Vice

Comcast’s rolling out of 1 terabyte (TB) data caps starting November 1 has left a lot of data-hungry people in a big bind. In an age where more people are turning to streaming services such as Hulu and PlayStation Vue for their fix, and with 4K becoming more commonplace, a data cap with only 1TB of data leaves many Comcast users looking to see what they can do to deal with the situation. As a result of the new data cap, people are looking for ways to cut back on data usage—lest they pay $10 per extra 10GB block of data.

Strategies abound, with some customers lowering their YouTube stream to a measly 480p. Others are also taking advantage of the ability to lower the quality of services like Netflix and Hulu offer options to decrease their data consumption. But who wants to see Stranger Things or Narcos in anything less than 720p at a bare minimum? Other customers are taking more drastic measures, such as switching to a Comcast Business account, which solves the data cap problem but isn't exactly cheap: a 100mbps connection costs $200 per month. In comparison, it’s only $60per month with Comcast’s residential Xfinity service. Of course, those being affected would be more than willing to switch to a different broadband provider—if only that were an option for more people.

It’s the $85 billion question. Will the Federal Communications Commission have jurisdiction over AT&T’s blockbuster $85 billion buyout of entertainment giant Time Warner? The reason why this is important is that the FCC is likely to take a more skeptical view of the deal than the Justice Dept. In mergers like these, the Justice Dept.’s job is to ensure that the deal doesn’t run afoul of antitrust laws. The FCC, by contrast, has a more rigorous responsibility: To ensure that the deal serves the public interest. That’s why AT&T wants to avoid FCC scrutiny in this case.

As a technical matter, it would be very difficult for AT&T to absorb CNN and HBO without the broadcast functionality that these licenses provide, according to John Gasparini, policy fellow at DC-based consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “It appears that AT&T and DirecTV do not currently have sufficient satellite licenses to forgo acquiring the Time Warner licenses without impacting the operations of big-name properties like CNN and HBO,” Gasparini said. “As a result, it’s more than likely that AT&T and Time Warner will need to secure FCC approval before the deal goes through.” “The only way AT&T could avoid FCC scrutiny is if they deliberately structure this deal in a convoluted way to avoid a transfer of these licenses and thus FCC review,” Gasparini added.

So what happened to Google Fiber? For one thing, building out a brand new wireline communications network from scratch is costly, difficult work. Permits must be obtained, partnerships with local governments must be struck, and obstacles thrown up by incumbent Internet service providers and their allies in statehouses must be overcome. Then there’s the small matter of actually building out the network—laying fiber in the ground, or stringing fiber on utility poles—which is an expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming endeavor. "I suspect the sheer economics of broad scale access deployments finally became too much for them," said Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research. "Ultimately, most of the reasons Google got into this in the first place have either been achieved or been demonstrated to be unrealistic."

Then there’s the changing nature of Alphabet itself. Alphabet is under increasing pressure from Wall Street to rein in the costs associated with its more fantastical moonshots. One thing seems clear: Alphabet's decision to halt its fiber expansion increases the urgency for cities and municipalities around the country to build community broadband networks if they want faster, cheaper alternatives to the dominant internet service providers. It appears increasingly likely that Google Fiber won’t save you, people, so maybe it’s time to take matters into your own hands.

The “Chattanooga Choo Choo” sign over the old terminal station is purely decorative, a throwback. Since the Southern Railroad left town in the early 1970s, the southeastern Tennessee city has been looking for an identity that has nothing to do with a bygone big band song or an abandoned train. It’s finally found one in another huge infrastructure project: The Gig. At a time when small cities, towns, and rural areas are seeing an exodus of young people to large cities and a precipitous decline in solidly middle class jobs, the Gig has helped Chattanooga thrive and create a new identity for itself.

Chattanooga and many of the other 82 other cities and towns in the United States that have thus far built their own government-owned, fiber-based Internet are held up as examples for the rest of the country to follow. Like the presence of well-paved roads, good Internet access doesn’t guarantee that a city will be successful. But the lack of it guarantees that a community will get left behind as the economy increasingly demands that companies compete not just with their neighbors next door, but with the entire world. But not every rural community can just lay its own fiber. Cities and towns that build their own Internet have found themselves squarely in the crosshairs of telecommunication lobbyists and lawyers, who have managed to enact laws making it difficult or illegal to build government-owned networks. But the success of these networks is beginning to open eyes around the country: If we start treating the Internet not as a product sold by a company but as a necessary utility, can the economic prospects of rural America be saved?

Let’s ponder the impact that technology had on the 1992 campaign.

1. Prodigy, the early online service that directly competed with AOL for a time, launched a 1992 campaign database for users to track candidates.
2. For his 1992 primary campaign, current Gov Jerry Brown (D-CA) innovated by using a 1-800 number to solicit donations.
3. Gov Brown also used Compuserve to reach voters
4. The 1992 campaign was a hot topic on Usenet, the decentralized newsgroup system which is best described to those who never experienced it in person as the Reddit of its day.
5. In 1992, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ran a number of email-driven bots on the campaign92.org domain, allowing users to request position papers for any campaign on the ballot in at least half of US states.

