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  2. August 2016

August 2016

FCC admits defeat in municipal broadband, won’t appeal court loss

The Federal Communications Commission has decided not to appeal a court decision that allows states to impose laws restricting the growth of municipal broadband. The FCC in February 2015 voted to block laws in North Carolina and Tennessee that prevent municipal broadband providers from expanding outside their territories, but the states convinced a federal appeals court to keep the laws in place. The FCC could have asked for another appeals court review or gone to the Supreme Court but will instead let the matter drop.

"The FCC will not seek further review of the [US Court of Appeals for the] Sixth Circuit's decision on municipal broadband after determining that doing so would not be the best use of Commission resources," an FCC spokesperson said. The cities that were seeking to expand municipal broadband networks—Chattanooga (TN) and Wilson (NC)—were also involved in the case. The cities have not yet said whether they will appeal. The FCC relied on a novel legal argument in the case. Congress authorizes the FCC to promote competition in local telecommunications markets and to remove barriers that prevent infrastructure investment, and the FCC said that this authority allows it to preempt the state laws. But Congress never specifically authorized the FCC to preempt state laws, a fact that judges cited in overturning the FCC decision.

Federal court dismisses AT&T throttling case

A federal appeals court has dismissed a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission against AT&T for throttling, or slowing data speeds, on millions of customers with unlimited smartphone data plans. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in a decision filed Aug 29, reversed a lower court's denial of AT&T's motion to dismiss the throttling lawsuit. The appeals court ruled that because AT&T was a common carrier, the service provider cannot be held liable for the violations that the FTC brought in its case.

The FTC filed the complaint in October 2014 charging that the nation's second-largest wireless carrier failed to adequately unlimited-data customers that their data speeds are reduced, or throttled, if they use too much data in a given billing cycle. Throttling would often make many common smartphone functions such as using the Web, getting directions and streaming video difficult or nearly impossible to use. The FTC had alleged that AT&T began throttling data speeds in 2011 and, overall, throttled at least 3.5 million unlimited data customers a total of more than 25 million times. AT&T did not offer new unlimited plan contracts after June 2010, but customers who had them could keep them. AT&T and other carriers that offered unlimited plans at the time argued that at some point they must throttle customers who used excessive amounts of data as part of network management. "We're pleased with the decision," AT&T said.

The Guardian view on Internet security: a huge and growing problem

[Commentary] The phone in your pocket gives you powers that were hard to imagine even five years ago. It can talk to you, listen, and give sensible answers to questions. It knows your fingerprint and recognises your face and those of all your friends. It can buy almost anything, sell almost anything, bring you all the news you want, as well as almost all the books, films and music you might want to look at. What’s more, it will even allow you to talk to your friends and to communicate with almost anyone. The problem is that these powers are not yours – at least they don’t belong to you alone. They belong to whoever controls the phone and can be used to serve their purposes as well as yours. Repressive governments and criminal gangs are all contending to break into phones today, and this kind of hacking will increasingly become the preferred route into all of the computer networks that we use – the ones we don’t call “phones”.

Beyond rogue nation states there is an unpleasant and insufficiently regulated market of legal firms that specialise in finding security vulnerabilities and selling them to the highest legal bidder, which normally means oppressive regimes; then there is a second tier of entirely illegal operators who sell tools to criminal gangs. Little of this is used for spying (though there is a market among jealous and abusive men for software that will enable to them to track their partners, one reason why some women’s shelters are reluctant to allow smartphones inside). Much more damage is done by “ransomware”, which encrypts and in effect steals all of a user’s data, to be released only on payment. Such assaults are becoming increasingly common. This is a global problem now. Since almost every country will want these powers for its own security services, if for no one else, what is developing is something like an international arms trade. International efforts to police it are urgently needed and the companies that sell us these powerful phones must also be pressed to live up to their responsibilities to keep them safe so that their power is not easily turned against their owners.

Web accessibility regulations are overdue

[Commentary] In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a standard view of how we would interact with a personal computer: we were sitting at a desk, with a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. Today, computing is very different. We still use desktops, but we also have laptops, tablet computers, smart phones, and some of us even have wearable computers such as the Apple Watch. And that "we" includes people with disabilities, who are a part of this rich, flexible world of computing but access it differently.

