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  2. April 2017

April 2017

The tech industry is already rebelling against the FCC’s latest plan for net neutrality

Silicon Valley is already rebelling against a plan by Republican Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai that would cancel the government’s network neutrality rules — and perhaps leave it to telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast to decide whether to adhere to open internet principles. "I think in practice, it goes against everything we would want in strong net neutrality protections,” said Evan Engstrom, the executive director of Engine. The group works with startups on policy issues in San Francisco (CA). As a result, Engstrom said he expected a “similar level of engagement that we saw the last time around when we had to fight” — a vicious rhetorical war that drew even John Oliver into the fray. And he said the tech industry again would “do everything we can to rally the community and the public.”

To that end, one of the Valley’s lobbying voices in Washington, the Internet Association, will share its views privately with Chairman Pai at the FCC the week of April 10, apparently. The group, which represents the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter, declined to comment on the meeting. In a statement, though, a spokesman for the Internet Association said, “Internet companies are ready to fight to maintain strong net neutrality protections in any forum. ISPs must not be allowed to meddle with people’s right to access content and services online and efforts to weaken net neutrality rules are bad for consumers and innovation.”

Sen Markey Blasts Chairman Pai's Reported Plan for Net Neutrality

Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) blasted Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s reported plans to scale back network neutrality measures. “The only way to protect a free and open internet is with strong net neutrality rules of the road — not voluntary guidelines — that ensure businesses, innovators and families can use the world’s greatest platform for commerce and communications,” Sen Markey said. “Chairman Pai’s proposal would put the future of an open and free internet in the hands of big corporations and the powerful few at the expense of consumers.”

House Judiciary Committee asks for disclosure of number of Americans under surveillance

The House Judiciary Committee asked the Trump Administration to disclose an estimate of the number of Americans whose digital communications are incidentally collected under foreign surveillance programs. Such an estimate is "crucial as we contemplate reauthorization," of parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that are due to expire at the end of 2017, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI) wrote in a letter addressed to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. The request comes as some Republican lawmakers, many of whom have stridently defended US surveillance programs in the past, express sudden interest in considering additional privacy safeguards to how US spy agencies collect and share intelligence that contains information about Americans.

When Apps Secretly Team Up to Steal Your Data

Pairs of Android apps installed on the same smartphone have ways of colluding to extract information about the phone’s user, which can be difficult to detect. Security researchers don’t have much trouble figuring out if a single app is gathering sensitive data and secretly sending it off to a server somewhere. But when two apps team up, neither may show definitive signs of thievery alone. And because of an enormous number of possible app combinations, testing for app collusions is a herculean task. A study released recently developed a new way to tackle this problem—and found more than 20,000 app pairings that leak data.

Republican Reps Urge FCC to Continue Protecting Privacy

More than half a hundred Republican Reps signed onto a letter asking Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to "continue ensuring" that consumer broadband privacy is maintained until the FCC "remedies" the Title II reclassification. Republicans are pushing the FCC to roll back Title II.

Lead signatories on the letter were House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection Subcommittee Chairman Bob Latta (R-OH). The letter was phrased to signal that they thought the FCC had been protecting privacy and just wanted to emphasize the need to continue to do so and to do so along the lines of the Federal Trade Commission's privacy by design approach to edge providers and, formerly, ISPs. "Until such time as the FCC rectifies the Title II reclassification that inappropriately removed ISPs from the FTC's jurisdiction, we urge the FCC to continue to hold ISPs to their privacy promises," the letter reads.

The US government has withdrawn its request ordering Twitter to identify a Trump critic

The legal battle between Twitter and the US government ended April 7, after the Department of Homeland Security withdrew its demand that the tech company release information to identify an account holder whose tweets are critical of President Donald Trump on Twitter. The lawsuit threatened to become a major battle over free speech between Silicon Valley and Washington. But it was over almost before it began. The tech company had filed a lawsuit April 6 to protest the order, saying that it violated the user's First Amendment right to free expression. But Twitter dropped its suit the next day, saying in a court filing that "[because] the summons has now been withdrawn, Twitter voluntary dismisses without prejudice all claims."

Ajit Pai’s net neutrality plan is nonsense

[Commentary] [J]ust conceptually, the idea that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will get Comcast and AT&T and Verizon and every tiny little regional Internet service provider to put strong open internet provisions in their terms of service agreements is pure nonsense.

First, terms of service agreements change all the time. And people freak out about them, and nothing happens. Do you think the iTunes Terms and Conditions are there to protect you? Facebook’s? Verizon’s? Come on. So what’s to stop Comcast from making this deal today, and then changing its terms a year from now? (It’s certainly not the presence of meaningful access competition in the marketplace!) How will the FTC track every single ISP’s terms of service language, the differences between them, and enforce any sort of consistent, reasonable policy?

Second, let’s say Chairman Pai manages to thread the needle and gets every ISP in the country to agree on the exact same open internet language in their terms of service, and further secures a commitment that the language will remain in their terms in perpetuity. Isn’t that functionally identical to... a law? Shouldn’t we just have... a law? And don’t we already have that law? What specifically is Pai trying to accomplish if he agrees that open internet principles are important?

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