September 2017

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced recently that the social network would begin voluntarily requiring disclaimers on political ads that appear on the site. But in 2011 Facebook went to federal regulators to get an exception from a rule that would have forced it to do the same thing.

Federal election regulations state that political "communications placed for a fee on another person's website" must carry disclaimers stating that they are advertisements and who paid for them. Facebook sought an exception to disclaimer regulations citing space constraints for its "character-limited ads." Lawyers for the company argued the ads were so small that a disclaimer would be impracticable. Facebook argued, at the time, that ads on the platform were restricted to 160 characters. However, ads on Facebook have since evolved into sophisticated multimedia experiences. Advertisers can choose to sponsor videos, carousels of images and slideshows. Today, not all of Facebook's advertising options are character-limited.

The Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG) will review the technical aspects of Internet of data collection and privacy. This review will result in a report with an anticipated publication date in early 2018.

In various contexts, different organizations are studying data collection practices and privacy in the Internet “ecosystem” and public discourse has suggested there is a significant gap between perceived and actual data collection practices. Much of this discourse has also been focused on one set of actors or another, without a more holistic consideration of the significant roles played by a broad cross-section of all those involved, ranging from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to edge providers, advertising networks, application developers, equipment manufacturers, and others. Often, the discussion is not sufficiently informed by technical information regarding actual practices. BITAG’s report on Internet data collection and privacy will draw on concrete, specific technical information and aims to shed light on the current state of data collection practices, including: what types of data are collected, where and how collection takes place, and for what purposes the data is used (e.g., operational, service related). The report will also investigate and report on how these practices vary across the broader Internet ecosystem; the report will discuss the roles various parts of the Internet ecosystem play in collecting data from and about Internet users, the analytic tools and methods that various stakeholders apply to the collected data, how different stakeholders use the data, and more. BITAG’s technical working group will analyze this topic and issue a report that will describe the issue in depth, highlight technical observations, and suggest appropriate best practices. The lead editors of BITAG’s report on IoT security and privacy are Jason Livingood of Comcast and Nick Feamster, Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Douglas Sicker, Executive Director of BITAG, Chair of BITAG’s Technical Working Group, Department Head of Engineering and Public Policy and a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, will chair the review itself.

President Donald Trump charged that Facebook has “always” been opposed to him, suggesting it is part of a network of “collusion” along with national newspapers and cable news networks that have covered his White House critically. President Trump did not elaborate much on his comments, but his accusations — as always, communicated by tweet — come at a time when Facebook is the target of scrutiny by congressional and federal investigators, who are probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The President tweeted, "Facebook was always anti-Trump.The Networks were always anti-Trump hence,Fake News, @nytimes(apologized) & @WaPo were anti-Trump. Collusion?..But the people were Pro-Trump! Virtually no President has accomplished what we have accomplished in the first 9 months-and economy roaring."

Of all concerns we have, probably the biggest one centers around something called paid prioritization. That’s where the broadband providers get to enter into special relationships with certain websites to get their websites into a “fast lane“ to get their content to users faster. There are a lot of problems with this idea. The first one is pretty obvious; a “fast lane” doesn’t exist. Fiber is fiber, and things travel across it at the same speed unless another force is acting on it. That means that in order to build the fast lane, you basically need to slow everything else down. Quite simply, we don’t think our users should be artificially slowed down. With extremely limited exception, the open Internet order bans paid prioritization. Walking back the order puts it back on the table, and that is dangerous. The same thing is true for blocking and throttling. These are not allowed by order of the open Internet order, except for network maintenance reasons. That is extremely important to the open Internet, and the customers we serve. It needs to persevere.