June 2015

2016's campaign technology takes online tracking to new level

Presidential campaigns this time around have a new technological ace in the hole -- you. Building off two decades of digital wizardry, the campaigns are getting ready to monitor and analyze most of what you do online instantaneously. And if you forward certain political emails to your Aunt Maggie in Iowa or your old college roommate in Ohio, they'll reward you for doing it.

The technology will no doubt make it easier for campaigns to personalize their messages and respond in seconds, but it will also test the will and patience of privacy advocates who might feel a little itchy about campaigns looking over everyone's shoulders in real time. "Four years in the digital age is like a generation in the industrial age, so whatever data mining they did four years ago will look like an antique now," said Andrew Rasiej, founder of New York-based Personal Democracy Media, which tracks the intersection of technology and politics.

High-Profile Study Turns Up the Antitrust Heat on Google

Google is facing a new high-profile adversary in the roiling fight over whether its monolithic search engine violates antitrust law: Columbia Law School professor and noted Internet theorist Tim Wu.

The author of the influential book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires co-wrote a paper asserting that Google is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by prominently serving up its own content, like restaurant reviews and doctors office phone numbers, in search results. Wu is an unlikely person to join the antitrust chorus against Google. He’s often been an ally of the company over the years. The new study, which was presented at the Antitrust Enforcement Symposium in Oxford, UK, says the content Google displays at the top of many search results pages is inferior to material on competing websites. For this reason, the paper asserts, the practice has the effect of harming consumers. Wu co-authored the study with Michael Luca, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and data scientists at the local reviews site Yelp, which has been one of Google's primary opponents in the global antitrust fight. Wu was paid by Yelp for his work on the paper.

There's a special place for those who quash hyperbole in online comments

[Commentary] On June 2, Reason.com, the website of the libertarian political magazine I edit, received a federal grand jury subpoena from Bharara, Manhattan's U.S. attorney, and his assistant Niketh V. Velamoor demanding “all identifying information” about six people who left comments on a May 31 blog post we published about the harsh sentencing of Ross William Ulbricht, founder of the “dark Web” illegal drug emporium Silk Road. Reason's commenters had been furious at the actions and words of U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, who sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison without possibility of parole — a harsher punishment than prosecutors had asked for — and accused him of harboring the “deeply troubling, terribly misguided and very dangerous” belief that he “was better than the laws of this country.”

Imagine the fun: A libertarian magazine, which has been criticizing the drug war and government overreach for 47 years while fighting constantly to expand the parameters of free speech, legally barred from talking about an egregious free-speech clampdown in its own lap. Fortunately, other outlets were not so restrained. Before Bharara and Velamoor obtained the gag order, Reason was able to alert the commenters to the subpoena, which was posted June 8 (and criticized witheringly) by the legal blog Popehat. This in turn led to coverage and commentary in scores of publications (sample headline, from Bloomberg View: “Reason Magazine Subpoena Stomps on Free Speech”).

[Matt Welch is the editor in chief of Reason]

We’re Losing the Cyber War

[Commentary] The Obama administration disclosed this month that for China had access to the confidential records of four million federal employees. This was the biggest breach ever—until the administration later admitted the number of hacked employees is at least 18 million. In congressional testimony it became clear the number could reach 32 million—all current and former federal workers.

What can the U.S. do to limit the damage to people with clearances and national security? One inevitable consequence is that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement will enhance the monitoring of Americans with security clearances, including their digital and telephonic communications. Millions of patriotic Americans entrusted with national secrets are going to lose much of their privacy because their government was unable to protect their confidential personnel records. That loss of privacy dwarfs the hypothetical risks from the NSA that have dominated the headlines about intelligence and surveillance in recent years. Americans expect their government to protect them in the digital, as much as the physical, world. The next president should accept the responsibility to fight back against cyber war before more is lost.

How Television Won the Internet

[Commentary] Online-media revolutionaries once figured they could eat TV’s lunch by stealing TV’s business model — more free content, more advertising. Online media is now drowning in free. Google and Facebook, the universal aggregators, control the traffic stream and effectively set advertising rates. Their phenomenal traffic growth has glutted the ad market, forcing down rates. Digital publishers, from The Guardian to BuzzFeed, can stay ahead only by chasing more traffic — not loyal readers, but millions of passing eyeballs, so fleeting that advertisers naturally pay less and less for them. Meanwhile, the television industry has been steadily weaning itself off advertising — like an addict in recovery, starting a new life built on fees from cable providers and all those monthly credit-card debits from consumers. Today, half of broadcast and cable’s income is non-advertising based. And since adult household members pay the cable bills, TV content has to be grown-up content.

Looking for irony? Television, once maniacally driven by Nielsen ratings, has gone upscale as online media becomes an absurd traffic game. TV figured out how to monetize stature and influence. Nobody knows how many people saw “House of Cards,” and nobody cares. Mass-market TV upgraded to class, while digital media — listicles, saccharine viral videos — chased lowbrow mass.

Television, not digital media, is mastering the model of the future: Make ’em pay. And the corollary: Make a product that they’ll pay for.

