Brian Fung

How Congress could actually wind up saving Aereo

[Commentary] A sliver of light may have just appeared at the end of Aereo's long legal tunnel. A Senate proposal is aiming to rewrite the economics of TV. If the idea moves forward, Aereo might be spared its demise -- and the company might even be able to keep the business model that got it into trouble with the Supreme Court.

The Senate proposal, known as "Local Choice," would ease the pressure on cable companies who currently pay rising fees to broadcasters to get their content. This idea could work in Aereo's favor; if the courts accept its new argument that Aereo is a cable company, Aereo might find itself lumped in with the other firms that would be affected by Local Choice, too.

Local Choice would benefit Aereo by letting it avoid paying those expensive content fees itself, landing it back where it began before it was laid low by litigation. Voila -- Aereo emerges more or less intact, though the details are a little more complicated.

What if you could pick and choose which broadcast TV channels you get?

Two of the most powerful senators in Washington have an idea that could change the economics of TV for good.

The plan, proposed by Sens Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and John Thune (R-SD), would let TV viewers individually decide which broadcast channels they want to receive in their cable subscriptions. You could, for example, opt to receive ABC and NBC but not CBS. Consumers would then be billed directly for those individual channels, essentially establishing an a la carte system for broadcast TV.

First, ending the cable companies' role as a middleman between viewer and broadcaster would eliminate the contracting disputes behind programming blackouts like the CBS-Time Warner Cable outage in 2013. Second, by paying for broadcast content themselves, consumers would have a better idea of how much that programming is actually worth. Third, consumers could more easily compare broadcast fees against the cost of cable programming.

FCC to Verizon: ‘All the kids do it’ is no excuse for throttling unlimited data

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler doesn't much like Verizon's latest attempt to justify slowing down 4G LTE for a select group of its customers.

Just because Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T all slow down mobile data for users who go over their monthly limit -- or who account for a disproportionate share of consumption -- doesn't make it okay for Verizon to do the same, he said.

"'All the kids do it' is something that never worked with me when I was growing up, and it didn't work for my kids," said Chairman Wheeler. "We have to be careful about attempts to reframe the issue."

Some cellphone calls to 911 are notoriously hard to trace. But now we’re one step closer to a fix.

Today, federal standards help 911 call centers find victims within minutes if they're calling from outdoors or from a landline. In most cases, help arrives on the scene with no complications at all. But for people calling 911 on a cellphone indoors, it's often a different story.

Being inside thwarts GPS signals used by cellphones and dispatchers to locate people in an emergency. For this reason, the Federal Communications Commission has announced a breakthrough in developing a plan that everyone can get behind.

Consisting of four guidelines, the roadmap puts the country "on track" to improving location accuracy for wireless 911 calls, which account for 70 percent of all calls to 911, according to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. Key to the guidelines is a requirement that wireless carriers provide 911 dispatchers with the exact floor and room of a caller.

Why regulators are the big winners in the failed Sprint-T-Mobile deal

[Commentary] With so much riding on the upcoming auction of wireless spectrum -- an event Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has described as "once-in-a-lifetime" -- and with so few obvious competitive benefits of approving a merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, it comes as no surprise that the FCC has opposed the deal.

Now that the merger has fallen apart, the FCC can turn its full attention to the other mergers on its plate, involving Comcast and Time Warner Cable on the one hand and AT&T and DirecTV on the other. "The big winner here is the FCC," said analyst Craig Moffett.

The competition for high-speed fiber optic Internet is escalating in 13 cities

The gigabit fiber war just got a little hotter. Louisiana-based broadband provider CenturyLink said that it's expanding its fiber optic service -- with speeds of 1 gigabit per second -- to 13 new cities. The speeds will be "symmetrical," meaning that users will get the same upload speeds as their download speeds.

The list of new cities getting CenturyLink residential fiber includes Seattle, Portland, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Orlando, and Columbia and Jefferson City (MO). Businesses will be able to take advantage of gigabit service in all those cities, as well as in Phoenix, Tuscon, Albuquerque, Spokane (WA), Colorado Springs, and Sioux Falls (SD).

Why did all these countries start asking for Twitter’s user data?

[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.

How the history of electricity explains municipal broadband

[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.

Netflix and AT&T have signed an interconnection deal

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.

How data caps could reshape the economics of the Internet (again)

[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 reveals it’s been lying to some of its users. Just to see what’ll happen.

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.

What a new law about cellphone unlocking has to do with coffee, cars and consumer freedom

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's latest tech mines your relationship data

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.

This Republican wants to keep the FTC from regulating data security

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.

Tech companies’ diversity problems are even worse at the leadership level

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.

Behind Comcast’s truthy ad campaign for net neutrality

[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.

