Brian Fung

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take the Oval Office, one high-profile tech issue that many analysts are watching is network neutrality. Republicans are widely expected to seek changes to the rules, which currently bar Internet providers from slowing down websites they don't like or speeding up others in exchange for payment. But one staunch backer of the rules isn't too worried about the impending rollback, and that's Netflix. It believes it's become so big that any changes to the net neutrality rules aren't likely to affect its business much at all.

“Weakening of US Net neutrality laws, should that occur, is unlikely to materially affect our domestic margins or service quality because we are now popular enough with consumers to keep our relationships with ISPs stable,” the company wrote. “We hope the new U.S. administration and Congress will recognize that keeping the network neutral drives job growth and innovation,” the letter reads. “It's understandable that people describe this as Comcast versus Netflix,” said Matt Wood, policy director of the consumer group Free Press. But, he said, “We [are] concerned about the next innovative company that doesn't have the ability to buy itself out of trouble.”

Once pilloried by consumer advocates and comedian John Oliver as a shill for big business, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler took many by surprise as he brought challenge after challenge to the dominance of the companies he once represented. “I have always been the insurgent versus the incumbent,” he said.

Welcoming the votes of his Republican colleagues when it was politically convenient, forging ahead unilaterally when it wasn't, Chairman Wheeler sought to turn a staid federal office better known for policing celebrity wardrobe malfunctions and distributing airwave licenses into a consumer protection agency that would shape U.S. companies and technologies of the future. But now a dark cloud looms over Wheeler's legacy as Republicans — led by President-elect Donald Trump — prepare to undo some of the most significant regulations approved under his watch. No policy inspires as much fury among technologically minded Republicans as net neutrality, a signature FCC initiative that turned Internet service into a kind of 21st-century utility. Subjecting Internet providers to the same obligations that traditional phone companies must meet, Wheeler's decision to ram the policy through over conservative objections led to intense outrage from his political opponents. A federal court upheld the rules in the face of an industry lawsuit, appearing to settle the matter once and for all.

A Q&A with outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler.

Asked, "What would you say were your biggest accomplishments and, by contrast, your biggest defeats or setbacks?" Chairman Wheeler replied, "I'm really proud of what we did on net neutrality. I'm proud about what we did on privacy. I'm proud of what we did on cybersecurity. I'm proud of what we did on E-Rate. I'm proud of what we did on Lifeline. There are a lot of things I look back on with pride, and smile. I mean, we were the first to have spectrum for 5G in the world. We expanded the rural broadband program. I mean, I'm proud, when I look back on it." Asked, "What are you going to do now? Do you see yourself staying in tech policy?" Chairman Wheeler replied, "I'm a network guy. I've spent the last 40 years of my life in new and evolving networks. I don't think the cat can change his stripes. I'm going to go to the Aspen Institute and decompress for about three months. I don't intend to go crawl under a rock someplace."

Top AT&T executives swept into Trump Tower Jan 12 for a discussion with President-elect Donald Trump's team that could include the telecommunication giant's $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson and Senior Executive Vice President Robert Quinn arrived at about 9:15 am — and headed upstairs without telling reporters why they were there. But with AT&T's massive merger still pending — and with Trump having publicly opposed the deal — it would be a surprise if the acquisition were not brought up in Stephenson and Quinn's meeting. That is bolstered by the fact that Quinn serves as AT&T's top official in Washington and is charged with handling regulatory affairs. To complete the purchase, AT&T must persuade the federal government that the deal would not harm competition.

For years, companies like Facebook and Google have captivated audiences with the prospect of someday beaming Internet access down to earth from drones or satellites flying high above the ground. The dream held particular promise for developing countries where it's often expensive to build cellular towers or lay down physical Internet cabling. Now, though, Google's parent company, Alphabet, is scaling back its ambitions for Internet by drone. It has disbanded the team that had been developing the technology, according to the company. Dozens of employees in the group, known as Titan, have been reassigned to work on other projects. They include Project Wing, Alphabet's effort to develop a drone delivery service, and Project Loon, which seeks to deliver Internet around the world via floating balloons. That project is still going strong, Alphabet says.

WikiLeaks wants to start building a list of verified Twitter users that would include highly sensitive and personal information about their families, their finances and their housing situations. “We are thinking of making an online database with all 'verified' twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships,” WikiLeaks tweeted Jan 6.

