Daily Digest 6/20/2018 (T-Mobile, Sprint)

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Broadband/Internet

How AT&T and Comcast are trying to kill California’s net neutrality bill

A strong network neutrality bill is advancing through the CA legislature, and the Big Intenet service providers (ISPS)–mainly AT&T and Comcast–are working overtime to stop it in its tracks. The bill passed the state Senate on May 30 by a healthy 23 to 12 margin. In the weeks leading up to that vote, lobbyists for the big ISPs tried to spread enough doubt about the bill’s possible implications that lawmakers would simply not vote on it. CA Senate Democrats needed an extra date to find the votes, but they found them, and the bill moved on to the Assembly. The ISPs are powerful, well-monied, and well dug-in with California lawmakers–especially AT&T, which contributed $511,000 to the California Democratic Party in 2017, and $339,500 to the California Republican Party. By June 18, people close to the politicking were saying the California net neutrality bill is in grave danger of being neutered in committee before being put to a vote.

Chairman Pai Visits Montana Fiber Network Sites

Blackfoot, the owner and operator of the region’s largest multi-gigabit network, welcomed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to Montana. During Chairman Pai’s visit, Blackfoot CEO, Jason Williams led a tour of the company’s fiber construction, followed by a working session that was focused on delivering broadband access to rural communities across Blackfoot’s service areas. “Bridging the digital divide and expanding Internet access to all corners of the country is my top priority at the FCC,” said Chairman Pai. “That’s why I appreciate the opportunity to visit states, including Montana, to see how service providers – large and small – are driving broadband access to communities. During my visit with Blackfoot Communications, I heard about their efforts to expand high-speed broadband to remote parts of the state. I also visited the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation to see firsthand the buildout happening to connect Tribal lands with digital opportunity. Everyone who wants to participate in the digital economy should be able to do so.”

Ownership

T-Mobile, Sprint File With FCC

T-Mobile and Sprint have filed with the Federal Communications Commission for approval of their proposed merger, and promised in their public interest statement that the deal would create more jobs, more choice in video and business service, and world-class 5G service, while lowering consumer prices and helping close the rural high-speed divide. They said the goal is to beat AT&T and Verizon, not emulate them. They pointed to Verizon and AT&T getting into other businesses, saying that is not their strategy.  "Verizon and AT&T are investing in a wide array of businesses in recognition of a converging broadband market, and therefore their interests and resources are spread across a lot of areas," T-Mobile and Sprint told the FCC. AT&T has just closed on its deal to acquire Time Warner and its programming assets, for example. "New T-Mobile will be laser-focused on improved broadband connectivity at a lower price," the companies said. "This means New T-Mobile will not be coordinating with AT&T, Verizon or other large players to increase prices or restrict the amount of data delivered per dollar." "New T-Mobile will be able to leverage a unique combination of complementary assets to unlock massive synergies in order to build a world-leading nationwide 5G network that will deliver unprecedented services to consumers, increasingly disrupt the wireless industry, and ensure U.S. leadership in the race to 5G."

Merged T-Mobile/Sprint to challenge Comcast, Charter to become nation’s 4th largest in-home ISP

If regulators approve their merger proposal, Sprint and T-Mobile promise to offer in-home internet services to roughly 9.5 million American households by 2024, or about 13% of the country. The company said that figure would give it a market penetration of around 7%, making it the nation’s fourth largest in-home ISP based on current subscriber counts. “The combined company’s 5G network will deliver mobile broadband speeds in excess of 100 Mbps to roughly two-thirds of the population in just a few years and 90% of the country by 2024. This is a mobile connection so fast, millions will be able to cut the cord with Comcast, Charter and the rest. We’ll offer both in-home broadband services and mobile broadband, so customers can pocket the savings from eliminating that pricey wired in-home broadband bill every month if they choose,” T-Mobile CEO John Legere wrote. “These cable/broadband providers are some of America’s most hated companies in the market, and for good reason—they treat their customers horribly because so many of their customers don’t have any choice! Personally, I can’t wait to bring the fight to them! In fact, I plan for the New T-Mobile to be the country’s fourth largest in-home ISP by 2024, freeing millions from the likes of Comcast and Charter in the process!”

