparity is the challenge of deploying copper-based broadband.

[Commentary] Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality — to the empowerment of the “user” — but their worldview rolls over it. Even the ubiquitous invocation of users is telling, a passive, bureaucratic description of us. The big tech companies (the Europeans have lumped them together as GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) are shredding the principles that protect individuality. Their devices and sites have collapsed privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship, with their hostility toward intellectual property.

In the realm of economics, they justify monopoly by suggesting that competition merely distracts from the important problems like erasing language barriers and building artificial brains. Over time, the long merger of man and machine has worked out pretty well for man. But we’re drifting into a new era, when that merger threatens the individual. We’re drifting toward monopoly, conformism, their machines. Perhaps it’s time we steer our course.

[Franklin Foer is the author of "World Without Mind"]

Apparently, federal law-enforcement authorities in New York are investigating whether Uber Technologies Inc. used software to interfere illegally with its competitors, adding to legal pressures facing the embattled ride-hailing company and its new chief executive.

The investigation, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York office and the Manhattan US attorney’s office, is focused on a defunct Uber program, known internally as “Hell,” that could track drivers working for rival service Lyft Inc., apparently. “Hell” worked like this: Uber created fake Lyft customer accounts, tricking Lyft’s system into believing prospective customers were seeking rides in various locations around a city. That allowed Uber to see which Lyft drivers were nearby and what prices they were offering for various routes, similar to how such information appears when an authentic Lyft app is opened on a user’s smartphone. The program was also used to glean data on drivers who worked for both companies, and whom Uber could target with cash incentives to get them to leave Lyft, said these people, who added that the program was discontinued in 2016.

A new study in the American Economic Review, with an intriguing and persuasive methodology, finds that Fox News could influence how Americans vote, perhaps even tipping elections. Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimate that watching Fox News directly causes a substantial rightward shift in viewers’ attitudes, which translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates. They estimate that if Fox News hadn't existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. For context, that would've made John Kerry the 2004 popular vote winner, and turned Barack Obama's 2008 victory into a landslide where he got 60 percent of the two-party vote. "There is a non-trivial amount of uncertainty" about those estimates, Yurukoglu cautions. "I personally don't think it's totally implausible, but it is higher than I would have guessed prior to the research." And even if the effect were half as large as estimated, that’d still mean that Fox News is having a very real, sizable effect on elections.

[Commentary] The three of us investigated several of the most promising efforts to “re-decentralize” the web, to better understand their potential to shake up the dominance of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The projects we examined are pursuing deeply exciting new ideas. However, we doubt that decentralized systems alone will address the threats to free expression caused by today’s mega-platforms, for several key reasons. First, these tools will face challenges acquiring users and gaining the attention of developers. These platforms also pose new security threats. Social media platforms are curators, not just publishers. Finally, platforms benefit from economies of scale — it’s cheaper to acquire resources like storage and bandwidth in bulk. And with network effects, which make larger platforms more useful, you have a recipe for consolidation.

[Chelsea Barabas is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Neha Narula directs the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. Ethan Zuckerman is the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT.]

Three US companies have agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that they misled consumers about their participation in the European Union-United States Privacy Shield framework, which allows companies to transfer consumer data from EU member states to the United States in compliance with EU law.

In separate complaints, the FTC alleges that human resources software company Decusoft, LLC, printing services company Tru Communication, Inc. (doing business as TCPrinting.net), and Md7, LLC, which manages real estate leases for wireless companies, violated the FTC Act by falsely claiming that they were certified to participate in the EU-US Privacy Shield. The FTC also alleged that Decusoft falsely claimed participation in the Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield framework. Despite these claims, all three companies failed to complete the certification process for the Privacy Shield, according to the FTC complaints. The actions against the three companies are the first cases the FTC has brought to enforce the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework, which was put in place in 2016 to replace the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor framework. The FTC brought 39 enforcement actions against companies under the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor framework. Like the Safe Harbor, the Privacy Shield is aimed at providing companies on both sides of the Atlantic with a mechanism to comply with EU data protection requirements when transferring consumer data between the EU and the United States. These cases join the four enforcement actions the FTC has brought related to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) system.

The House Communications Subcommittee drilled into the Federal Communications Commission's post-incentive auction repack plan in a hearing that touched on everything from hurricanes and tornados to tall towers, timelines and even the Sinclair/Tribune merger, which actually drew a fair share of time and attention. Most of the ground covered was not new, but there were some key takeaways, which were that both keeping broadcasters on air and serving viewers and freeing up spectrum for deploying and advancing broadband service are important, that how much money and time that will take remain points of debate, and that Congress will likely have to step in, at least on the financial end. Some legislators emphasized the need to hold broadcasters harmless, while others countered that they should not be allowed to do any foot-dragging, noting that wireless carriers had bid $20 billion for the spectrum.