January 2011

[Commentary] In November 2009, I quit Facebook. I had had an account for about a year, but with my 30th birthday and a cross-country move both looming, I felt it would be a symbolic way to shed my youth, a gesture that signified “I'm grown up now.” I didn't miss it — I didn't think much of it at all, in fact — until I took this job writing about cybersecurity. After six months of reporting on Facebook scams and the privacy infringements its users face daily, I came to a conclusion: You should quit Facebook. And you should do it now.

The revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen are driven by deep dissatisfaction with authoritarian regimes, but Internet technology has played a crucial role as a 21st-century weapon for democracy movements, experts say.

Inspired by the recent overthrow of the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia, citizen activists on Thursday escalated their protests in Egypt and Yemen, denouncing their respective governments. And social media played the dual role of a virtual town square where protest leaders rally the masses and counter government disinformation. Services such as Twitter and Facebook are "playing an increasingly large role in almost any mass protest around the world," said John Palfrey, a law professor at Harvard University who studies limits on Internet expression. "We will see more of this." The demonstrations in Egypt, where the government completely shut down the Internet late Thursday, "were started primarily by the April 6 Movement, which was basically a Facebook campaign that started in 2008 and called for protests about workers' rights," said Lina Khatib, a Stanford University expert on Arab reform who was in Cairo on Thursday before leaving for Paris. During the latest unrest, Twitter became an instant information tool, she said: "People were spreading the news on Twitter. They would alert people where demonstrators were gathering."

Netflix made good on a promise and released data on which US Internet providers offer the best access to Netflix streaming content. The company's data puts it "in the unique position of having insight into the performance of hundreds of millions of long duration, high-definition video streams delivered over the Internet."

Netflix displays throughput from Netflix content delivery networks to subscriber homes. Netflix's best quality HD streams are encoded at 4,800Kbps, and it's clear that no ISPs can sustain this level of service across an entire movie. But "the higher the sustained average, the greater the throughput the client can achieve, and the greater the image quality over the duration of the play," says the company. In the US, Charter delivers the best performance over time (2,667Kbps average), with Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner Cable taking the next three spots. The disparity between the top and bottom ISPs is stark; Clearwire offers only about half the sustained throughput as Charter (as a wireless operator, this is expected), but wireline ISPs like Frontier and CenturyTel also perform poorly (both companies do have large rural footprints, however). Netflix has promised to update the charts monthly, which may exert at least a bit of pressure on ISPs who might be tempted to throttle or otherwise downgrade Netflix quality.

In the first few weeks of 2011, Rep. Marsha Blackburn didn't just test the tech policy waters, she dove in head first.

On the opening day of the 112th Congress, the Tennessee Republican reintroduced a bill to bar the Federal Communications Commission from instituting network neutrality rules. Days later, she spoke on an online privacy panel at the geek equivalent of the Oscars: the International Consumer Electronics Show. Last week, she keynoted the State of the Net conference — the biggest tech policy fete in the capital so far this year. Blackburn’s turf, however, is far from the tech hubs of Silicon Valley, New York’s Silicon Alley or Boston’s Route 128 corridor. She’s from Brentwood (TN), a suburb of Nashville, known more for producing country music than silicon chips or Web startups.The tech community has taken notice.

Jason Linkins looks at who's financing Rep Blackburn's campaigns and finds Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association near the top of the list.