April 2014

FCC Chairman Wheeler On Wrong Side Of Regulatory History

[Commentary] After nearly four decades of gradually and carefully loosening the rules governing how many TV stations a broadcaster may own and where it may own them, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his two Democratic colleagues decided to more strictly enforce the local ownership rule, which forbids broadcasters from owning two stations in small and medium markets or from owning two top four stations in large markets.

They did that by reversing the FCC's 10-year-old policy of allowing broadcasters to operate (or at least enjoy the economies of) second stations through joint sales and shared services agreements in markets where they could not own them outright. They threw out 10 years of precedents, and they did so in a punitive way. No existing deals would be grandfathered and no pending deals would be approved. Broadcasters with joint sales agreements (JSAs) would have two years to unwind them.

I agree with FCC Commissioner Pai that in reneging on all its JSA approvals to date, the FCC is discouraging investment in broadcasting and, perhaps more important to Chairman Wheeler, undermining his planned incentive auction, through which he hopes to reallocate spectrum from TV to wireless broadband.

Unless overturned by the courts, the crackdown on JSAs is going to disrupt a lot of businesses. It's already caused a lot of financial damage. Chairman Wheeler says it's going to create more opportunities in broadcasting for small businesses, especially those owned by minorities and women, but he makes no good case for it. He offers no evidence that it will.

In Verizon’s Price Battle With AT&T, Users Get the Spoils

Your mobile-phone bill may finally be shrinking. The industry’s fight over prices, ignited in 2013 by T-Mobile US, is beginning to have a noticeable effect even for consumers who haven’t switched carriers.

As they jockey to match or beat each other’s discounts for new customers, the wireless companies are also passing along savings to their current users to keep them from running off to a competitor. Even Verizon Communications, the largest US wireless carrier and the one that gets the most revenue per customer, has been dragged into the fray. With no formal announcement or fanfare, it matched AT&T’s latest price cut for big-spending, family-plan customers -- itself a move to get closer to the $140 a month T-Mobile charges for an equivalent package.

While sales are still expanding for mobile carriers, savvy consumers have been able to save hundreds of dollars a year. In its latest price cut, Verizon reduced the monthly charge for using a smartphone on a 10-gigabyte service plan to $15 from $20. For a family using four smartphones, that means a monthly plan of $180 just fell to $160 -- in line with discounts AT&T announced in February. Verizon says its promotion is temporary.

The Internet of the future will look a lot like TV

[Commentary] Almost half a century after the first e-mail crashed the communication link between the computer science department at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute, the Internet stands at a tipping point. Now, after a wave of telecom consolidation at the turn of the 20th century, only two of the original seven Baby Bells remain, in the form of Verizon and the reconstituted AT&T.

Along with a handful of giant cable providers and satellite giants, less than a dozen companies control the overwhelming majority of US Web traffic. In the fourth quarter of 2013, the number of TV-style commercials on digital entertainment delivered to US high-speed Internet subscribers of those companies roughly equaled the number of pieces of content they appeared next to. Moreover, Web-based video ads, and the TV shows, live events and movies that they are paired with, are growing in lock step at roughly 30% a year. With both business and consumers willing to pay for a broad array of products and services, the Internet has become the world's first global medium for delivering news and entertainment. Not surprising, then, that it's started to look a lot like television -- a medium that in the US is overwhelmingly commercial (save for PBS and local public access channels, home of the original video bloggers); and soon, it will likely be far more so. A US federal court ruling in January, which struck down rules concerning how Web traffic and capacity are priced, has already begun spurring a new wave of telecom consolidation, such as Comcast's $45 billion bid for rival Time Warner Cable.

The Internet, already half-commercialized, has just been further deregulated. Given its history and current data traffic trends, if there are going to be public spaces on the Internet of the future, online consumers may have to work hard indeed to find them.

Tech group hires House cyber guru

TechAmerica is bringing on a former House Homeland Security Committee staffer as its director of cybersecurity policy. Michael Spierto, who worked on the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies subcommittee, will help the organization as lawmakers continue to push for legislation to protect the country’s computer networks.

