Adi Robertson

US says internet services are exempt from Russian sanctions

The US Department of the Treasury is exempting telecommunications services from ongoing sanctions against Russia. The move, confirmed April 7, follows requests from advocacy groups who feared a disruption would cut off Russian activists’ access to the outside world. It may not, however, cause companies that voluntarily cut off access to restore it.

Social justice groups warn President Biden against throwing out Section 230

A group of 75 activist groups and nonprofits have urged against sweeping changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, warning that it could silence marginalized communities while making online moderation harder. “Section 230 is a foundational law for free expression and human rights when it comes to digital speech,” the letter says.

President Trump Trying to Control the FCC is a 'Disaster,' Says Sen Ron Wyden

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) says President Donald Trump’s recent handling of Federal Communications Commission nominations is a “disaster.” The Trump administration withdrew the nomination of FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, shortly after O’Rielly criticized an executive order demanding that the agency unilaterally revise Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Sen Wyden, one of the coauthors of Section 230, said the move called the agency’s independence into question.

Democrats want a truce with Section 230 supporters

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says apps and websites aren’t legally liable for third-party content, has inspired a lot of overheated rhetoric in Congress. Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have successfully framed the rule as a “gift to Big Tech” that enables social media censorship. While Democrats have very different critiques, some have embraced a similar fire-and-brimstone tone with the bipartisan EARN IT Act.

President Trump reportedly clashes with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile over spam texts

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is reportedly fighting cellphone carriers over the right to send Americans unsolicited texts. The campaign’s lawyers are in active talks with phone companies after a third-party screening tool blocked President Trump texts in early July. The campaign alleges that screening the texts amounts to suppressing political speech, while carriers fear allowing them will result in fines for violating anti-spam rules.

Lots of Policymakers Hate Section 230 — But They Can't Agree On Why

Building a consensus to change Section 230 will be harder than it looks. The law’s critics have vastly different and sometimes incompatible ideas about how the law should work. Republican and Democratic policymakers alike have called for sites to bear more legal liability if users post illegal content.

Congress takes aim at Google search in antitrust hearing

The Senate Judiciary Committee met to discuss tech companies unfairly favoring their own products. And Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) announced the "Anticompetitive Exclusionary Conduct Prevention Act" to limit “exclusionary conduct” where a big company locks out smaller competitors, among other changes to antitrust law. It increases the burden of proof on monopolists to prove they’re not suppressing competition, and it discourages courts from granting immunity from antitrust enforcement.

Sprint and AT&T settle lawsuit over ‘blatantly misleading’ 5G E logo

AT&T and Sprint have settled a lawsuit over AT&T’s “5G Evolution” branding, which Sprint claimed was fooling customers into believing its 4G LTE network was a full-fledged 5G network. “We have amicably settled this matter,” an AT&T spokesperson said. Apparently, AT&T will keep using “5G E” in its marketing material. Earlier in 2019, AT&T started displaying a “5G E” logo on certain upgraded parts of its LTE network.

Former Senate staffer admits to doxxing five senators on Wikipedia

The man who edited Wikipedia with several senators’ private phone numbers and addresses has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and other offenses. Jackson Cosko, a former employee of Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), was arrested in 2018 on suspicion of doxxing five members of Congress. He’s now admitted to breaking into Sen Hassan’s office after being fired, stealing data that included personal contact information, then posting that information online during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, 70 other groups want Facebook to offer users ‘due process’ for takedowns

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and over 70 other groups have asked Facebook to adopt a clearer “due process” system for content takedowns. An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg urges him to enact the Santa Clara Principles, a series of moderation guidelines that academics and nonprofits put forward earlier in 2018. “Civil society groups around the globe have criticized the way that Facebook’s Community Standards exhibit bias and are unevenly applied across different languages and cultural contexts,” the letter says.

One of President Trump's lawyers asked the Supreme Court to hear a case that could weaken web platforms' legal protections

Charles Harder, part of President Donald Trump’s legal team, is pushing the Supreme Court to hear a lawsuit that could weaken legal protections for web platforms. Harder’s firm announced that it had filed a petition in Hassell v. Bird, a defamation case that California’s Supreme Court decided in July. The court ruled that recommendations site Yelp couldn’t be forced to remove a defamatory review from its site, based on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a legal shield that’s been criticized by Republican politicians in recent months.

How the Antitrust Battles of the '90s set the Stage for Today's Tech Giants

The 1980s saw major changes in the tech and telecommunications landscape, primarily the breakup of AT&T, which agreed to end its telecom monopoly by splitting into a number of “baby bells.” At the start of the ‘90s, the Federal Trade Commission was already scrutinizing computerized systems that seemed to facilitate entirely new monopolistic and collusive schemes.