via Fierce

AT&T's merger will change how we watch TV

AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner will create a media conglomerate that combines premium content with a vast distribution network to deliver it to consumers. One of its first experiments in marrying the two will be a "skinny bundle" called AT&T Watch, providing Time Warner content (minus sports) to mobile customers. This is a glimpse at the future of media — packages of content curated and disseminated by the same companies that provide the broadband service you need to watch it in the first place. AT&T wants to replicate what Google, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon already do quite well — generating engagement on their platforms, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said. "Premium video is what drives engagement on their platforms," he said. "The more distribution points and customers we enable to consume premium content, the more we want to own and invest in premium content itself." The revocation of network neutrality rules may shift the universe of content that viewers are exposed to, determined by what types of content your ISP decides to provide, and what content is tailored to you by algorithms.

via Axios

In the Aftermath of the AT&T/Time Warner Decision, There’s Still Hope

While the result of AT&T/Time Warner is disappointing, there’s light at the end of the dark tunnel that was the week of June 11. First, the Department of Justice may yet appeal and win the AT&T case, and we hope it does. Even without that, one bad result will not deter the professionals in the DOJ Antitrust Division. Further, the increased attention to competition and concentration issues by policymakers, both left and right means that new polices to strengthen antitrust or otherwise address market power may be on the horizon. Finally, the Federal Communications Commission has its own regulatory tools to protect competition in the video marketplace. Oversight of the video marketplace is needed now more than ever to protect consumers in an increasingly uncompetitive environment.

Elections

Facebook renews promise to lawmakers: we're ready for elections

Facebook is sending a signal to Capitol Hill that it's taking the integrity of its social network seriously during the US primary election season. One of the main messages aimed to be delivered to Capitol Hill: Facebook is taking serious steps to protect its network, flush with 2.2 billion users, from misinformation and other political ploys on the platform. "In retrospect, we were too slow to anticipate and build teams and tools around each of the forms of misuse," said Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer. He called 2018 "an incredibly important year for the company for social media for the internet and democracy." Facebook plans to double the number of people working on safety and security to 20,000 by the end of 2018, a goal the company announced late last year as the revelations of divisive political ads placed by fake accounts emerged.

Cambridge Analytica-linked academic spurns idea Facebook swayed election

Aleksandr Kogan, the academic researcher who harvested personal data from Facebook for a political consultancy firm said that the idea the data was useful in swaying voters’ decisions was “science fiction.” “People may feel angry and violated if they think their data was used in some kind of mind-control project,” Aleksandr Kogan, the now notorious Cambridge University psychologist whose app collected data on up to 87 million Facebook users, said during a US senate hearing. “This is science fiction. The data is entirely ineffective.” He repeatedly took aim at the field of research – psychometrics – that Cambridge Analytica claimed it could use to predict voters’ psychological traits and influence their votes. “If the goal of Cambridge Analtyica was to show personalized advertisements on Facebook, then what they did was stupid,” Kogan said, arguing that it is much more effective for any advertiser to use Facebook’s own advertising targeting tools. He also said that tech companies are under pressure to "gobble up" more personal information on consumers. "They are under enormous financial pressure to gobble up more and more of our data so they can deliver better and better personalized ads," said Kogan. "And the dirty secret in the industry is that these ads right now are just not that effective. Not useless, but not as effective as we'd want. So companies want more, not less, data, so they can do better."

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie warns that Facebook targeting threatens free speech

Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who outed Cambridge Analytica for improperly accessing millions of Facebook users’ personal information, warned that unchecked data collection and targeting on social media threaten Web users’ privacy — and the healthy functioning of democracy. Wylie, who worked at the consultancy before it assisted President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, pointed to Facebook’s tools that allow political candidates, advertisers and others to reach discrete categories of Americans online. But Wylie and academic researcher Aleksandr Kogan, in separate appearances in Washington on June 19, said Facebook’s fixes do not go far enough. Wylie coupled his warning with a call to federal lawmakers that they must create a “common set of standards that apply universally,” to tech companies beyond just Facebook, in the wake of the social giant’s controversy with Cambridge Analytica. Kogan, who appeared at a hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, criticized tech giants such as Facebook for “skulduggery,” while calling for greater regulation that would force companies to be more transparent and give users more choice about how their data is used.