“Cybersecurity is a worldwide challenge that spans across every industry and government sector,” Spierto said in a statement. “TechAmerica is on the forefront of this debate and I aim to build upon the organization's proven record of success to development of new thresholds of achievement.”

TechAmerica has urged Congress not to enact an overly broad cybersecurity bill that could end up doing more harm than good by imposing extra mandates or requirements on companies. Instead, it has pushed for a way to allow companies and the government to better share information as well as a nationwide set of rules for alerting people after their information may have been compromised in a data breach.

FCC Outlines Deadlines for Captioning Compliance

The Federal Communications Commission has issued the deadlines by which various parts of its Closed Captioning Quality Order become official.

That order included mandates for cable and broadcast caption quality, equipment, and various housekeeping items. April 30: Rule revisions on equipment monitoring, the treatment of multicast streams, filing for exemptions, and getting program distributors' e-mails correct. June 30: Rule revisions regarding use of Electronic Newsroom Technique (ENT) for captioning of live programing.

When the Office of Management and Budget approves them: Rules about maintaining records on monitoring and maintenance of the captioning system, informal complaint procedures regarding use of ENT techniques. Jan 15, 2015 or OMB approval, whichever comes first: Rule revisions relating to captioning quality standards and best practices. The FCC voted unanimously Feb 20 to require program creators and distributors to make their best efforts to improve the quality of closed captioning. While there were no quantitative standards, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said this was not an "act it and forget it" item and the FCC wants to remind stakeholders of the upcoming deadlines for compliance.

As the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger process gets going, expect more talk about peering

[Commentary] Comcast will file an application with the Federal Communications Commission for a formal review of the proposed Time Warner Cable transaction.

And once that happens, the Federal Communications Commission will have an excellent opportunity to get some of the data it will need to decide if it should regulate interconnection agreements between last-mile ISPs such as Comcast and other companies selling bandwidth or content over IP.

The problem appears to be congestion between online video providers like Netflix and bandwidth providers like Comcast that causes packets to drop and the end user experience to degrade. Basically, are last-mile ISPs acting as rent-seeking opportunists because they can or is this a legitimate business fight over who pays for the interconnections between networks? To decide the FCC will need data on both the actual congestion at these interconnection points and on the pricing that ISPs are charging. And the sense in Washington, as articulated by Public Knowledge SVP Harold Feld, is that the Comcast acquisition of Time Warner Cable is the right venue to force access to this data and start this debate.

So even as Netflix and Level 3 confuse the issue, equating it with paying for better access, the FCC is going to stand its ground and look at peering as an interconnection issue. That is part of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s beloved network compact that is governing how he’s thinking about moving from the analog to the IP age in communications. And the logical place to start this review will be as part of the Comcast-Time Warner merger review.

DHS Prepares Overhaul of Internal Security Operations

The Homeland Security Department announced future plans to overhaul an organization that defends DHS’ own internal networks.

A counter-hack mechanism called the intrusion defense chain, or "kill chain” -- developed by researchers at Lockheed Martin -- is expected to drive the revamp, according to DHS officials. A kill chain predicts an intruder’s attack plan and breaks it down into steps that must be taken to achieve the ultimate hack -- for instance, obtaining a map of the most critical US water plants from a DHS network. Operators then devise a countermeasure for each action that, if applied along any point in the chain, will thwart the criminal's plan.

The office of DHS Chief Information Security Officer Jeff Eisensmith is requesting security operation ideas, "including most notably the employment of an Intrusion Defense Chain methodology to 'align enterprise defensive capabilities to the specific processes an adversary undertakes to target that enterprise," stated a market research survey. The notice quotes a 2011 Lockheed paper. The potential plans also ask vendors how they would measure the effectiveness of the center, if given the management job. And officials want contractors to list staffing and facilities requirements DHS should consider.

Sometimes the Best Big Data Questions Raise The Biggest Privacy Concerns

One useful definition for the unstructured data that underlies most existing and theoretical big data projects is that it was often collected for some purpose other than what the researchers are using it for.

