April 2016

[Commentary] On March 31, on a party-line 3-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission proposed to adopt new rules designed to provide privacy protections for customers of Internet service providers (ISPs). The FCC’s wide-ranging Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) asks hundreds of questions as to how it should shape these requirements. There has already been considerable news coverage concerning the scope and details of these rules, and there will be much more debate as the Commission’s inquiry proceeds over the coming months. However, there has been less discussion about the underlying legal issues which made it necessary for the FCC to initiate this proceeding and the questions about whether the FCC can, indeed, adopt the rules it has proposed.
[Andrew Jay Schwartzman is the Benton Senior Counselor at the Public Interest Communications Law Project at Georgetown University Law Center's Institute for Public Representation.]

From a storefront in Inglewood, Manchester Community Technologies went to work and in 2015 declared the firm had created corridors of free public Wi-Fi access for Internet-starved communities from Long Beach to Pasadena. In a report to the California Public Utilities Commission in March of 2015 documenting what it did with nearly $500,000 in ratepayer fees, the company said it had deployed free Wi-Fi hot spots at eight parks and 16 community Wi-Fi networks, "enabling over 100,000 community based unique end-users the opportunity to connect to the Internet." But today, most of those networks and hot spots don't link to the Internet.

Revlyn Williams, Manchester Community Technologies' founder and executive director, said the networks had all functioned at one time. Maintaining them has proved difficult, she said, because businesses that form the backbone of the networks sometimes shut down their routers at night, lose equipment to theft or don't rely on the Internet enough to keep it running. With the three-year grant now expired, her company will persist in its efforts with "God's help," Williams said.

[Commentary] My colleague Ashley Walker and I have found that people who are more concerned about privacy are less likely to be Internet users based on data from the Federal Communications Commission’s 2009 national survey of Americans’ Internet uses. While plenty of prior work has considered demographic and socioeconomic factors in who goes online, this important factor has not been included in existing studies of Internet diffusion. It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that those who are more concerned about their personal information being stolen online are significantly less like to be Internet users. But FCC should spend some of its resources collecting high-quality data about Americans’ Internet uses regularly, data that go beyond basic access statistics. Without such data, it is hard to devise sound policies. Gathering nationally-representative detailed data of Americans’ attitudes about and experiences with the Internet is not cheap. But any related costs are a drop in the bucket compared to the $2 billion dollars the FCC will spend on its Lifeline program.

[Hargittai is Delaney Family Professor, Communication Studies Department, Northwestern University]