Eisner Brings His Media Expertise to Local TV Markets

Michael D. Eisner is best known for developing the Walt Disney Company into a diversified entertainment conglomerate, but one specific slice of the media business has always been his sweet spot: television. He saw the potential of ESPN and bought it for Disney in 1995. Earlier in his career, as an ABC executive, he helped discover seminal shows like “Happy Days.” Now, as owner of the Tornante Company, which he founded after leaving Disney in 2005, Eisner sees opportunity in an area that’s considered television’s biggest backwater: original shows aired by local stations, mostly during the day. Tornante and Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns 162 stations, have formed a company, Tornante-Sinclair, that aims to produce and distribute new syndicated talk shows, court shows and game shows.

FCC Chairman Wheeler: OTT Report And Order By Fall

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said that he expected to vote on a report and order on defining some over-the-top video providers as multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) by Fall 2015. In a speech at the Brookings Institution about promoting broadband, Chairman Wheeler said that one way to do that would be to "give over-the-top video providers the ability to choose the same business model as cable and satellite providers, with the same program access rights." Saying OTT's were lining up to "expand video choice," Chairman Wheeler added, "We expect to move that [proposal] to a report and order this fall."

He has already proposed that for "linear" OTT providers -- ones who provide day and date lineups of content channels similar to cable and satellite operators, have nondiscriminatory access to programming affiliated with competing cable and satellite distributors -- but the FCC has yet to vote on the proposal. In December 2014, the FCC launched the rulemaking to define some online video providers (OVDs) as MVPDs, at least with respect to access to cable and TV station programming. The item proposed is to require that linear OVDs be given access to cable-affiliated programming and local TV station broadcasts regardless of whether or not they have facilities based distribution platforms. Beyond that, it tees up lots of questions about how to apply that definition and the ramifications of doing so.

House Pushed to Vote on Privacy Bill

Congress is getting pressure to pass a bill that would make it harder for the government to access e-mails, texts and other online communications, including from the legislator who proposed it. The Digital 4th Coalition (ACLU, Americans for Tax Reform and others) has joined with other privacy advocates to call for passage of the E-mail Privacy Act (HR 699). Reps Kevin Yoder (R-KS) and Jared Polis (D-CO) are lead sponsors on the bill, which would change the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to require a warrant before Internet service providers would have to disclose the contents of email communications. The bill has 281 cosponsors according to Rep Yoder, who pushed June 26 for a vote. That is clearly enough to pass the House. “When ECPA was written, the Internet as we understand it did not exist. Only 340,000 Americans even subscribed to cell phone service," Rep Yoder told a House Judiciary Committee audience. "Mark Zuckerberg was only two years old. But as our society and technology has evolved, our digital privacy laws remain stuck in 1986. With our bill now receiving the distinction of the most-cosponsored bill yet to be considered by the House, the time has arrived to fix that."

Digital 4th says the only reason the bill has been held up is by those who want to be able to access ISP records without a warrant. This legislation has seemingly been held up by only one issue -- an effort to allow civil regulators to demand, without a warrant, the content of customer documents and communications directly from third party service providers. This should not be permitted. Such warrantless access would expand government power; government regulators currently cannot compel service providers to disclose their customers’ communications." They argue that would be an expansion of government power and should not be allowed. Other backers of the E-mail Privacy Act include Microsoft, Google and eBay, as well as Dish, Aereo, Sprint and T-Mobile.

FCC to start work on broadband privacy in fall

The Federal Communications Commission will start the rulemaking process Fall 2015 to clarify its expanded privacy authority under new Internet rules. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler made the revelation during a speech, in which he gave a strong defense of the commission's broadband policies, from recent network neutrality rules to a pair of scuttled mergers.

One unsettled issue under the net neutrality order is the FCC's expanded authority to protect broadband customers' privacy -- an authority that has traditionally applied to telephone companies. The FCC released an advisory in May saying it would initially judge Internet providers, like AT&T or Comcast, on whether they are "taking reasonable, good-faith steps" to comply with the general privacy provision, until tailored rules can be developed. "If consumers worry that they don't have sufficient privacy online, why are they going to use online?" Chairman Wheeler asked, adding it is "integral to the growth of broadband."

Why a top net neutrality activist took a gig with an Internet provider

At the height of the war over network neutrality, Marvin Ammori was one of the most outspoken critics of Internet providers, calling for tough new rules to make sure they don't block, slow or selectively speed up Web sites in exchange for cash. Now he's been hired by the very industry he spent so long attacking.

So why has Ammori switched sides? As part of its attempt to buy up Time Warner Cable, Charter is offering certain concessions that it hopes will defuse any regulator concerns about the deal being anti-competitive. A net neutrality commitment is just one of these -- and Ammori says he helped write it. "Charter is offering the strongest network neutrality commitments ever offered -- in any merger or, to my knowledge, in any nation," Ammori wrote. "It certainly wasn't 'Marvin, cheerlead for us,'" said Ammori. "It was, 'Give us advice,' and I definitely signaled to them that you can't bring a merger nowadays without bringing strong net neutrality conditions." Charter is part of the cable association that's currently suing to have the net neutrality rules overturned. But Charter clearly hopes that having the stamp of approval from a major net neutrality advocate will grease its path at the Federal Communications Commission, which must approve the TWC deal. Now it's time to see if that strategy will pay off.

Benton

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