Susan Crawford

[Commentary] Street lights and traffic signal poles are like the Colorado Esplanade in the sky. No, I am not celebrating their function as providers of light. Their real power comes from a transformation — into neutral platforms that provide the tools of connectivity to everyone. Very few American cities (notable exception: Atlanta) have carried out this transmogrification, but every single one will need to. Santa Monica is showing the way: it is a city that will be able to control its future digital destiny, because it is taking a comprehensive, competition-forcing approach to the transmission of data.

Cities that get control of their streetlights and connect them to municipally-overseen, reasonably-priced dark fiber can chart their own Internet of Things futures, rather than leave their destinies in the hands of vendors whose priorities are driven (rationally) by the desire to control whole markets and keep share prices and dividends high rather than provide public benefits.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]

[Commentary] Practical ingenuity is still on display in Connecticut, which is poised to become the first “Gigabit State” in the country. Talk about your labor-saving, productivity-enhancing inventions — dozens of Connecticut towns are now on a path towards installing wholesale fiber networks connecting all homes and businesses. And those flinty Yankees won’t be paying for the installation of these open access networks themselves, because fiber, with its predictable up-front cost and steady returns, is an excellent longterm investment for private companies.

Meanwhile, any ISP will be able to use these networks to sell service directly to homes and businesses. Result: world-class connectivity at low prices for Connecticut residents in towns across the state — including in rural areas where getting online is a struggle. As Elin Katz, the Consumer Counsel of the State of Connecticut, puts it, “It’s like building the road — and anyone can drive their cars on it.”

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]

[Commentary] Lincoln made sure we had railroads; FDR made sure we had electricity; Eisenhower made sure we had highways. What US president will make sure we make a national upgrade to competitive, last-mile-fiber-plus-advanced-wireless connections? The question has become even more vital after a disappointing recent court decision that gave the thumbs up to a tactic of big communications companies who, for business reasons, refuse to extend service to rural communities: they can continue to lobby for laws that prevent those communities from setting up their own networks.

The fine-print interpretation by those Sixth Circuit judges has consequences. And some have already happened: Wilson (NC) turned off access for Pinetops (NC) right after the decision came down. The real need here is for national leadership. We need infrastructure banks writing loan guarantees that will lower the cost of accessing capital to build last-mile fiber across the land. We need to set our standards high in defining a basic Internet connection that’s essential for thriving lives — and those standards will need to involve a lot of fiber. To do all this, someone needs to step up, and soon. We need to take the burden off local heroes. It isn’t really their job to fix America’s competitive standing in the world. It’s the job of Congress and it’s the job of the president—but it’s mostly the latter. The president has to see that this isn’t a partisan issue, and that just as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower rose to the occasion, whoever is in the White House in 2017 must also do so, to serve the nation and its people. We can’t afford another administration that doesn’t get this job done.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]

[Commentary] America, we have a problem, and it is tall, ubiquitous, and on the side of the road. It is poles. Not the polls that do or do not track the progress of Donald Trump. Not people of Polish extraction. Utility poles. Poles are the key to our future, because poles are critical components of high-speed fiber optic Internet access. The lucky towns that have dominion over them have been transformed—take, for example, Chattanooga (TN).

Poles, as it turns out, seethe with operatic drama. They are creosote-soaked, 40-foot-high wooden battlegrounds. And, right now, a handful of companies — the usual villains in the Internet access story — is very interested in keeping the status quo in place by quietly making sure that access to these vertical conflict zones is fraught with difficulties. In some areas, poles are controlled by utilities, or even telecom companies. Anyone hoping to string fiber in those places faces two nightmarish, indefinite periods of delay and uncontrolled costs: first getting an agreement in place with the pole owners, and then getting the poles physically ready for a new wire.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]

[Commentary] When it comes to hype, “5G” is this year’s “cold fusion.”

The meaning seems obvious — our current communications system is 4G, so of course we must already have the next generation in line. Telecom executives play on this perception. Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, says 5G is “wireless fiber.” (And I thought fiber was fiber.) SK Telecom says it will soon be able to transfer holograms and enable virtual reality over 5G networks that are 100 times faster than current 4G LTE connections. Noise about 5G is incessant and triumphant, a constant drumbeat of predictions crowing about the arrival any day now of seemingly costless, ubiquitous, instantaneous, unlimited connectivity. The “5G” story is far more complex, calculated, and contingent than anyone in the carriers’ PR departments wants you to know. There is no 5G standard — yet. This “wireless fiber” will never happen unless we have… more fiber. In order to work, 99% of any “5G” wireless deployment will have to be fiber running very close to every home and business.

[Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center]

[Commentary] Network neutrality is about attempting to limit the power of Internet access network operators (like Charter or Comcast) to choose winners and losers among the services that have to use their wires — because, remember, competition is so limited — to reach consumers. It’s a kind of synthetic attempt to keep the operators from favoring their own commercial interests when sending Internet traffic from other people to you (or vice versa). But the problem is that where network operators don’t have to compete, and use their digital pipes for multiple purposes (like providing their own TV services that feel just like over-the-top video services), it’s so easy for them to act like media distribution companies, slicing and dicing and packaging, rather than transport providers. And ultimately, that kind of behavior is designed to serve their commercial interests. It’s only rational. But it’s harmful to new competitors and ultimately to consumers.

In the US, the net neutrality issue has been forced to bear too much weight. It stands in for a larger problem that a single law or regulation can’t address. It’s like a small white bird perched on the head of a hippo. The little bird is noticeable and interesting, but really just a side-effect of the reality of the hippo himself. And the hippo in this metaphor is the lack of competition for network access services, particularly higher-capacity services, in a fundamentally unregulated market.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center]

[Commentary] With the highest percentage of fibered homes in the world, and fiber-connected cell towers everywhere, all kinds of digitally enhanced mobile wireless possibilities have emerged in Seoul, South Korea. 5G won’t be a panacea for South Korea. There are genuine structural issues in Seoul that won’t be solved by technology. Like other major cities, affordable housing is a huge problem. Traffic congestion is awful — worse than New York City — and inequality is growing. As the mayor of Seoul, Won Soon Park, put it earlier in 2016, “Low growth is becoming firmly entrenched, drawing a deep, dark shade over our entire economy.” But with innovation on its side — Bloomberg says South Korea ranks first in the world as an innovative economy — South Korea hopes to use the new wizardry of wireless/fiber to create whole new categories of occupations (not just new jobs) for its people.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]

[Commentary] The town of Rockport (ME) opened its own gigabit-scale municipal fiber optic network -- meaning it can transmit a thousand megabits of data a second. It is the first such network in Maine.

Most importantly, the Rockport network provides a replicable model for towns and cities across the country. Rockport's town-owned gigabit network doesn't directly serve subscribers, which means Rockport isn't competing in the private market. Instead, the town is making its network -- made up of so-called dark fiber, which carries a potentially unlimited amount of communications data -- available to any private service provider.

Creating jobs and competing with other countries depend on ubiquitous, inexpensive fiber connectivity, so we need all the help we can get.

[Crawford is John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School]

[Commentary] Twenty-first Century Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch's plan makes sense, and Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner's whip-smart chief executive officer, will eventually find a partner. Why?

Because even very powerful programmers such as Time Warner need increased heft to deal with the ever-more-concentrated US distribution market.

To control their own destiny, to ensure that they're able to reach viewers on their own terms (rather than paying unlimited tribute to ComcastTimeWarnerCable), programmers will need all the firepower they can muster. That means having as much sports and high-value content as possible on their side of the table. In turn, that means getting bigger.

[Crawford is John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School]

[Commentary] For the same reason the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile US didn’t go through in 2011, a Sprint/T-Mobile joinder shouldn't be permitted either: No matter how the deal is conditioned, it will cause a reduction in competition. We already have a highly concentrated mobile-phone marketplace.

It's a "duopoly with a fringe": Two behemoths, Verizon Communications and AT&T, take home three-quarters of mobile revenue in the US. Their spectrum holdings, existing physical networks, powerful brands and lobbying heft create significant barriers to entry in an industry in which scale and scope are everything.

Sprint, with about 16 percent market share, argues that combining with T-Mobile (13 percent) will create a viable third player. But if a Sprint/T-Mobile deal is approved, the combined entity will have less incentive to be disruptive and more incentive to raise prices than either of them have now as separate businesses.

That matters even if you're not one of their customers. T-Mobile's aggressive marketing plans have driven Verizon Wireless and AT&T to act differently, offering better and cheaper family plans to some of their customers.

[Crawford is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law]