Pai Breaks His Silence -- Was It Good For You?
You’re reading the Benton Foundation’s Weekly Round-up, a recap of the biggest (or most overlooked) telecommunications stories of the week. The round-up is delivered via e-mail each Friday; to get your own copy, subscribe at www.benton.org/user/register
Robbie's Round-Up for the Week of October 16-20, 2017
Axiom is more than just a technology and broadband services provider. The company -- along with AETC -- is leading a digital equity movement in Maine which it plans to take national in the years ahead. The key to its national push is the recently-announced National Digital Equity Center (NDEC). NDEC, as a part of the AETC nonprofit arm, will seek to engage communities all over the country to provide the expertise needed to mobilize broadband technologies through digital inclusion, literacy efforts, education, resource planning, funding research, and infrastructure leveraging and stakeholder engagement.
[Commentary] There is one aspect of criminal justice reform that the current administration has tragically ignored: the broken market for inmate calling services.
Inmate calling is a horribly malfunctioning system that not only adversely impacts inmates and their families, but our society as a whole. Providers of inmate calling services compete and win business not based on being the lowest-cost bidder, as is customary for most requests for proposals to governmental agencies. Rather, they win contracts based on which of them is willing to pay the most in kickbacks (they call them “commissions”) to those correctional facilities. The result is not the lowest cost service for inmates and their families, but instead, rates for phone calls that have been as high as $14 per minute.
The FCC should end the practice of picking and choosing, ignoring and punting, while an unarguably dysfunctional market regime preys on the most vulnerable. The FCC can and should adopt targeted rules to address the costs of interstate calls. States and localities can and should reform their practices to cap rates and eliminate kickbacks. And Congress can and should enact a legislative solution that provides a firm legal foundation for further inmate calling reforms. Private litigation could also attack these practices, and some lawsuits have already been filed. But policymakers should also work to help new services and technologies enter the marketplace, to increase competition and lower prices. There is no good policy reason why an inmate’s family should have to use the most antiquated and expensive systems to communicate with loved ones when viable alternatives exist. The time to act is now.
Google Fiber has begun taking signups in Louisville, Kentucky, after a tumultuous process involving lawsuits filed against the local government by incumbent broadband providers.
AT&T and Charter both sued the metro government in Louisville and Jefferson County in an attempt to stop a new ordinance designed to give Google Fiber easier access to utility poles. The lawsuits haven't stopped the new ordinance, as AT&T's was thrown out of court and Charter's is still pending. But instead of hanging wires on utility poles, Google Fiber ended up burying the cables with a "microtrenching" strategy that is quicker than traditional underground fiber deployment. While it has been more than two years since Google Fiber announced that it would build in Louisville, it has only been a few months since construction began. "Louisville is the fastest we’ve ever moved from construction announcement, which happened in May, to signing up customers," a Google Fiber executive said. Residents in the Portland, Strathmoor and Newburg neighborhoods of Louisville can now sign up for service. Google Fiber is also providing a gigabit connection at the Neighborhood House, a community center for children and families living in poverty.
If, like an ever-growing majority of people in the U.S., you own a smartphone, you might have the sense that apps in the age of the pocket-sized computer are designed to keep your attention as long as possible. You might not have the sense that they’re manipulating you one tap, swipe, or notification at a time. But Tristan Harris thinks that’s just what’s happening to the billions of us who use social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, and he’s on a mission to steer us toward potential solutions—or at least to get us to acknowledge that this manipulation is, in fact, going on.
Harris, formerly a product manager turned design ethicist at Google, runs a nonprofit called Time Well Spent, which focuses on the addictive nature of technology and how apps could be better designed; it pursues public advocacy and supports design standards that take into account what’s good for people’s lives, rather than just seeking to maximize screen time. He says he’s moving away from Time Well Spent these days (his new effort is as yet unnamed), trying to hold the tech industry accountable for the way it persuades us to spend as much time as possible online, with tactics ranging from Snapchat’s snapstreaks to auto-playing videos on sites like YouTube and Facebook.
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