October 2014

Civil Rights Movement knocks on the door of the FCC

[Commentary] In the decades-long struggle for civil rights, the movement has focused on different Washington institutions, from Congress to the White House to the Supreme Court. This summer, part of the battle moved to the Federal Communications Commission. The critical question now facing the FCC is how to preserve the open Internet while continuing to expand opportunity and bring the transformative benefits of broadband technology to all Americans, including communities of color. The digital divide is still too large in this country -- but we will not close it by adopting obsolete utility rules that have never previously equalized service or economic opportunity for communities of color. Instead, we need the Internet to keep growing, getting faster and reaching more Americans. This issue is bigger than the ordinary give and take of party politics, campaign machinations, and legislation. It’s the next great chapter in our unceasing struggle for full citizenship -- offline and on. All communities deserve a vibrant, growing, and open Internet -- and we must ensure that we take the right approach today.

[Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League]

Don’t worry about getting hacked. Worry about getting socially engineered.

Engineers who want access to your e-mail or iCloud account have three ways to go about the task: They can try to persuade you to give the passwords up directly (“active engineering”); they can try to guess or reset the passwords using other information about you (“passive engineering”); or they can pretend to be someone else entirely and get account access that way (“pretexting”). Of these options, passive engineering is probably the easiest to pull off — it is, after all, just another strain of “Google stalking,” that favored technique among curious daters and other casual snoops. By gathering information from your social media accounts (as well as from public records, your employer’s Web site, your long-forgotten wedding page, and what have you), a social engineer can get a pretty good picture of what you like, where you live and what you’re generally about. That might be enough information to guess your password. If not, it’s definitely enough information to let the engineer escalate to some other type of attack.

Google Fiber will launch in Austin in December

Google will launch its fiber network in Austin, beginning this December in the south and southeast portions of the city.

The company will continue rolling out gigabit service in stages as it’s deployed in other parts of the town. Google also plans to implement a similar sign up-process for fiber as it did in Kansas City, where areas are divided into neighborhoods and residents need to commit to get fiber. Neighborhoods that hit a threshold specified by Google will get fiber. Those that do not meet that threshold will not, although in Kansas City, neighborhoods have gotten a second chance to sign up.

HBO’s taking on Netflix like never before. But now they’ll share the same headaches, too.

HBO is finally offering its streaming service, HBO Go, as a standalone subscription next year. This is a huge deal for cord-cutters, people who forego pricey cable subscriptions in favor of online streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

One of the more immediate effects has to do with HBO's relationship with Netflix. While HBO's latest move highlights more than ever how the two companies are head-to-head competitors, it's just as likely they'll find themselves sharing common interests over the long run. That's particularly true on questions of policy, regulation and dealings with broadband providers. Standalone HBO Go isn't some side project; it's HBO's play for a vast segment of the population. Simply by being in the same business puts HBO Go and Netflix in similar positions. Of course, HBO enjoys a much cozier relationship with broadband providers than Netflix does, because some of those broadband providers are cable companies that have existing deals with HBO for its content. In that respect, HBO Go has a major advantage. Thanks to what we'll call Big HBO, the standalone HBO Go will have some extra pull that Netflix doesn't have.

HBO's stand-alone service could open floodgates

[Commentary] Could Time Warner and HBO have just broken the logjam preventing the move to a full-fledged Net-delivered TV future? That remains to be seen.

A stand-alone HBO subscription service would require no pay TV subscription and could lead to other content providers following suit. Or it could lead to an uptick in the intrigue that comes with negotiations between content providers and pay TV companies. Studios and networks that do not follow HBO's lead demand higher prices from pay TV providers for their content. Pay TV services in turn could attempt to punish HBO saying that their relationship is diluted by the stand-alone move. Consumers who abhor pay TV will have to wait to see whether it's pay TV providers or content companies that blink in the days to come. It will be hard for other companies, especial networks, to follow suit, says Erik Brannon, analyst with market research firm IHS. "The business in pay TV is too lucrative to rock the boat. But this is a recognition that we are now in a new developing world," he said.

Turning the tables on online advertisers

Online advertisers collect tons of digital data to understand us as consumers. Now we're getting a chance to see what they're seeing. A team of digital specialists recently launched Floodwatch, a free extension for the Chrome browser that tracks and analyzes the ads that cross your screen as you move around the Web and displays the data visually to reveal a bird's-eye sense of how you're being targeted. Online advertisers -- or at least their algorithms -- are studying us all day long. This is an opportunity to study them back.

Noncommercial Broadcasters Push FCC for Spectrum Reserve

Top public broadcast officials paid a call to the Federal Communications Commission to push for a guarantee that there would be some spectrum reserved for noncommercial broadcasting in each market.

Noncommericals have already petitioned the FCC to make that change in its May incentive auction order, but it made the point in numbers they hope are too big to ignore, including PBS President Paula Kerger, CPB President Patricia Harrison and almost a half-dozen top execs from both organizations, all of whom met with Gary Epstein, chief of the Incentive Auction Task Force, Bill Lake, chief of the Media Bureau, and FCC managing director Jon Wilkins. They pointed out that universal service is their statutory mission, and that the FCC has supported that mission in the past and should do so into the future. They want the FCC to rewrite the May order to specify that if a noncommercial gives up its entire channel for auction, at least one channel will be reserved during repacking of stations, essentially a placeholder, to enable a new noncommercial to take its place.

Safety and Broadband Must Go Hand in Hand

The wireless industry is a powerful driver of growth in our economy. New facilities pop up all the time, giving the devices in our pockets and purses better service and faster broadband connections. Our country relies on these connections, but serving America's exploding demand for them shouldn't come at the cost of a worker's life. This is why our agencies joined together with telecommunications and tower industry leaders to address this heartbreaking problem. We know that we can only solve it if we work together; that we each have a role to play in stopping these senseless tragedies. It's also why we're proud to announce that our partnership on this issue doesn't end today, but will continue in the form of a joint working group the Federal Communications and the Department of Labor have decided to form, with industry participation, to develop recommended practices for employers.

Judge Is Skeptical About Aereo's New Bid for Survival

US District Court Judge Alison Nathan considered a preliminary injunction against Aereo, the controversial tech service that upon launching in the spring of 2012, promised to pry open the delivery of television signals so that customers could access the major networks on digital devices.

At a hearing, attorneys for broadcasters and Aereo took turns arguing before a humbled judge who two years ago offered the prospect of revolution in the TV industry by denying an injunction on grounds that the relaying of individual copies of over-the-air TV signals constituted a private performance permissible under the Transmit Clause of the Copyright Act. This time, after the U.S Supreme Court concluded otherwise, Judge Nathan was more skeptical of Aereo's arguments, even downright contemptuous at moments.

Nobel-Winning Message for the FCC

[Commentary] Jean Tirole's Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is being celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic by academics and economists. But there is no joy in the power circles of US telecommunications policy. More than a decade ago, federal policy makers turned their backs on Tirole's sensible assessments of private communications utilities -- and with disastrous results.

Tirole's insight was that any company controlling physical lines into homes and businesses, left to its own devices, would act as a natural monopoly, extracting tribute from every other business and customer that depends on communications capacity. To constrain that power, regulators might need to separate wholesale and retail communications-access services, and require interconnection with other networks.

[Crawford is the John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School]

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