San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco (CA) Supervisor Mark Farrell has assembled a group of business, privacy and academic experts to discuss crucial, early-stage questions surrounding Farrell’s plan to wire the city with high-speed Internet service. In the coming months, the San Francisco Municipal Fiber Blue Ribbon Panel will conduct research and provide recommendations on the most efficient and effective ways to blanket the city with broadband, an effort that could cost up to $1 billion.

If it becomes reality, San Francisco would be the largest city in the country to implement citywide high-speed Internet. City officials are currently targeting speeds of 1 gigabit per second. The average Internet speed in the US is 31 megabits per second according to the most recent data published by the Federal Communications Commission, so this could be about 30 times faster. Farrell will serve as the panel’s co-chair alongside Harvard Law School Professor Susan Crawford.

In the invisible spaces between the broadcast channels on your TV dial, a battle is brewing. As part of an effort to expand access to broadband Internet, Google and Microsoft are butting heads with the nation’s thousands of low-power television broadcasters, all jockeying for the same slivers of wireless spectrum.

The Internet and television industries are grappling over how portions of unused spectrum, commonly dubbed “white space,” should be put to use in the wake of a seismic upheaval of the TV spectrum landscape. At stake, broadcasters and their advocates say, is the future of low-power television, a class of TV operators who beam a wide variety of religious, ethnically diverse and hyper-local programming over the air. But setting themselves against the prospect of faster, more reliable Wi-Fi service, experts say, will be a steep uphill fight. “The balance here is trying to maintain some sort of local broadcasting versus what’s coming next, and what’s coming next is wireless” Internet, said Jonathan Kramer a telecommunications attorney. “The value of having high-speed Internet at home is likely far more valuable than simply access to a local station.”

A US District Court Judge has denied the Center for Public Integrity’s request for access to a taxpayer-funded study about cybersecurity vulnerabilities at the Federal Election Commission. The court’s decision comes more than 13 months after the Center for Public Integrity sued the FEC for access to the security study, which the FEC commissioned following a Center investigation revealing how Chinese hackers infiltrated the FEC’s computer systems.

The 44-page document — known within the FEC as the “NIST study” — in part provides recommendations on how to fix the FEC’s problems and bring its computer systems in line with specific National Institute of Standards and Technology computer security protocols. The study cost $199,500 to produce. In its lawsuit and the requests for the security study that preceded it, the Center noted that it had no quarrel with the FEC redacting sensitive passages that, if revealed, could compromise agency security.

On July 16, presidential nominee Donald Trump (R-NY) signed a pledge that he would fight internet porn and work to prevent the sexual exploitation of children online if elected president.

The pledge he signed was authored by Enough is Enough, a bipartisan group that says it's been fighting internet porn since 1994. The organization says it has worked to combat "internet pornography, child pornography, sexual predation and cyber-bullying." Trump promised to "give serious consideration to appointing a Presidential Commission to examine the harmful public health impact of Internet pornography on youth, families and the American culture and the prevention of the sexual exploitation of children in the digital age."

The public has blistered the Federal Communications Commission with a record 780,000 responses to its proposal that Internet service providers no longer be required to treat all online traffic equally.

But does the onslaught -- more than the agency has received for any proposed rule change -- even matter to the five commissioners who are expected to consider it in late 2014?

"I can tell you that I didn't go read all 3 million of those messages, but I knew they were there," former Commissioner Michael Copps said, referring to a similar deluge that were sent to the FCC, Congress and elsewhere in Washington when the commission considered loosening media ownership rules a decade ago. "But did they make an impact? You bet they made an impact. There was no question about it."

Copps, who served on the commission from 2001 to 2011, has long been a fierce advocate for preserving net neutrality and an opponent of further media consolidation.

Silicon Valley's newest venture capitalist has social media experience - and a social justice background. Benjamin Jealous, the former NAACP president responsible for turning around the flagging civil rights institution, will join an Oakland venture capital firm dedicated to socially conscious investing.

His assignment as a venture partner with Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact: create a freeway to the tech world from poor communities of color where now there is little more than a trail. Only 6 percent of US tech workers are African American and 7 percent are Latino; 15 percent are Asian American and 71 percent are non-Hispanic white, according to 2011 census data.

Jealous, a former Alameda resident who revived the 105-year-old NAACP during his tenure that ended in December, is a lifelong activist with no tech or venture capital experience.

Seven-term Rep Mike Honda (D-CA), challenged by opponent Ro Khanna to take a stand on the impending $45 billion mega-merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, said that he opposes the deal as “not in the best interests of my constituents.”

“I have long advocated for policies that protect and enhance consumer choice, increase competition, enable innovation and promote network neutrality. This merger has the potential to harm these principles, and I believe it should not be approved. I have always fought for diversity in media ownership, local control over cable franchising, and requiring providers to build out networks to all parts of their service area so that all consumers can benefit from broadband access and competition. I fear that this merger, which would concentrate vast market share in a single company, would result in price increases for customers, would slow the pace of innovation in the equipment market, and would dampen investment in the development of online content.”