Comparing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on cybersecurity is probably one of the toughest challenges for a journalist writing about the presidential race. Or, perhaps, it’s one of the easiest. Donald Trump has no mention whatsoever of cybersecurity in his official platform. In fact, he doesn’t even mention the word “Internet” once, although he has mentioned the word cyber. Clinton, on the other hand, has a whole section of her platform dedicated to innovation and technology. To be fair, she doesn’t have detailed proposals regarding cybersecurity, but at least she mentions it, saying she intends to promote it “at home and abroad,” and will protect “online privacy and security.” Clinton also specifically says she intends to safeguard “free flow of information between borders,” and update procedures that regulate the sharing of people’s data across borders—a key internet privacy issue.

Trump, for his part, has shown a remarkable ignorance toward cybersecurity even throughout the campaign. Recently, he said “the cyber is so big,” and explained the word cyber didn’t even exist until recently—showing how out of touch he is from anything that involves computers. He also called out Apple for fighting the FBI in the famous San Bernardino (CA) case and said he was going to boycott the tech company, and joked about the DNC hack, calling Russia to hack Clinton’s e-mails.

Evaluating Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on technology and telecommunication policy issues poses an interesting challenge. Clinton has laid out detailed proposals on issues ranging from network neutrality to expanding broadband access to increasing broadband competition. Trump has not, and there is very little material in the public record with which to evaluate his positions. On the issues where Trump has taken a public position, his statements indicate a troubling ignorance of technical facts, and an alarming willingness to peddle blatant falsehoods for political gain.

Clinton has presented a detailed set of policy proposals aimed at ensuring Internet openness and reducing the digital divide by encouraging broadband deployment, including at the community level, and increasing competition in markets often dominated by a dwindling number of corporate giants. Trump has largely ignored issues like the digital divide and broadband competition, and his erroneous statements on issues like net neutrality and the Internet governance transition suggest that he has little grasp of, or interest in, tech and telecom policy.

At 5:00 pm on April 25, 2015, dozens of cell phone users in Mountain View (CA) were warned of a bizarre road accident. A satellite had crashed to Earth on the busy Moffett Boulevard, three miles from Google’s headquarters, causing gridlock. Half an hour later, things got really weird. First responders to the scene began sickening with an unknown virus. By half past six, the infection had spread to Palo Alto and Menlo Park, traffic was at a standstill for miles, and gunshots had been heard in nearby Sunnyvale. The messages—issued through the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system that normally warns of severe weather and missing children—kept coming. A firestorm in San Jose, mobbed hospitals and widespread civil unrest. By the next afternoon, Gov Jerry Brown (D-CA) had ordered the evacuation of millions of people and the National Institutes of Health had confirmed the virus was extraterrestrial in origin. As darkness fell, the president imposed martial law. But there was no need to panic. This was, of course, just an exercise, a scenario dubbed "Alien Catastrophe" by researchers with funding from the Department of Homeland Security to test new technologies for public alerts. The real battle being fought right now is not between the National Guard and interstellar microbes but between government agencies keen to drag Wireless Emergency Alerts into the digital age and a telecom industry that seems happy with things just the way they are. Because of the way the underlying technology works (more on this later), WEAs are text-only messages limited to just 90 characters. All the information that could rescue a child or save your life today has to squeeze into less than two-thirds of a tweet. And there is currently no way to include a clickable phone number or web link for recipients to report sightings or learn more.

The US government’s plan to relinquish stewardship of key Internet governance functions is under attack from Republicans who are using blatant falsehoods and fear-mongering to obstruct the historic transfer, according to Internet policy experts. Led by Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX), Republicans are working to sabotage the US government’s long-standing plan to transfer oversight of core Internet technical functions, including management of the Domain Name System (DNS), to a nonprofit group of global stakeholders. Sen Cruz and his GOP allies claim that the Oct 1 transfer would undermine global Internet freedom, imperil US national security, and violate federal law—and they’ve pledged to use the federal budget process to block the move. Sen Cruz has even gone so far as to threaten federal employees working on the transition with prosecution and imprisonment. “The Obama administration's proposal to give away control of the Internet poses a significant threat to our freedom,” Sen Cruz said, warning darkly of “the significant, irreparable damage this proposed Internet giveaway could wreak not only on our nation but on free speech across the world.”

Internet policy experts say Sen Cruz’s attempt to delay the transition, which is largely clerical in nature and unlikely to even be noticed by the world’s 3.2 billion internet users, poses serious risks to global Internet governance and could embolden repressive regimes around the world to undermine Internet freedom and seek greater government-led or intergovernmental control of the Internet. "There’s no legitimate way for him to get to that conclusion,” Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy and a leading authority on global internet governance, told PolitiFact, which rated Sen Cruz’s claims as FALSE. “What he’s doing is fear-mongering and trying to create a bogeyman, which is the United Nations.”

With the presidential election taking all the air out of the room, July's IT attack on the Library of Congress barely made the news. But for good governance advocates and policymakers, this denial of service attack, which caused a three day service outage, validated decades of complaints about the Library of Congress’ failure to join the digital age.

Americans are familiar with the Library’s mission to archive the world’s literature and research. But Congress, librarians, and specialized policy wonks are more familiar with the Library’s many other functions, including the intelligence gatherer, legislative tracker, governance think tank, and intellectual property bureaucracy. The library’s dysfunction is bad news for Congressional staff, and the researchers and scholars who defend on the archives of American history and information on the world’s most unstable regions.