GigaOm

We won’t see the first AT&T-DirecTV wireless-broadband-satellite service package until the summer of 2015 -- assuming the deal goes through. But what would such a bundle look like?

AT&T wants to tie together as many of the two companies’ products and services as possible. Most significantly, AT&T wants to tie the video distribution network more closely to the broadband network.

AT&T doesn’t just want consumers to buy their satellite TV and Internet from the same provider, it may require it -- or at least make it much more costly to separate them.

AT&T said it would continue to offer stand-alone DSL and U-Verse connections at guaranteed prices for three years after the deal’s close. The same goes for DirecTV service.

[Commentary] We don’t usually venture into politics here at GigaOm. Now we are making an exception to that rule because of a grave threat to the very foundation of technology-driven innovation.

The founding principle of GigaOm has always been that broadband is a transformative factor that enables innovation and brings about positive change for industries and societies alike. And while we have expanded our focus over the years to cover emerging technologies in fields like mobile, cloud computing, media, data and science, broadband has always been a key enabler of those technologies.

Without the transformative power of broadband, there would be no Amazon Web Services, no Netflix, no iOS and no Android, no Facebook, no Bitcoin and no Internet of Things. There would be no Teslas as we know them today, Pandora would stream no music and we wouldn’t be able to share our photos and videos over Instagram and Vine.

But broadband isn’t just about speed. It’s also about providing equal access, about enabling small startups to compete with the big guys and in turn become the next YouTube, Instagram or Twitter. It’s about a diversity of voices and opinions that can be found via search engines or social networks.

That’s why it is so important to have strong net neutrality protections that prevent access providers, many of which have their own competing business offerings and a monopoly over the eyeballs of end users, from discriminating against network traffic.

If you sign up for AT&T’s GigaPower fiber-to-the-home Internet service in Austin (TX), you can expect to pay more than twice the advertised rate on plans that include video to keep your privacy and web surfing history intact.

AT&T’s GigaPower service, which currently delivers 300 Mbps to homes and will eventually get upgraded to a gigabit, launched last December in Austin. It did so with two different pricing plans, one that cost $99 a month for typical service, and another that cost $70 a month provided users agreed to let AT&T monitor their packets to see where on the web the user has been. In turn, AT&T would sell ads targeted to that customer based on his or her habits. But the $29 more a month to keep your privacy isn’t actually $29 a month.

As you add video service, the price differential between choosing privacy and letting AT&T snoop rose to $62 a month for an equivalent package and included a $49 one-time fee (see the screenshot below). Keeping your web history out of Ma Bell’s hands would have cost almost $800 the first year you signed up at the high-end and $531 at the low-end of ordering only Internet (there’s a $99 activation fee and a $7 monthly gateway box fee).

A federal judge in Silicon Valley took the unusual step of rejecting a routine e-mail search request, and suggested that Google and the government take steps to halt the now-routine practice in which tech companies hand over the entirety of their customer’s cloud-based computer accounts.

“The Technorati are … everywhere,” wrote US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal. “And yet too few understand, or even suspect, the essential role played by many of these workers and their employers in facilitating most government access to private citizen’s data.”

The words introduced a six-page decision in which Judge Grewal refused to issue an order that would have forced Google to hand over the email account of a government employee suspected of corruption. Judge Grewal ordered the details of the investigation, including the name of the suspect, to be redacted but stated that the refusal order should be published.

Judge Grewal’s unusual order is also the latest flare-up in what the Washington Post styled the “Magistrate’s rebellion,” in which federal judges in multiple states have begun to balk about the scope of the search warrants that law enforcement agencies routinely demand.

[Commentary] 1999 had a gold rush mentality, a sense of broader mania. This time around you see more of a gross entitlement; and that’s what is different about the Bay Area.

The difference is the scale and scope of everything happening. Back then people would show up, hoping that they could merely participate in this tech-Internet thing. Now, many (if not most) show up expecting millions even if their companies fail. Just sit in a cafe -- any cafe in San Francisco -- and you hear stuff that makes you want to poke your eyes out. Founders, instead of trying to forge relationships, are getting into a pattern of expecting funding without much effort. After all, if it doesn’t work out, no harm done and there is an acqui-hire around the corner. There is an expectation that even if they don’t build an interesting product, they deserve a nice exit for trying anyway: which is troubling as far as I am concerned.