The Man Who Saw the Dangers of Cambridge Analytics Years Ago

In December 2014, John Rust wrote to the head of the legal department at the University of Cambridge, where he is a professor, warning them that a storm was brewing. Rust informed the university that one of the school’s psychology professors, Aleksandr Kogan, was using an app he created to collect data on millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. Not only did the app collect data on people who opted into it, it also collected data on those users’ Facebook friends. He wrote that if just 100,000 people opted into the app, and if they had an average of 150 friends each, Kogan would have access to 15 million people’s data, which he could then use for the purposes of political persuasion. Journalists had already begun poking around, and Rust wanted the school to intervene, arguing Kogan’s work put the university at risk of “considerable media attention, almost entirely adverse.” “Their intention is to extend this to the entire US population and use it within an election campaign,” Rust wrote of Kogan and his client, a little-known political consulting firm that went on to be called Cambridge Analytica. He predicted, “I simply can’t see this one going away.” Six months later, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United .States, and launched a campaign that depended, in part, on Cambridge Analytica's work.

via Wired
Privacy

It’s time to rein in the data barons

Facebook, Google, and Amazon all have business models that require them to scoop up large amounts of data about people to power their algorithms, and they derive their power from this information. Like the oil barons at the turn of the 20th century, the data barons are determined to extract as much as possible of a resource that’s central to the economy of their time. The more information they can get to feed the algorithms that power their ad-targeting machines and product-recommendation engines, the better. Their dominance is allowing them to play a dangerous and outsize role in our politics and culture. Rather than waiting for legal battles that may or may not foster more competition, we urgently need to find ways to bolster rivals. That means reducing the vast chasm between the amounts of information held by the web giants and the rest. Regulation can help here: Europe’s new data privacy regime requires companies to hold people’s data in machine-readable form and let them move it easily to other businesses if they want to. This “data portability” rule will allow startups to get hold of more data quickly.

The regulatory mistakes that let Facebook and Google buy ad dominance

Several major acquisitions have helped Google and Facebook on their way to unprecedented dominance over the advertising supply chain, antitrust analysts argued at the Open Markets Institute forum. There are six acquisitions that experts cited as missed opportunities by regulators at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to curb the advertising market dominance of Google and Facebook. For Google, most of its acquisitions helped scale its ad-serving dominance. The big three for Google are its acquisition of DoubleClick for ad-serving, AdMob for its own mobile ad-network, and AdMeld. For Facebook, most of its acquisitions helped scale its ad inventory. The big three for Facebook were its acquisition of Onavo for VPN serving, Instagram for ad inventory, and Whatsapp for expanded user base. 

via Axios

Verizon to end location data sales to brokers

Verizon is pledging to stop selling information on phone owners’ locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy. The data has allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners’ knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known CA-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly — LocationSmart and Zumigo. Though Verizon is the first major U.S. wireless carrier to end sales of such data to brokers that then provide it to others, Verizon did not say it was getting out of the business of selling location data. Verizon’s chief privacy officer, Karen Zacharia, said the company would be careful not to disrupt “beneficial services” such as fraud prevention and would “work with these aggregators to ensure a smooth transition for these beneficial services to alternative arrangements so as to minimize the harm to customers and end users.” The nation’s largest mobile carrier made its disclosure in a letter to Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has been probing the phone location-tracking market.

Senator Blumenthal Preps US Version of EU Privacy Framework

Sen Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said that he is preparing to introduce a privacy "bill of rights." That came at another hearing on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica third-party data sharing issue, this one in the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security. Sen Blumenthal said it was based at least in part on the European Union's tough new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) online privacy framework taking effect May 25. He said a first step toward stronger privacy protections was to alert the public to what the threats and challenges of data sharing are, what the national security threats might be, and that may be known to Facebook and other companies, but not to the general public. Sen Blumenthal said he was not happy with what he said was Facebook's continued lack of transparency about its data collection and sharing.