ISPs are spending less on their networks as they make more money off them

It turns out that, as a percentage of the money they pull in, Internet service providers (ISPs) have generally spent less on infrastructure over time -- from a high of 37 percent of revenue in some cases to a low of around 12 percent more recently. This affects how reliable your connections are, what kind of speeds you get and the amount you pay for service each month.

Some companies are building out fiber directly to the home. But not all; fiber is expensive. The question now is whether ISP spending will rise again to meet the new demand.

No human has ever been to Mars. But NASA wants to put commercial satellites there.

NASA is investigating ways to put commercial satellites into the planet's orbit. A network of privately funded satellite relays could take advantage of next-generation, laser-based data links capable of sending information back to Earth hundreds of times faster than the typical American broadband connection.

FCC: Over 1 million comments have now been filed on net neutrality

The Federal Communications Commission says more than 1 million people have now submitted comments on network neutrality. With the closing of the extended comment period looming, the FCC's net neutrality docket now has more comments than any other rulemaking proceeding.

What a terrible Comcast rep can teach regulators about the Time Warner Cable merger

[Commentary] A Comcast customer service call from hell highlights something that isn't as easily quantified by cold, hard economic analysis. The Federal Communications Commission, one of two agencies along with the Justice Department charged with approving the merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, typically considers the public interest as part of its mandate.

Consumer advocates argue that quality customer service ought to be included under that umbrella. Yet the very fact that people are making that case at all underscores how subjective the term "public interest" really is, and why it's sometimes easier to focus on what can be measured or projected numerically.

Google’s back-door approach to Internet policy

Google isn't exactly sitting on its hands in the network neutrality debate. It's taking a more oblique approach to the Washington game -- like speaking through industry groups.

Google has also, like Netflix, begun shaming Internet providers that it perceives as laggards in the video streaming department. And it is clear Google hasn't completely disengaged from issues of Internet policy. It's simply grown more selective in its battles, and perhaps a little more ninja-like in the way it fights them.

No, Aereo isn’t really claiming to be a true cable company

In an effort to survive, Aereo's throwing everything against the wall and hoping something -- anything -- sticks. Its latest tactic? To embrace the Supreme Court decision that effectively killed its existing business model, and to work within the confines of the ruling to arrive at an alternative that won't land the company in court again.

Aereo is now conceding that it is a cable company after all, after having argued the opposite point before the Supreme Court. The company now says it's willing to pay those licensing fees -- but to the Copyright Office, rather than to the broadcasters who were suing Aereo in the first place. In short, Aereo is trying to thread a very small needle: It wants to say it's just enough of a cable company that it qualifies for the benefits that come along with it (more on that shortly) but not so much of a cable company that it needs to pay expensive retransmission fees required of other cable companies.

If Aereo admits that it's a cable company in the eyes of the copyright law, what's to stop the FCC from branding Aereo as a cable company that has to pay retransmission fees? Aereo's only hope at avoiding that outcome rests on the FCC's historical reluctance to say whether online video services count as MVPDs.

The Senate has advanced a bill to legalize cell phone unlocking

We're one step closer to a world where it's no longer a huge chore to take your existing cell phone to another network. The Senate Judiciary Committee just unanimously approved a bill that'd make it easier for you to "unlock" your cell phone so that you can port it to a different carrier -- much in the way you can bring your phone number with you.

"With today’s strong bipartisan vote in the Judiciary Committee, I hope the full Senate can soon take up this important legislation that supports consumer rights," said Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the committee chairman. The House has already passed a similar bill -- but unlike the House version the Senate's, notably, doesn't forbid people from unlocking lots of cell phones. That language is important when it comes to businesses that trade in second-hand devices; currently, you can only unlock your phone if you ask for your carrier's permission (and only at the end of your contract).

Calling 911 from your cell phone in DC? Good luck getting first-responders to find you.

Over a six-month period in 2013, Washington (DC) data show, calls to 911 were easily narrowed down to a general geographic area covered by a single cell tower. But a startling proportion of those calls lacked the latitude-longitude data required by federal regulations for pinpointing people in distress.

The more specific data was missing for as many as 90 percent of such calls over a six-month period in 2013, according to data from the DC government that was provided to the FCC and obtained by the Washington Post. Of the 385,341 wireless calls to 911 made during that time, technological systems were able to provide accurate location data for only 39,805.

Dispatchers in some cases may have been able to get an address from the caller. But in other cases -- for instance, where the caller was unable to speak due to danger or injury -- dispatchers would have had little to go on aside from a search area the size of a few city blocks.

Other data the DC government provided to the Federal Communications Commission -- covering a three-month period in the summer of 2014 and breaking the calls down by wireless carrier -- showed that some carriers did a better job than others at providing the latitude-longitude data. But rates of compliance were still no better than a coin toss, according to the research.