Why the AT&T and Time Warner merger appeal matters — and why it’s a long shot

The Department of Justice (DOJ) appeal of the AT&T-Time Warner decision doesn’t have any immediate effects on the company's plans since the DOJ didn’t ask for a legal stay while it filed its appeal. But it signals the department’s plans to keep fighting consolidation, which could help shape the landscape for future mergers. If the Department of Justice successfully appeals the decision, it could make many other deals less likely to succeed, setting a precedent for considering vertical mergers potentially as monopolistic as horizontal ones.

What happens if Apple loses its Supreme Court App Store antitrust appeal?

The Supreme Court will decide whether iPhone users can sue Apple for locking down the iOS ecosystem, something the suit’s plaintiffs say is creating an anti-competitive monopoly. Apple v. Pepper could theoretically affect how tech companies can build walled gardens around their products. The Supreme Court isn’t going to make a call on that specific issue, but its decision could affect people’s relationship with all kinds of digital platforms. Here’s what’s at stake when the Supreme Court case starts, which should happen sometime in the next year. 

Here’s how companies have flouted net neutrality before and what made them stop

No matter what happens June 11, network neutrality repeal opens the door to some real abuses of internet service providers’ power — not hypothetical scenarios, but real predatory practices we’ve already seen in the past. These incidents show how complicated the issue of net neutrality is: all of these transgressions happened after the 2005 Internet Policy Statement, which laid out four “open internet” principles that would guide the agency’s decisions.

OLPC's $100 Laptop was going to Change the World -- Then It All Went Wrong

One Laptop Per Child wasn’t just a laptop, it was a philosophy. After announcing “the $100 Laptop,” OLPC had one job to do: make a laptop that cost $100. As the team developed the XO-1, they slowly realized that this wasn’t going to happen. OLPC pushed the laptop’s cost to a low of $130, but only by cutting so many corners that the laptop barely worked. Its price rose to around $180, and even then, the design had major tradeoffs. While Sugar was an elegant operating system, some potential buyers were dubious of anything that wasn’t Microsoft Windows.

How women helped build the internet, and why it matters

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, a new book from journalist and musician Claire L. Evans, offers a rougher and more complicated version of the history of the internet. 

New York attorney general asks people to report fake net neutrality comments

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman wants New York state residents to report fake net neutrality-related comments sent under their names. Schneiderman’s office has put up a page where New Yorkers can search the FCC’s comment database, then report any fake submissions. The page asks users to post links to fake comments and answer a few accompanying questions, including whether the content matched their actual view of net neutrality.

Anti-net neutrality spammers are impersonating real people to flood FCC comments

Thousands have posted comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s website in response to a proposed rollback of network neutrality internet protections, weighing in on whether and how to defend the open internet. But many others appeared to have a different point of view. “The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation,” read thousands of identical comments posted this week, seemingly by different concerned individuals. The comment goes on to give a vigorous defense of deregulation, calling the rules a “power grab” and saying the rollback represents “a positive step forward.” By midday May 9, the thread was inundated with versions of the comment. A search of the duplicated text found more than 58,000 results as of press time, with 17,000 of those posted in the last 24 hours alone.

The comments seem to be posted by different, real people, with addresses attached. But people contacted said they did not write the comments and have no idea where the posts came from. “That doesn’t even sound like verbiage I would use,” says Nancy Colombo of Connecticut, whose name and address appeared alongside the comment. “I have no idea where that came from,” says Lynn Vesely, whose Indiana address also appeared, and who was surprised to hear about the comment.

Can virtual reality help us talk politics online?

The more remote someone feels, the less human they seem. This is the driving force behind large parts of what is wrong with communicating on the Internet, and it often makes talking about politics on the internet a special kind of hell. But virtual reality, theoretically, can make people on opposite sides of the globe feel like they’re talking face-to-face. And this election season, a VR social network called AltspaceVR is testing whether this feeling of connection can bring its users together during a bitterly divided campaign.

WikiLeaks threatens to start its own Twitter because of 'cyber feudalism'

WikiLeaks and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have had harsh words over Twitter’s recent decision to ban noted Breitbart editor and troll Milo Yiannopoulos. WikiLeaks’ Twitter account declared the ban an example of "cyber feudalism," saying that Twitter had "banned conservative gay libertarian [Yiannopoulos] for speaking the 'wrong' way" to Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones.

According to an earlier Twitter statement, Yiannopoulos was banned for "inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others" after Jones began posting examples of racist and misogynist abuse she had received on the platform. Dorsey soon replied to WikiLeaks, echoing this language. "We don't ban people for expressing their thoughts," he wrote. "Targeted abuse & inciting abuse against people however, that's not allowed." The ideal version of Twitter would in fact do what WikiLeaks suggests: build tools to let people pick who they want to communicate with, then facilitate that as openly as possible.

