November 2016

The Internet Association, an organization that represents several large Internet companies including Facebook, Twitter, and Google, released a policy roadmap detailing opportunities for the incoming administration and Congress to enable continued growth and success in the Internet ecosystem, and in turn, the US economy. The letter states, “From its inception, the internet was built on an open architecture that lowers entry barriers, fosters innovation, and empowers choice. The internet represents the best of American innovation, freedom, and ingenuity.” The list of policy positions include:

• Upholding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so Internet companies can't get sued easily for things their users say or do online.
• Upholding Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act so Internet companies can't get easily sued if they quickly remove copyrighted content that users upload (such as infringing photos and YouTube videos).
• Reforming the 30-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- "Internet users must have the same protections for their inbox as they do for their mailbox," states the association.
• Supporting strong encryption (President-elect Trump called for a boycott of Apple when it refused to comply with an FBI order to unlock an iPhone linked to terror.)
• Reforming Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which lets the National Security Agency collect online communications without a warrant.
• Providing similar copyright protections for companies that operate outside the US.
• Reforming the US Patent Office to deter patent trolls, a term for companies that sue other companies based on patents without actually producing new products.

Social media companies are under increasing scrutiny for the amount of hate speech that thrives on their platforms, especially since the presidential election. Now, Twitter has unveiled several new measures to curb the online abuse, though the changes are unlikely to be far-reaching enough to quiet the company’s critics. Twitter said it was making it easier for its users to hide content they do not wish to see on the service and to report abusive posts, even when those messages are directed at other users. The company has given its support teams training to better identify mistreatment on Twitter.

How much would you pay to read lots of stories, from lots of digital publishers, without having to look at many ads? Tony Haile wants to find out. Haile is the former CEO of Chartbeat, the real-time analytics software used by most of the digital publishing world. Now he’s at work on a new company: Scroll, a startup that wants to roll up a selection of stories from a wide variety of publishers and sell monthly subscriptions.

The big selling point for readers: Haile says they’ll have a better experience than the one they have now, when they read web pages clogged with crummy ads. The big selling point for publishers Haile wants to recruit: He says they’ll make more money sharing subscription revenue with him than they do with those crummy ads. Scroll is a bit difficult to describe, in part because it seems to combine elements of things people have already tried. And in part because Haile hasn’t put it together yet. He has raised $3 million from investors including SoftTech, OATV, Axel Springer, News Corp and the New York Times. And he’s currently out pitching publishers to sign up. It won’t launch until 2017. But let’s try walking through it: Haile wants to create a subscription service that gives readers an ad-free, or nearly ad-free, reading experience for stories from a wide variety of publishers.