February 2015

The FCC is moving to preempt state broadband limits

The Federal Communications Commission is moving ahead with a proposal to help two cities fighting with their state governments over the ability to build public alternatives to large Internet providers. The FCC will begin considering a draft decision to intervene against state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that limit Internet access operated and sold by cities, according to a senior FCC official.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler could circulate the draft to his fellow commissioners as early as Feb 2 and the decision will be voted on in the FCC's public meeting on Feb. 26. If approved, the FCC would find that the states have erected barriers to the timely and reasonable deployment of high-speed Internet access in Chattanooga (TN) and Wilson (NC). It would effectively knock down the state laws that the cities say inhibit them from building viable competitors to the likes of Comcast and Verizon. The draft decision targets legal hurdles that make it more difficult for city- or community-run Internet services to get off the ground.

How FCC chair took control of Internet

It was August 2014 when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler was coming -- quietly -- to the conclusion that he was going to have to turn on the industries that launched his career in Washington.

On Feb 5, he is expected to present to the FCC a set of rules that would treat broadband providers like utilities, effectively denying them the right to charge companies a premium for faster access to consumers and holding them accountable for any attempt to secretly impede the flow of data. When the FCC finally approves them -- a vote is scheduled for late February -- it will mark the most significant rewrite of the rules of the road for the Internet in more than a dozen years and affect the competitive playing field for generations to come. The origin of Wheeler’s dramatic pivot? An intense and relatively brief grass-roots lobbying campaign that targeted two people -- him and President Barack Obama. “We [knew] that Tom Wheeler was going to make the decision on this,” said Craig Aaron, president and CEO of Free Press, a liberal public interest group. “He was the guy with the most influence over the details, and the question becomes who has the most influence over him, and that is President Obama.”

How Did An Idea That Seemed Like A Long Shot Win The Net Neutrality Debate?

[Commentary] To the disappointment of many network neutrality advocates, the Federal Communications Commission’s first cut at its proposed rules -- leaked in April by the Wall Street Journal -- didn’t embrace Title II. Instead, the FCC returned to the portion of the Communications Act rejected by the courts. As the leaked proposal horrified net neutrality proponents, it also served as rallying cry, helping to coalesce a diverse set of advocates with different interests, missions, and organizational structures into a formidable coalition.

Within weeks, this group combined non-profit groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge with a bevy of Internet heavyweights like Netflix and smaller, midsized web-based businesses like Etsy. Academic think-leaders like Columbia Law School’s Tim Wu rounded out the group. Soon, this core group of institutions and individuals swelled as organizations like the ACLU, which hadn’t focused much on net neutrality, joined the effort. This ad hoc coalition mobilized one of the most successful advocacy campaigns seen in recent years.

Rolling Internet, Government to ’34

[Commentary] If President Obama and the Democrats on the [Federal Communications Commission] are determined to take us back to 1934 legislation for purposes of controlling the Internet today, can we also head back to 1934 for an all-controlling Washington? Federal spending then was less than half of today’s spending as a percentage of GDP, while national debt was 0.15% of today’s $18 trillion level. Washington can hem in a vibrant part of the private sector as if it’s 1934, as long as it also adopts 1934 fiscal standards for the public sector.

AmericanExceptionalism.com

[Commentary] Congress did the world’s three billion Internet users a favor by blocking President Obama’s plan to end US protection of the open Internet. Now it is time to embrace the American exceptionalism that made today’s Internet possible. The US oversees an Internet built in its own image, with the result that people around the world increasingly expect free speech and open innovation. All presidential candidates should embrace this enormous accomplishment and pledge never to abandon the open Internet.

FCC Commissioner Pai Objects to Dish’s Wireless Deal

Federal Communications Commission member Ajit Pai is objecting to Dish Network’s claim on more than $3 billion in discounts aimed at small business in the government’s auction of wireless licenses. He plans to ask FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to investigate the award, saying that giving such a lucrative break to a company as large as Dish “makes a mockery” of the small-business discount program.

The move adds an element of uncertainty to an auction that drew surprisingly aggressive bidding that culminated in a record $44.9 billion being spent, mostly by telecom companies looking to meet growing demand for the airwaves that carry signals to smartphones. Dish racked up $13.3 billion in winning bids, topping even Verizon Communications, the largest US wireless carrier. It qualified for the discounts by bidding via a pair of partnerships that reported having less than $15 million in annual revenue. Its partners included mutual-fund giant BlackRock, employees of private-equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners and a native Alaskan investment fund, among others.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon pay to get around ad blocking tool

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Taboola have quietly paid the German start-up behind Adblock Plus, the world’s most popular software for blocking online advertising, to stop blocking ads on their sites. The deals demonstrate that some of the biggest participants in the $120bn online advertising market see the rise of ad-blocking as a material threat to their revenues.

Google Now powers up by pulling in info from other apps

Google Now can now use data from apps such as Pandora, The Economist, and eBay to answer users' questions before they even ask them. Google Now doesn't share user data with third-party apps, but it can use your location to predict what information you'll want to see.

A Question Over the Reach of Europe’s ‘Right to Be Forgotten’

The ability for Europe to enforce the region’s privacy rules beyond its borders will be a major part of a report soon to be published by a committee set up by Google.

The report, expected to be released by mid-February 2015, will counsel the company on how to handle Europe’s right-to-be-forgotten standard. The company has complied with roughly 40 percent of the 760,000 link-removal requests that it has received over the last eight months, according to the company’s latest transparency report. The advisory group includes Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who has been a vocal opponent of the European privacy decision, as well as a number of leading data protection academics. But after holding a number of public meetings across Europe, the committee remains divided over whether Google should impose the right-to-be-forgotten decision on all of its global search results, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report had yet to be completed.

The One Loophole to Rule Them All

[Commentary] We are one month from the Federal Communications Commission issuing a final decision on network neutrality. But it will be a month that matters because it’s not yet clear who will triumph. For the next month, the giant phone and cable companies will be lobbying to put a loophole in the FCC’s rule. Any significant loophole will do. They will ask for many loopholes, but all they need is one. So they can “compromise” by letting go of several outrageous loopholes because with one alone they can create an entirely new business ecosystem of slow and fast lanes that undermines the open Internet. It would be the one loophole they need to rule all the websites and users. If FCC Chairman Wheeler’s rule deviates from President Obama’s proposal and doesn’t include these four principles, you should be freaked out.

Bright-line, enforceable rules: We need bright-line rules that clearly define in advance which behavior is and is not allowed, using easily verifiable behavior.
Applying the rules to “interconnection”: President Obama called for the FCC “if necessary to apply net neutrality rules to points of interconnection between the Internet service provider and the rest of the Internet.”
Policing “specialized services”: Nobody really knows what a specialized service is, but the idea is that cable and phone companies might offer services that are not access to the Internet and they should be subject to different laws. The FCC should define the term very narrowly and clarify that cable companies cannot use them to circumvent network neutrality rules on the Internet.
Title II authority: President Obama called on the FCC to use its “Title II” authority. That’s the FCC’s main authority, and the commission uses it to govern phone service, mobile phone service, rural access to the Internet, and big-business access to the Internet.

Benton

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