Wired

A set of internet privacy rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission has become a target for Republicans.

Though it’s received far less attention than healthcare or immigration, the rollback would affect millions of consumers and bring basic changes to how they use the internet—though they might not ever know it. Companies like Google and Facebook can learn an awful lot about you based on what you search for, what pages you “like,” and who your friends are. But your wireless company and in-home broadband provider could learn much more. Although Google uses encryption to protect your searches from prying eyes, these companies can potentially see what sites you actually end up visiting and when you visit them. Mobile carriers track your location and could keep tabs on how much time you spend using different apps. And they can sell that information to the highest bidder.

Now Sen Jeff Flake (R-AZ) plans to introduce a resolution to overturn the FCC rules, enabling internet providers and wireless companies to sell your data unless you explicitly opt out. “The FCC’s midnight regulation does nothing to protect consumer privacy,” Senator Flake said. “It is unnecessary, confusing and adds yet another innovation-stifling regulation to the internet.”

President Donald Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly met recently with Time Warner executives to complain about CNN’s coverage of the president. Any visit from a White House official seeking to stifle journalists is disturbing. But Time Warner, which owns CNN, has another problem that’s all tied up in presidential politics.

The cable and entertainment giant is seeking to sell itself to AT&T, a mega-merger that would require federal approval. At this point, thanks to Kushner’s visit, any move by the Department of Justice or the Federal Communications Commission to block the merger would end up looking political. That’s too bad, because there are plenty of good reasons to be skeptical of the deal. AT&T could hike the rates that other pay TV providers have to pay to provide channels like HBO and CNN. It could refuse to license that content to streaming video services. It could give Time Warner an edge over competitors on its wireless network by exempting its content from data caps. All that stands to get lost in Trump’s petty war on the press.

Google Fiber is getting a lot smaller. Alphabet is sending hundreds of employees at Access—the division that runs the high-speed internet service—to work at other parts of the company. It’s not the end of Fiber, not exactly. But the slimming-down likely signals a future for Alphabet’s broadband ambitions that involves less fiber. Google first announced Fiber in 2010 with a widely publicized contest to see which city the company would first grace with its ultra-fast service. Since then, Fiber has spread to several US cities and metropolitan areas. But Access said in October that it was curtailing plans to expand to new locations, and Alphabet has clearly lost faith in the idea of running fiber optic cables right into people’s homes, at least in the traditional way.

Instead, Access has hired a new CEO, tech and broadband veteran Greg McCray, to figure out new ways to bring faster—and presumably cheaper—high-speed internet access to the rest of the country. McCray used to be chief executive officer of telecom services provider Aero Communications Inc. He also sits on the board of CenturyLink Inc., one of the biggest U.S. providers of internet and phone services for businesses.

Internet access is at least as crucial to taking part in the 21st-century US economy as a phone or a car. But one-third of adults have no broadband connection at home. For low-income families with a household income of less than $20,000, it’s closer to 60 percent. The new Federal Communication Commission chairman Ajit Pai has promised to close this so-called digital divide. But he recently put a stop to the expansion of a key government program to offer subsidized broadband access to low-income Americans. Advocates and educators say it’s a move that will leave behind.

Verizon is finally bringing back unlimited plans. Yes, the plans come with catches. But they’re great news for Verizon customers who want to stream or upload lots of video. At least as long as the company faces enough competition to keepthe competition might not last. T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom, has been trying to sell the wireless carrier for years, and T-Mobile’s aggressive pricing has always looked in part like a ploy to grow its subscription base to make itself more attractive to potential acquirers. If Deutsche Telekom were finally able to sell T-Mobile, its new parent might get stingier with pricing and pizzas. If not, its current parent might do the same.

Nearly four years after his leaks, Edward Snowden has focused the next phase of his career on solving that very specific instance of the panopticon problem: how to protect reporters and the people who feed them informa­tion in an era of eroding privacy—without requiring them to have an National Security Agency analyst’s expertise in encryption or to exile them­selves to Moscow.

“Watch the journalists and you’ll find their sources,” Snowden says. “So how do we preserve that con­fidentiality in this new world, when it’s more important than ever?” Since early in 2016, Snowden has quietly served as president of a small San Francisco–based nonprofit called the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Its mission: to equip the media to do its job at a time when state-­sponsored hackers and government surveillance threaten investigative reporting in ways Woodward and Bernstein never imagined. “Newsrooms don’t have the bud­get, the sophistication, or the skills to defend them­selves in the current environment,” says Snowden. “We’re trying to provide a few niche tools to make the game a little more fair.”

[Commentary] The news media is in trouble. The advertising-driven business model is on the brink of collapse. Trust in the press is at an all-time low. And now those two long-brewing concerns have been joined by an even larger existential crisis. In a post-fact era of fake news and filter bubbles, in which audiences cherry-pick the information and sources that match their own biases and dismiss the rest, the news media seems to have lost its power to shape public opinion. We have gone from a business model that manufactures consent to one that manufactures dissent—a system that pumps up conflict and outrage rather than watering it down.

Moat calls itself the “Nielsen of digital.” It’s a service advertisers use to make sure the right people are seeing and clicking on their ads. And those advertisers today have a problem: Because of the automated nature of so much online advertising, cash is increasingly flowing to sites that peddle fake news, often without the knowledge of the advertisers themselves. That’s not the kind of news brands want to be seen paying for. But Moat says it’s got a fake-news fix that could dry up ad dollars that keep fake news sites in busines

While abolishing network neutrality might initially increase profits for telecom and cable companies, long-term, it would harm both internet-focused companies and consumers. Telecom and cable companies claim that consumers will pay less if they abandon network neutrality, but economic models dispute that. Cable and telecom companies want to kill network neutrality to increase their profits, not decrease prices for consumers. Without net neutrality, consumers would be forced to access a distorted internet, where information is prioritized according to the financial interests of telecom and cable companies. Preserving network neutrality will help “make America great again.”

2015 was the year the Federal Communications Commission grew a spine. And 2017 could be the year that spine gets ripped out. Over the past two years, the FCC has passed new regulations to protect network neutrality by banning so-called “slow lanes” on the internet, created new rules to protect internet subscriber privacy, and levied record fines against companies like AT&T and Comcast. But this more aggressive FCC has never sat well with Republican lawmakers. Soon, these lawmakers may not only repeal the FCC’s recent decisions, but effectively neuter the agency as well. And even if the FCC does survive with its authority intact, experts warn, it could end up serving a darker purpose under President-elect Donald Trump.