The Wall Street Journal studied the internet use of 53 of our journalists across the country, over a period of months, in coordination with researchers at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. Our panelists used only a fraction of their available bandwidth to watch streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube, even simultaneously. Quality didn’t improve much with higher speeds. Picture clarity was about the same. Videos didn’t launch quicker. Broadband providers such as Comcast, Charter, and AT&T are marketing speeds in the range of 250, 500 or even 1,000 megabits a second, often promising that streaming-video bingers will benefit. “Fast speeds for all of your shows,” declares one online ad from Comcast. But for a typical household, the benefits of paying for more than 100 megabits a second are marginal at best, according to the researchers. That means many households are paying a premium for services they don’t need.

Facebook unveiled its long-awaited feature allowing users to limit businesses, apps, and other groups that collect data about them on the Web and pass that information to the tech giant — a move that may disappoint people who thought they would be able to delete that information from Facebook in full. The social media giant said the new tools to control “Off-Facebook Activity” are designed to “shed more light” on a form of online tracking — around shopping habits, web-browsing histories and other activities — that determines some of the ads people see on Facebook. Users now can choose to remove this history from their accounts and turn off some or all of that tracking in the future. The tools are being rolled out in Spain, Ireland and South Korea beginning Aug 20, with additional availability in the coming months.

The feature comes more than a year after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg first pledged to build a function called “Clear History” that he said would work much the same way a browser allows people to see and delete information about the sites they visited. The goal had been to empower users to “flush your history whenever you want,” he said in May 2018, admitting the company hadn’t been clear about all the ways it learns about its users. But the implementation of those controls doesn’t exactly flush data, as Zuckerberg had promised. Instead, it disconnects information from being identified to a specific user, and it isn’t deleted outright. Facebook officials previously said users could “delete this information from your account,” a pledge that might have led users to believe Facebook would remove it entirely. The controls also won’t prevent Facebook from reporting back to another business whenever users generally purchase their product after seeing an ad targeted to them — one of the most attractive elements of the Facebook platform, underpinning its lucrative success, in the eyes of companies that want to reach specific audiences and measure the impact of their ads.

Facebook asked me to conduct a survey to hear from conservatives directly. Following substantial public interest in the project and in light of policy changes Facebook has recently made, we have decided to share our findings at this time. We found conservatives’ concerns generally fall within the following six buckets:

1. Content distribution and algorithms. Conservatives have expressed concern that bias against their viewpoints may be “baked in” to Facebook’s algorithms. In addition, interviewees argued that Facebook shouldn’t be in the business of separating fact from fiction in the news.
2. Content policies. Facebook’s community standards prohibit hate speech, graphic violence, adult nudity, sexual activity and cruel and insensitive content. Several interviewees pointed to the highly subjective, ever-evolving nature of some of these standards, in particular the term “hate speech.”
3. Content enforcement. Interviewees were concerned that the biases of Facebook employees who enforce the rules may result in disproportionate censoring of conservatives. Some midsize and grass-roots organizations also believe their appeals are not taken as seriously as those of larger organizations.
4. Ad policies. In the wake of strong evidence from the US intelligence community that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election with fake social-media accounts and inflammatory content, Facebook required advertisers to register as “political” organizations in order to post ads with a political or policy focus. Some conservative interviewees said this new rule jeopardized their status as nonprofits under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code.
5. Ad enforcement. As a result of Facebook’s new, more stringent ad policies, interviewees said the ad-approval process has slowed significantly. Some fear that the new process may be designed to disadvantage conservative ads in the wake of the Trump campaign’s successful use of social media in 2016.
6. Workforce viewpoint diversity. Several interviewees noted the overall lack of viewpoint diversity throughout Facebook’s workforce and senior management.

Facebook has made several changes that are responsive to our findings, and we understand more are being considered. For now, changes include:

• Oversight board. Facebook announced plans in July for an oversight board to hear appeals of some more-difficult content-removal decisions. If structured to reflect accurately the diverse ideological and religious views of Facebook’s user base, the board may help ensure content decisions are made thoughtfully and free from inappropriate bias.
• Explanations of news-feed rankings. To foster user trust in the algorithms that influence content placement, Facebook has launched transparency tools that explain to users why they see certain content on their news feeds.
• Page transparency. Facebook has enabled page managers to see when their content has been removed for violating community standards, or when distribution of a post has been reduced because a fact-checker gave it a “false” rating.
• Staffing. Facebook has hired four additional people devoted exclusively to working with smaller organizations to resolve questions and complaints about content decisions.
• Ad labeling requirements. To avoid incorrectly branding ads as “political,” Facebook renamed its ads library and now refers instead to ads “about social issues, elections or politics.”
• Ad policies. Facebook has changed its ad policies that prohibit images of patients with medical tubes as “shocking and sensational content.” This will make it easier to promote certain pro-life ads.

[Jon Kyl, a Republican former US senator from Arizona, is a senior counsel at Covington & Burling LLP.]

A years-long legal battle between Domino's Pizza and a man who is blind named Guillermo Robles over whether the pizza chain is required by law to make its website accessible to the disabled could make it all the way up to the Supreme Court in 2019. Should the case go that far, its outcome could forever change the way the internet is regulated — and determine how accessible the internet will be in the future for the roughly 20% of Americans with a disability. Domino's is petitioning the Supreme Court to take up the case after a federal appeals court sided with Robles in 2016. The pizza giant argues that compliance to the American Disabilities Act (ADA) is costly and unnecessary, since the law doesn't explicitly include internet provisions. The disabled community argues that online coverage is implied in the ADA. "When we wrote the bill and it passed nearly 30 years ago, obviously, the internet was not up and alive," says former Rep Tony Coelho (D-CA), a disabilities advocate who authored the ADA. "But when we say that the bill covers all public accommodations, we believe that applies today to the internet. And I believe that if it got to Supreme Court, it would say it does, too." Inconsistent court rulings and regulatory positions on the issue over the years have brought little clarity on whether businesses have to legally update their software, leaving millions of Americans unable to access retail and consumer websites. When the Supreme Court returns from summer recess, it will decide whether it will take up the case or not. If it does, experts expect it to be reviewed by the end of 2019.