Emergency Communications

Letter from Commissioner O'Rielly on Rhode Island 911 Fee Diversion

On June 15, 2018, Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly wrote to Gov Gina Raimondo (D-RI) and Rhode Island General Assembly Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello (D-RI-15) to follow-up on the issue of 9-1-1 fee diversion. He wrote, "To put it bluntly, your state is diverting 60 percent of the funds intended and necessary for public safety purposes to your general fund, and no amount of relabeling will resolve this reality...I am writing, again, to implore you to end Rhode Island's fee diversion practices." 

Letter from Commissioner O'Rielly on New Mexico 911 Fee Diversion

On June 19, 2018, Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly wrote to Charles Salle, Deputy Director of the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee. He was responding to a phone call Commissioner O'Rielly received addressing why the state of NM diverted 9-1-1 fees in 2016. Commissioner O'Rielly wrote, "It is my understanding that the state faced 'extraordinary solvency' that year due to the decreasing price of oil and swept almost every state account in order to make-up a $1 billion shortfall....While I firmly believe that diversion is detrimental to consumers and emergency personnel, no matter how meritorious the cause, I am relieved to learn that this appeared to be a unique situation and will not serve as precedent or common practice. Moreover, I am pleased to learn that the state did not divert funds in 2017 and is committed to not diverting funds in 2018 or the near future." 

Government and Communications

President Trump blames 'fake news' media for aiding smugglers, human traffickers

President Donald Trump blamed yet another entity for the growing immigration crisis on the US southern border: the news media. President Trump said the “fake news” reports about children being separated from their families at the border are aiding human traffickers. "They are helping these smugglers and these traffickers like nobody would believe," President Trump said of the media. “They know exactly what they’re doing.”  The president accused news outlets of covering child separations more than congressional hearings about an inspector general report about the Hillary Clinton email probe “because those hearings are not good for them.” “The whole thing is a scam,” he said. 

US prosecutors tell court they won’t subpoena journalists in James Wolfe leak probe case

Federal prosecutors said they are not seeking to subpoena reporters or Senate aides in the prosecution of James A. Wolfe, a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer charged with lying to the FBI about his contacts with journalists. Attorneys for Wolfe, meanwhile, are asking a federal judge for a gag order including on President Donald Trump to forbid government officials from making remarks they contend could harm Wolfe’s case. Wolfe, 57, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of making false statements in a government crackdown on leaks that collected a New York Times reporter’s phone and email records. On June 19, each side laid out some of its strategy in Washington at a status hearing before U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the District of Columbia. “The government is not seeking to subpoena” attorneys, Senate Intelligence Committee aides or reporters, Assistant US Attorney Tejpal Chawla said in court, adding, “this is not what the government is seeking. Maybe the defense, but not the government.”

New York Times under fire for spiking a Stephen Miller interview from its podcast

The June 19 episode of the New York Times' podcast "The Daily"  focused on the GOP’s controversial new policy of separating migrant families. Reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis had actually interviewed White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, and she planned to use the audio from the interview on this morning’s show. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the episode features a little explanation at the beginning from Davis, who said the Times had planned use the audio “until I heard from the White House earlier today that they were not at all comfortable with us using that audio.” The issue is that Davis interviewed Miller a few weeks ago for a big story about the topic, but hadn’t discussed the other ways the audio could be used. Still, the White House appears to have wielded its influence in this case. “When they found out his voice was actually going to be on the podcast discussing this,” said Davis, “they were not happy about it so they asked us not to use it.” The Times did not have to say yes, yet it ultimately did.

via Fast Company

More Online

A new EU copyright bill forces filtering across the internet

On June 20th, a committee of the European Parliament will vote on whether to proceed on a copyright proposal that some say will destroy the internet as we know it. That may sound fairly hyperbolic, but over 70 experts — including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales — have criticized the proposal, saying it will turn the internet into “a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users.” The controversial provision in question is Article 13, which requires internet platforms to filter uploads for copyright infringement. If it seems as though Article 13 has sprung up out of nowhere, blindsiding people, it’s because it quite literally has. “It wasn’t going to be in the final draft but it was reintroduced on GDPR day [May 25th, the day GDPR went into effect],” says Cory Doctorow, who is organizing against the proposal with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Doctorow — whose copyleft views are well known — calls the rest of the EU proposal “a pretty unobjectionable, technical set of revisions to a pretty important statute that has gone long in the tooth.”

via Vox
More Online

Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) -- we welcome your comments.

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