This definition points to the potential of big data analysis as more and more information is gathered online and elsewhere, but it also points to some challenges as outlined by Duncan Watts, a principal researcher at Microsoft’s research division.

First off, a large portion of the data that might be valuable to social scientists, policymakers, urban planners and others is held by private companies that release only portions of it to researchers. Facebook, Amazon, Google, email providers and ratings companies all know certain things about you and about society, in other words, but there’s no way to aggregate that data to draw global insights.

“Many of the questions that are of interest to social science really require us being able to join these different modes of data and to see who are your friends what are they thinking and what does that mean about what you end up doing,” Watts said. “You cannot answer these questions in any but the most limited way with the data that’s currently assembled.”

Second, even if social scientists were able to draw on that aggregated data, it would raise significant privacy concerns among the public.

Finally, because much of the data that’s useful to social scientists was gathered for other purposes, there’s often some bias in the data itself, Watts said.

“When you go to Facebook, you’re not seeing some kind of unfiltered representation of what your friends are interested in,” he said. “What you’re seeing is what Facebook’s news ranking algorithm thinks that you'll find interesting. So when you click on something and the social scientist sees you do that and makes some inference about what you’re sharing and why, it’s hopelessly confounded.”

The Fall of Internet Freedom: Meet the Company That Secretly Built ‘Cuban Twitter'

The United States discreetly supported the creation of a website and SMS service that was, basically, a Cuban version of Twitter, the Associated Press reported. ZunZuneo, as it was called, permitted Cubans to broadcast short text messages to each other.

At its peak, ZunZuneo had 40,000 users. And what government agency made ZunZuneo? It wasn’t the Central Intelligence Agency. No, it was the US Agency for International Development, USAID, working with various private companies, including the DC for-profit contractor Creative Associates and a small, Denver-based startup, Mobile Accord. T

he company’s not in the discreet social network game anymore; now it surveys countries in the developing world by SMS. As I started piecing together Mobile Accord’s past -- and that of the State Department that encouraged and hired them -- I found that a project like ZunZuneo wasn’t out of the ordinary at all. As ludicrous as the phrase ‘fake Cuban Twitter’ might sound, projects like ZunZuneo were meant to be a major focus of US diplomacy. If it sounds like a risible plan, now -- as it does to some commentators and, apparently, at least one Democratic senator -- that only shows how much has changed since the Arab Spring was still blooming.

The story of ZunZuneo foreshadowed, too, developments that would come. Who did ZunZuneo benefit most of all, eventually? Cubacel: The Cuban government’s state-run mobile monopoly which owned the physical infrastructure through which ZunZuneo messages traveled. USAID, in trying to harass the Cuban government, wound up financially supporting it.

Ten Years In, Gmail Still Evolving Through Use of Encryption

[Commentary] The 10th anniversary of Gmail reminds us of Google’s uncanny ability to symbiotically evolve with and shape the future of the Web.

When the service launched in 2004, it successfully disrupted the then-dominant players in the space, a feat that the company pulled off for search, and repeated with Android. The most recent example of Google’s adaption is its move to extend Gmail encryption. No, this isn’t deja vu. While Google made a similar announcement about email protection in 2010, it will now encrypt all inter-server traffic for Gmail to offer an additional step to enhance user privacy in the era of Web-powered communications. At the center of Google’s approach to protecting the next generation of the Internet is a revamp of email encryption, a technique that traces back to the 1990s.

Historically, HTTPS made it possible for e-commerce to flourish by securing the IT tunnels for payment transactions, authenticating websites and securing digital communications. Now, Google is adapting the protocol as part of its model for securing the future of the Internet by building trust in its technologies and by setting the stage for a more secure Internet. The fact is that the Web is evolving much faster than we can grasp, and not always in a good way. But, as Google’s latest move shows, encryption is becoming a much more pervasive and trusted technology in our connected world. Google has brought end-to-end encryption to email tunnels. Now it’s time to extend that protection to data across the IT stack that businesses and consumers touch. As Edward Snowden pointed out in his SXSW panel, encryption is most powerful when applied from end to end.

[Kothari is Founder and CEO, CipherCloud]

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