GigaOm

The Supreme Court ruled in June that Aereo, whose service helped subscribers stream TV signals, is like the cable companies that need a license to transmit over-the-air TV. But when Aereo responded by trying to buy such a license, the Copyright Office stated it is not a cable service -- leaving the start-up in a legal no-man’s land where it is likely to die.

The situation sums up the surreal world of TV regulation, which is built on an outdated set of rules that serve to entrench the current model of TV distribution. Under this model, broadcasters charge to stick consumers with bloated bundles of channels, and newer internet services like Aereo get frozen out altogether. Used as a sword, the retransmission consent rules mean the broadcasters can cause a channel to “go dark’ for months until a cable service agrees to pay a fee.

[Commentary] Google and other search engines operating in Europe have to take down links to information about people if those people ask them to do so, provided there’s no public-interest or other good reason for keeping the links up.

The problem for now, however, is that the search engines are already plowing ahead with the takedowns and no-one is sure how exactly they’re doing so. European data protection officials, who are due to meet with Microsoft and hopefully Google, want the search engines’ test for removing data to be more transparent. This could be accomplished with a series of blog posts.

We don’t need to know the details of every case (information overload won’t help anyone, and it would defeat the purpose of the exercise anyway) but there’s no reason we can’t get further insight into what the takedown teams are thinking and how they are operating.

[Commentary] The Internet champions “permissionless innovation,” the ability to develop new services without tedious negotiation and approval. As the Federal Communications Commission makes its third attempt to develop a fair, coherent, and lawful regulatory policy for the Internet’s broadband on-ramps, it can either apply this principle or it can adopt Title II -- a contrary rule that once limited the pace of innovation in the historic telephone network.

Much of the Internet establishment, many ordinary citizens, and even some cable network comedians urge implementing Title II without acknowledging the harm it’s likely to cause. The father of net neutrality, Columbia law professor Tim Wu, is an exception: he admits that “excessive regulation can stagnate an industry” even while preferring monopoly-style regulation for increasingly competitive broadband networks.

[Bennett is a Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute]

DirecTV is finally making the NFL Sunday ticket available to football fans without a pay TV subscription. The satellite TV provider is about to launch a new online service, dubbed NFLSundayTicketTV, which will offer access to NFL games that were previously only available to DirecTV subscribers. However, it looks like eligibility is limited to people who can’t get DirecTV.

The bigger drawback of the service is that many sports fans won’t have access to it. Prospective buyers have to enter their home address to see whether they’re eligible, and many are turned away. It looks like DirecTV is checking whether applicants live in single-home residencies, which could theoretically get satellite TV, or apartments, where satellite dishes are often blocked.

Mass surveillance by intelligence agencies is almost certainly illegal under international law, even where it involves collecting but not looking at people’s data, the United Nations human rights chief has advised.

In a damning but cautiously phrased report, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay recommended that governments review their national laws, policies and practices to check that they do comply with international human rights law, then fix them if they don’t.

The report doesn’t name names, but it’s not very hard to see that much of it applies to the activities of the US and its various intelligence partners. “The very existence of a mass surveillance programme creates an interference with privacy,” Pillay said.

News stories about a child rapist, a shoplifter and a financial scandal have all gone missing from Google search results in recent weeks -- but now links to the stories have reappeared on “Hidden from Google,” a website that is archiving examples of Internet censorship that are taking place under a controversial new law.

Three weeks after the Supreme Court shut down Aereo for streaming TV over the Internet without permission, a court in California has given the green light for satellite TV company Dish to continue selling a service that does much the same thing.

In a short ruling, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused a request by Fox to shut down “Dish Anywhere,” which lets consumers record the broadcasters’ shows on a DVR and then beam them over the Internet to a computer or mobile device.

In its ruling, the 9th Circuit upheld a lower court’s finding that Fox was unlikely to suffer serious harm if Dish Anywhere was not shut down pending a copyright trial.

New York Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has upped the stakes in the debate over how the Federal Communications Commission should regulate broadband Internet providers, by calling for them to be reclassified as so-called “common carriers.”

Sen Schumer invoked “Title II,” which has been a third rail in discussions on telecom policy, because it would require companies like Comcast to behave more like public utilities. His Facebook post reads in part: “Like a highway, the Internet must remain free and open for all; not determined by the highest bidders … Title II reclassification is the best way to for us to preserve the Internet as an unfettered tool for communication and the sharing of ideas.”

In response to the post, prominent figures from the tech world, including Reddit’s Alexis Onanain and lawyer Marvin Ammori, left comments hailing Sen Schumer’s plan as an important step for startups.

The World Wide Web Foundation and the United Kingdom Law Society have both strongly criticized the British government for attempting to fast-track the new Data Retention and Investigation Powers (DRIP) Act, which is meant to keep existing surveillance powers going but which will actually expand them greatly.

According to the World Wide Web Foundation, which is headed up by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, the British government’s assertion that the bill needs to be rushed through as emergency legislation “seems at best incompetent, and at worst manipulative,” as the law could easily have been debated over recent months. The Law Society, which represents British lawyers, warned that history shows emergency laws tend to be “used for purposes for which they were not intended.”

In July a Seattle area startup called Syntonic is offering up a new kind of app and content store to AT&T Mobility customers.

What makes this app store different from, say, the iTunes app store or Google Play, is it comes with a free-data pass. Any app downloaded, video watched or site surfed isn’t counted against your data plan.

Syntonic is taking advantage of AT&T’s new sponsored data program, in which developers or advertisers can the pay the mobile data freight charges that would normally be incurred from consuming their content over the cellular network. The company is basically creating a free zone on the mobile Internet within the borders of its app store.