Brian Fung

[Commentary] Twitter's latest transparency report is out, and the company's new data show a 46-percent jump in the number of government requests for user information since the company issued its last report covering July to December of 2013. Since its last transparency report, Twitter says eight new countries have begun asking for user data, for a total of 54.

What explains the spread isn't clear. Maybe governments are learning from each other that online user information is a useful tool. Maybe as adoption of technology (and of specific services like Twitter) grows in other countries, there's more information to be mined from people the government would be investigating anyway. Or maybe the very proliferation of transparency reports is drawing attention to this option for governments around the world.

[Commentary] In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt launched the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Rural Electrification Administration, among a number of other offices meant to provide power to those who'd been passed over by the privately owned utilities because those areas weren't as profitable.

TVA in particular worked with cities like Chattanooga to provide affordable energy. To supporters of publicly owned broadband networks, the TVA's circumvention of commercially owned electric utilities to support public utility projects helps justify the rise of municipal Internet today -- despite the protests of incumbents both then and now.

AT&T has become the latest company to sign a deal with Netflix to ensure that the company's streaming videos get to consumers without lagging or delay.

Netflix said that the two companies had reached an agreement on interconnection in May. "We're now beginning to turn up the connections, a process that should be complete in the coming days," the company said.

[Commentary]The Government Accountability Office is out with a new preliminary report on data caps, in response to a request by Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA).

Among its findings? Broadband companies can take advantage of usage-based pricing to "generate more revenues" for their business, but ordinary consumers are often befuddled by the rules, potentially leading to over-payment.

GAO interviews with ordinary consumers revealed that most people have little to no idea how much data they actually use, despite some ISPs' offer of tools to help customers track their intake. Many incorrectly assumed, for instance, that online shopping requires a lot of data. Others believe that "leaving social media applications running in the background used large amounts of data."

OkCupid cofounder Christian Rudder explained that OkCupid has on occasion played around with removing text from people's profiles, removing photos, and even telling some users they were an excellent match when in fact they were only a 30 percent match according to the company's systems. Just to see what would happen. OkCupid defends this behavior as something that any self-respecting Web site would do.

In the coming months, expect to hear a lot about something called "circumvention." According to a House Judiciary Committee aide, lawmakers are going to take a specific look this fall at the Copyright Act's provisions that presume cellphone unlocking and similar activities to be illegal by default.

In the context of cell phones, circumvention involves bypassing the controls that a wireless carrier has placed on a phone so that the device can't be used with a different network. The results of the these Congressional hearings, advocates say, will likely shape the future of all technologies involving intellectual property -- ranging from self-driving cars to media and entertainment to the Internet-connected home.

Ready for Hillary, the super political action committee that's laying the groundwork for a potential Hillary Clinton run in 2016, is testing software to determine whether data about social ties can help identify likely grassroots leaders and new supporters.

If the insights into online relationships prove useful in the 2014 midterm elections, further experiments could even lead to campaigns picking out the most active organizers before those people even know it.

The tool is called Recruiter. While campaigns have largely reached the limits of improving the voter file -- those massive databases of names, e-mail addresses and commercial information that became so important in the 2012 cycle -- the next step is to figure out how to identify and leverage the connections between entries in those files.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) thinks the Federal Trade Commission shouldn't be allowed to sue companies for breaches of customer data using its main legal authority.

In a hearing, Rep Issa slammed the agency for using what he called an "unlimited power" under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Section 5 is what gives the FTC the authority to take legal action against companies it believes has been behaving deceptively or unfairly.

Now the scope of that authority is coming into question just as technology have opened up new risks of data-related crimes like fraud and identity theft.

Data show that there's a big gap between the executives at the top of the tech pyramid and those who actually make the machines go.

This is true for Twitter, but also at Yahoo, where women account for 37 percent of the workforce but only 23 percent of leadership positions. Whites make up only 50 percent of Yahoo's US employees, but as much as 78 percent of its US-based leadership. Asians make up more than a third of Facebook's overall workforce. Yet only 19 percent have made it into senior-level positions.

There appears to be a ceiling at many of these companies that transcends demography.

[Commentary] Comcast has been engaged in a public relations battle lately to convince policymakers and the public that it is all in favor of network neutrality, or the idea that Internet traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers no matter where it came from or what's contained in it.

In an ongoing ad campaign, Comcast touts that it's the only Internet service provider (or ISP) legally bound by "full" net neutrality and that the company wants to expand that commitment to even more people.

None of what Comcast has claimed is factually untrue. But the company omits some facts in its advertising that gives the impression that it is unconditionally committed to "full" net neutrality, whatever that might mean, when the bigger picture is somewhat more complicated.

What Comcast doesn't say is that its commitment to "full" net neutrality expires in 2018. After that, it will no longer be legally bound to follow the 2010 rules, and it'll be free to abandon that commitment literally overnight. Comcast does not note this detail in its ads; nor does it explain how its policies may change in 2018.