The disclosure organization, run by Julian Assange, says the information would be used for an artificial-intelligence program. But Twitter users immediately fired back, saying WikiLeaks would use the list to take political vengeance against those who criticize it. Twitter “verifies” certain users, such as world leaders, nonprofit organizations and news outlets, with a blue check mark beside their names so that other users of the service can be confident about the posters' identities. Asked by journalist Kevin Collier why it needed to build a database of dossiers, WikiLeaks replied that the database would be used as a “metric to understand influence networks based on proximity graphs.” But the proposal faced a sharp and swift backlash as technologists, journalists and security researchers slammed the idea as a “sinister” and dangerous abuse of power and privacy.

AT&T is trying to ease its way out of scrutiny by the Federal Communications Commission over the wireless and TV giant's $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. Telecommunication regulators shouldn't need to analyze the deal because it will be beyond their jurisdiction, AT&T signaled in a filing Jan 5 to the Securities and Exchange Commission. By potentially eliminating a layer of oversight, the claim could accelerate the merger's approval in Washington, where federal antitrust officials are also expected to review the proposed purchase.

AT&T, which became the nation's largest pay-TV provider when it acquired DirecTV in 2016, is gunning for Time Warner's massive library of content and intellectual property, which it hopes to distribute and sell advertising against. In its SEC filing, AT&T said it has concluded that no licenses will be transferred. (In addition, Time Warner could seek to spin off its FCC licenses so that they are not a part of the deal, analysts have said.)

T-Mobile is trying to simplify how it and other wireless companies sell you phone service — and how they bill you for it. If it works, it could help clear up those headaches you may get while trying to decipher what you're actually paying for month after month.

T-Mobile said that beginning Jan 22, it will only sell a single cellular plan to new customers: a plan that gives you unlimited talk, text and data (though heavy users may still experience reduced Internet speeds during periods of high demand). This plan, known as T-Mobile One, has been around for a while now. But T-Mobile's decision to sell only this plan moving forward is an effort to streamline what can be a confusing jumble in the industry of different-size data buckets, temporary promotional discounts and opaque billing that adds up to billions every year, according to the company. The centerpiece of this new approach is the notion of single-figure billing: You see one number on your bill, and you pay it. That's it — no additional line items for taxes or other fees. As an example, a family of four might previously have paid $40 a line, and then additional miscellaneous charges on top of that, upping the total.

Some of the nation's biggest Internet providers are asking the government to roll back a landmark set of privacy regulations it approved last fall — kicking off an effort by the industry and its allies to dismantle key Internet policies of the Obama years. In a petition filed to federal regulators Jan 2, a top Washington trade group whose members include Comcast, Charter and Cox argued that the rules should be thrown out. “They are unnecessary, unjustified, unmoored from a cost-benefit assessment, and unlikely to advance the Commission’s stated goal of enhancing consumer privacy,” wrote the Internet & Television Association, known as NCTA.

The petition joins a bevy of others from groups representing telecom companies, wireless carriers, tech companies and advertisers. The rules, which passed by a 3-to-2 partisan vote favoring Democrats at the Federal Communications Commission in October, are meant to keep Internet providers such as Comcast, Verizon and others from abusing the behavioral data they collect on customers as they regularly use the Internet.

As rumors swirl about Verizon's plans for acquiring Yahoo, business analysts say the former search giant could see choppier waters ahead if Verizon backs out of the deal, as some observers have suggested it should do. The initial hack could have been written off as a one-time event, analysts say, but the bigger breach will be impossible to ignore. For Verizon, the stakes have risen.

Although it has not raised fresh warning flags over the new disclosure, the telecom firm must balance Yahoo's initial estimated value against the possibility of discovering even more hackings down the road. "It’s like buying a ticking time bomb,"said Jeff Kagan, an independent industry analyst. "You never know when it’s going to blow again, and could keep blowing up time after time." Security experts have criticized Yahoo's use of outdated security technologies to defend user data, and the company's top security official resigned in protest in 2015 when he was cut out of a major decision to allow the federal government to scan customer emails. Backing out of the deal, Kagan said, probably would cause Yahoo's value to decline. But Verizon is more likely to seek a discount than to walk away, according to a mergers and acquisitions lawyer familiar with the transaction who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters of corporate strategy.