People who are deaf or hard of hearing need captioning for video, or transcripts of audio. People who are blind need a Web page to have appropriate markup, such as text describing the images (such as the shopping cart icon on a retail website), and appropriate labels on forms (e.g. “first name”, “last name”, “city”), so that they can listen to the Web page using a screen reader such as VoiceOver, JAWS, Window-Eyes, or NVDA. Having the same level of interaction, the same ease of use, the same access to content, is a form of innovation. It's also a civil right.

[Jonathan Lazar is a Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University.]

Honest question: what does T-Mobile think data actually is?

[Commentary] Here are two lines from T-Mobile’s latest "Uncarrier" missive, in which the company proclaims that it has "listened to customers" and is changing its new T-Mobile One plans less than two weeks after announcing them. The first line: "Everyone gets unlimited talk, unlimited text and unlimited high-speed 4G LTE smartphone data on the fastest LTE network in America." The second line: "With T-Mobile ONE, even video is unlimited at standard definition so you can stream all you want." At this point it appears that T-Mobile is operating with definitions of "unlimited" and "data" that are are only tangentially related to reality. For example, most people understand the word "unlimited" to mean "without any limits or restrictions," but T-Mobile’s definition clearly means "without any limits except for a hard restriction on HD video that can only be lifted for $3 a day or $25 a month."*

Shentel says E-Rate, wireless backhaul are bolstering its dark fiber business

Shentel may not be the size of its larger incumbent local exchange carrier compatriots, but the service provider is being no less aggressive in pursuing dark fiber deals with school districts and wireless operators in its largely rural territory. What’s helping Shentel get the attention of wholesale and retail customers is a fiber network that currently consists of nearly 5,000 route miles of fiber throughout Virginia, West Virginia and parts of Maryland. Ed McKay, SVP of engineering and planning for Shentel, said that the fiber network is being used to satisfy external and internal needs. One of those needs is being able to backhaul traffic on its growing wireless network. The telecommunication company has built fiber to over 240 of its own cell sites and it has 60 more in construction. “We’re using it to not only go after fiber customers, but also to reduce our operational costs,” McKay said. “We’re interconnecting our cable networks and providing backhaul to our own cell sites.”

Rural Internet cost forces family of six to ration

The couple moved from Loudoun (VA) to Fauquier (VA) 15 years ago because they liked this county’s rural lifestyle and wanted a small-scale public school system for their children. The importance of broadband access never occurred to Jerry and Sandy Harris when they built their four-bedroom home on Beach Road south of Warrenton (VA).

The family pays $475 per month for Internet, television and phone services – almost double its $239 Dominion Virginia Power electric bill for July. Harris said her father, who lives in Fairfax County, pays $90 per month for essentially the same communications services. “It kills me,” she said. The family pays $100 per month for home Internet service through Verizon. It helps to ration her kids’ internet use, said Mrs. Harris, who affectionately calls them “data gobblers.” “They have to earn their gigabytes,” she said. “They have chores to do – dishes, grass, dogs.”

Privacy groups file complaint over WhatsApp data sharing

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy filed a federal complaint over WhatsApp’s decision to share consumer data with parent company Facebook. WhatsApp announced recently that it was planning to provide information about its users for Facebook's targeted advertising unless users choose to opt out. EPIC and the Center for Digital Democracy say that the change betrays previous promises Facebook has made on privacy. “When Facebook acquired WhatsApp, WhatsApp made a commitment to its users, to the Federal Trade Commission, and to privacy authorities around the world not to disclose user data to Facebook,” said EPIC President Marc Rotenberg. “Now they have broken that commitment.”

Specifically, the complaint invokes the FTC’s jurisdiction to police unfair and deceptive practices, as well as a 2012 agreement between Facebook and the agency that the company would take certain steps to protect user privacy. Central to their case is a long history of WhatsApp making privacy a core part of its brand. The company now makes end-to-end encryption the default setting for its users, for example, and over the years has said that it is not interested in leveraging its customers’ info.

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