Brian Fung

So, you're on the hunt for a new home-Internet provider. The one you like seems to offer fast, reliable service, but its footprint ends just short of where you happen to live — and there aren't many other options in your area. Too bad: Looks like you'll be sticking with slow speeds and lackluster customer support while your luckiest neighbors get to surf without interruption. For many Americans, this isn't hypothetical. It's reality.

Until now, there weren't many ways around this problem. But thanks to a technology some Internet service providers (ISPs) expect to roll out next year, Americans dreaming of better, faster broadband may actually be able to get it.

To understand how, let's start with key concepts about how Internet service works. Most residential broadband today runs over cables that are laid in the ground or strung on telephone poles, that then branch off and tunnel directly into your house. Laying these cables is costly, which is why many Internet providers expand slowly — or not at all, if they're worried the returns can't justify the outlays.

Cellular Internet is a little different. Cell towers are expensive, too, but they create a one-to-many connection that serves thousands of mobile devices wirelessly — rather than creating a dedicated pipe to a single, fixed destination such as a home or business. The speeds aren't quite as fast on mobile data as what you get with fixed broadband, but for basic Web browsing and video, it's good enough.

Now, imagine if you could take the convenience of cellular data and combine it with the superfast download speeds associated with fixed, wired broadband. What might that look like?

Will Internet providers have to start cracking down harder on their own customers for suspected copyright infringement? That's one of the big questions being raised in the wake of an obscure court ruling that finds that Cox Communications is liable for the illegal music and movie downloads of its subscribers.

A federal judge said Cox Communications will have to pay a $25 million penalty that a jury had awarded in December to BMG, the music rights company. BMG had been using a third-party company called Rightscorp to monitor the Internet for filesharing activity and notify Internet providers when it found evidence of it. The expectation was that Cox would pass along Rightscorp's notices to consumers. BMG claimed that Cox was dragging its feet and using a variety of technical means to keep the notices from reaching its affected customers. The court ruled in favor of BMG's argument that Cox should be held liable because it not only knew that its users were illegally downloading copyrighted content, it also took actions that contributed to it.

The finding that Cox is liable for its customers' piracy should absolutely worry other Internet providers, according to legal analysts at the consumer group Public Knowledge.

Should your online privacy depend on whether you've paid your Internet provider a little extra this month? That's one of the key policy questions concerning the future of the Web. And the nation's top telecom and broadband regulator, Tom Wheeler, signaled that he's not a fan of the idea.

Talking to reporters, the head of the Federal Communications Commission implied that the Internet risks becoming divided into privacy haves and have-nots, if companies such as AT&T and Comcast can dangle discounts in front of consumers in exchange for slurping up their search and browsing histories for advertising purposes. "I would hope that privacy doesn't become a luxury item," Chairman Wheeler said. The FCC is waist-deep in crafting a set of privacy regulations for Internet service providers (ISPs). Some, such as Comcast, have met with the FCC to ask that it not restrict the ability of ISPs to tinker with a discount-for-data business model. "Low-income consumers have less disposable income with which to pay for privacy-protective plans, and therefore are much more likely to give up their privacy in exchange for access to the Internet," wrote Eric Null, a policy lawyer at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. "Low-income consumers should not have to decide between internet access and privacy, but pay-for-privacy forces that decision upon them."

Amazon.com says the cable industry's own proposal for how to shift Americans away from the set-top boxes they currently rent for hundreds of dollars a year is riddled with flaws. The online retail giant is arguing that the cable companies' vision for accessing TV content in the future — via apps embedded in smart TVs, phones and other devices — doesn't guarantee the copy protections that currently exist with set-top boxes. (Copy protection has emerged as a key issue in the ongoing fight to determine how cable viewers will someday get their shows and movies.) The cable-backed "app-based approach" to getting your programs is an alternative to what some federal regulators want instead: A system that forces cable companies to hand over all their programming so that any other company — including, perhaps, Amazon — could build and sell their own set-top boxes straight to consumers.

In a nutshell, cable companies are saying new regulations could disrupt the copy-protection regime that undergirds the economics of TV. Amazon's saying the cable industry's counterproposal isn't worth its salt, in part because Amazon potentially stands to gain from a more stringent set of requirements on cable companies.