This is the NSA reform that you've been waiting for -- sort of

[Commentary] Reformers are now pinning their hopes on a single bill: the USA Freedom Act, only one step away from passing the House of Representatives. The USA Freedom Act, brought by Rep Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), focuses on the most notorious government surveillance program: the NSA’s mass collection of phone call records, which it stores for up to five years.

The new bill focuses only on the calling records. Among other things, the amendment took out a section that would make it easier for companies to reveal that they’d been ordered to give up data, and it explicitly allowed intelligence agencies to gather numbers within two "hops" of the original query, instead of restricting it only to foreign agents and their contacts.

Most controversially, though, it struck out a section that applied to another NSA program: the collection of emails through Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The original bill explicitly barred the practice of "backdoor searches," which let NSA agents get around bans on collecting communications from Americans by searching for data that had been inadvertently caught in the dragnet.

The Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, was initially rumored to be making some unpopular changes of its own. A circulated amendment, says Center for Democracy and Technology senior counsel Harley Geiger, apparently would have made it unclear what the NSA could count as a search term when requesting data, opening a significant loophole. Unlike the Judiciary Committee, the Intelligence Committee held its hearing behind closed doors, part of a more general pattern of secrecy.

Ultimately, though, the bill that emerged was the same one the Judiciary Committee had amended and approved. Rogers and Ruppersberger praised the committee for adopting "a compromise that garnered strong, bipartisan support," leaving their own proposal in limbo.

Who's fighting to save the Internet now?

After years of pressure from Internet service providers, network neutrality is under threat by the Federal Communications Commission itself.

In a letter, Sen Al Franken (D-MN) warned that the FCC’s latest network neutrality proposal "would not preserve the Open Internet -- it would destroy it." His language is reminiscent of the response to another "Internet-destroying" policy: SOPA, the anti-piracy bill that mobilized perhaps the most effective online protest of all time. Like SOPA, these proposed Open Internet rules tackle an issue that’s near to the hearts of both Internet denizens and tech companies.

And as the FCC plans to officially consider the rules on May 15th, they’re figuring out how to mobilize the same kind of opposition. Though the company hasn’t confirmed anything on the record, sources say that outspoken net neutrality proponent Netflix has privately brought concerns to the FCC, and that it, Google, and other major players are quietly planning an accompanying publicity blitz.

Other groups have been more open. Mozilla, a prominent participant in the 2012 anti-SOPA blackout, has filed a petition with the FCC, asking it to regulate parts of Internet service providers’ business under common carrier laws. Mozilla senior policy engineer Chris Riley sees the FCC’s current proposal as the worst of both worlds: by allowing "commercially reasonable" discrimination, it’s allowing ISPs to undermine net neutrality, and by requiring a baseline level of service, it could be stretching beyond the limited authority courts have given it. "I’m really worried that what the FCC would do now is both lose in court and fail to protect net neutrality," he says. If it fails, net neutrality supporters predict dire consequences.

Reddit, currently one of the 25 most popular sites in the US, also joined the SOPA blackout, and it’s planning a site-wide online protest on May 15th. Nothing is locked down, but he hopes some of the politicians who have spoken out against the proposal will make appearances on Reddit -- a statement by Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) made it to the top of the site.

Comcast has very bad reasons for wanting to buy Time Warner Cable

[Commentary] Comcast wants to own the Internet -- or, at least, the cables that carry it to most Americans’ homes. There is absolutely no way that Comcast can argue it would have meaningful competition in wired broadband or cable after the merger.

A merger would turn Comcast’s already long lead into overwhelming dominance. And Comcast knows this. So how can it convince the FCC that this isn’t a problem? By comparing itself to pretty much any company that offers Internet or video service in any form. Leaving aside its link to NBCUniversal, Comcast has three major offerings: wired broadband, cable TV, and video on demand. If a company has moved into any of those spaces, Comcast says it’s a competitor.

Taken individually, each of these companies do compete in some sense with parts of Comcast, but the comparison falls apart when you look at how many of these services run on its broadband network. Comcast offers carefully constructed revenue and market cap charts that place it and TWC at the very bottom of the scale -- except that it’s comparing itself to the entirety of multinational giants like Apple, AT&T, and Microsoft, as well as bizarre additions like Facebook.

Comcast can only claim new services compete with existing wired broadband if it vastly oversells their potential. Google announced tentative plans to bring Fiber to more cities in February, and Comcast has spun this into a pending flurry of expansions, ignoring the fact that Google has until the end of 2014 to announce its decision and currently operates in only two small markets. There’s no doubt it can spur competition, but certainly not on the scale that Comcast implies.