Many in the tech industry are already none too pleased with the idea of a President Trump. But Trump's selection of Gov Mike Pence (R-IN) may drive them even further from the Republican ticket.

For starters, Gov Pence is at odds with one of the wealthiest, most popular companies on the planet: Apple. He and the company's chief executive, Tim Cook, faced off in 2015 over a bill that let business owners and workers cite religious objections as a reason not to serve customers. The result, said Cook, would lead to unjust discrimination against consumers based on their physical appearance or sexual orientation. The bill was widely criticized by execs across Silicon Valley, including from Twitter, Yelp, Lyft and LinkedIn.

[Commentary] The New York Times has endorsed Tim Wu, the progressive candidate for New York lieutenant governor, in its editorial pages. The endorsement is a sign that technology, long relegated to the fringes of political discussion, has finally become a dinner-table issue and the basis for a viable campaign platform.

As the Web keeps taking over ever larger chunks of the economy, the policies that govern it have become increasingly relevant to the average consumer. Large, public debates like the one involving SOPA and PIPA, or cellphone unlocking, or net neutrality, have a direct effect on what Americans can do with their connected devices and the services layered on top of them. And that's made tech a hot-button issue.

[Commentary] The interconnection market might be complicated and opaque to most of us, but it's a vital part of our Internet experience. A Cloudflare analysis shows that in North America (which basically means the United States, because Cloudflare operates only one Canadian data center and none in Mexico) companies engage in much more paid transit than free peering than in other regions of the world.

Cloudflare's data offers more insight on the bigger picture, which is that paid transit is very common. That's a talking point often advanced by people who say Netflix is complaining a lot about nothing, or that efforts to ban "Internet fast lanes" overlook the fact that the Internet is already non-neutral thanks to paid transit. If there's already an existing market where companies pay each other to carry traffic, the argument goes, then what's the big deal about paid peering or, in the last-mile Internet, paid prioritization?

From New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to cable advertising firms to state public service commissions, there are those who believe that the Federal Communications Commission should impose stronger merger conditions on Comcast and Time Warner.

Here are a few of those ideas.

• Make sure Internet Essentials actually works for more people.
• Extend Comcast's previous commitments by another two years.
• Limit Comcast's control over the cable advertising market.

[Commentary] Leading network neutrality proponent Barbara van Schewick, a Stanford University law scholar, pointed out three tiny words that threaten to undermine Mozilla's proposal to heavily regulate the relationship between Internet service providers (ISPs) and digital content companies as telecommunications services.

"The definition of 'telecommunications service' requires that telecommunications is offered 'for a fee,'" van Schewick wrote. That's problematic, van Schewick argued, for a couple of reasons. If the FCC adopts Mozilla's proposal, then the FCC's net neutrality regulations wouldn't cover Internet providers that don't charge content companies an access fee.

More troubling to van Schewick, though, is how the phrase "for a fee" would complicate efforts to ban fee-based content prioritization. At a basic level, what Mozilla is asking the FCC to do is to single out fee-charging ISPs (because non-fee-charging ISPs would be exempted under the definition of "telecommunications service") and then turn around and tell them, based on that very same part of the Communications Act, that they can't charge those fees.

[Commentary] Like Hollywood, Silicon Valley has an idea of how politics works. And that idea is generally wrong. But some tech startups are finding that they can't get ahead without grappling with bureaucrats and lobbyists -- a dirty, petty business that reminds us more of the fading 20th century than the sleek, futuristic promise of the 21st.

Most of the time, tech companies would simply rather disengage from the squabbling that's characteristic of Congress and city hall. George Mason University researcher Adam Thierer calls this the principle of "permissionless innovation": When businesses don't have to justify their experiments to anyone, they can simply focus on building the next great tool or platform. This is the bedrock of startup culture, in which low barriers to entry allow the best ideas to bubble to the top whether you're a college dropout or have a Ph.D hanging on your wall.

A belief in permissionless innovation is what gives the tech industry its libertarian streak. Silicon Valley is in the throes of another tech bubble. Only this time, instead of ballooning stock prices, the bubble is one of political culture. Insulated from the challenges facing more established companies, the Bay Area's youngest have been socialized to believe that most problems can be fixed with enough money and engineering. As some companies are discovering, the reality is less straightforward.