Nowadays, the babble is sourced from blogs; news blogs, expert blogs, investor blogs and founder blogs. The mainstream is once again back chasing the story. The reason why there is a boom in technology media today is because it is THE story. Technology is now part of the social fabric; it is what is causing dislocation. It is the cause of fear amongst all of us. The digitization of our society is a challenge that is both legislative and philosophical. And that is why we are seeing a greater demand for those who cover this industry.

[Commentary] Quick, what do Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cogent, Level 3, Google, Facebook and Vonnage all have in common? Among other things, they all pump a lot of data onto last-mile broadband networks and they could all afford to pay for a fast lane, if necessary.

Well, allowing discriminatory network management would be a grave threat to Netflix’s and Google’s bottom lines in any case. For all the hue and cry over the prospect of fast lanes on the Internet for the few and “dirt roads” for the rest, the truth is, no one wants to pay for a fast lane, even if they are able to. It’s bad for business. Regardless of what happens with the vote, however, it’s really the whole net neutrality debate that’s gone off the rails.

As evident from the Netflix, et. al. letter, the debate has devolved into an argument between the big and the bigger over the price of throughput. And Chairman Wheeler has allowed the FCC to get trapped into refereeing among the vested commercial interests rather than promoting and protecting the public interest (more or less the definition of regulatory capture).

It’s hard to see what the public interest is in the rate that Amazon or Netflix is able to negotiate with Comcast for a fast lane. I’ve been skeptical that reclassification is the way to go because it could provoke such a monumental political fight that anything useful happening on the net neutrality front could be delayed for years. But if the only alternative is to limit the public’s interest in the most important communications network of our time to refereeing between Netflix and Comcast, perhaps it’s time to take on the fight.

[Sweeting is Principal, Concurrent Media Strategies]

Japanese mobile giant NTT Docomo plans to conduct experimental trials of new high-bandwidth network technologies that could deliver up to 10 Gbps over a wireless link and connect millions of new devices to the mobile network.

The hope is these new radio technologies could become part of the emerging 5G standard. Docomo is working with network vendors Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent, Samsung, NEC and Fujitsu to conduct lab trials at the carrier’s R&D center in Yokosuka, followed by outdoor trials.

NTT Docomo is exploring a part of the electromagnetic band that has been previously deemed useless for mobile use: the vast swaths of wireless spectrum above 6 GHz. By bringing together huge numbers of frequencies and using big antenna arrays, carriers could introduce reams of new capacity into their networks, but there’s also a question of whether they can use that capacity in truly mobile networks or just transmit it only to devices that stay put.

[Commentary] One of the founding principles of GigaOm is that connectivity is the lifeblood of the tech industry, and over the years we’ve tried to shape our coverage as much around that topic as possible.

It has become increasingly clear to us that the Internet is under siege from for-profit business interests, aging and outdated laws and policies, and the ever-growing demands that we place on its infrastructure.

We thought it was time to take a look at the current state of the Internet and outline our proposals for how we think the Internet -- including everything from last-mile broadband to wireless spectrum to movies and TV -- might be reinvented if it were being conceived in 2014, knowing what we now know about its evolution and the world’s reaction to its expansion.

We have five pieces to this special report:

1. Stacey Higginbotham on next-generation broadband
2. Kevin Fitchard on the future of wireless networks
3. Janko Roettgers on content business models and the Internet
4. David Meyer on how privacy could be reinvented on the Internet
5. Jeff Roberts on how governments can more wisely regulate networks

[Commentary] There are plenty of people concerned that wireline and wireless network routing, as it is now, might not work for much longer.

Between battles of peering, concerns over network neutrality, the changing shape of content and even concerns about network resiliency and privacy more people are looking at the current Internet and dreaming of a change that takes into account the growing dependence society has on the Internet. While, the projects below are not a complete list, they illustrate some of the big trends in how people with a stake in the Internet are thinking about making it better for the long haul and future network demands.

• Push everything to the edge: there is a dilemma for network architects: can pushing files out to the edge continue to solve problems as demand increases for fat content like video, but also when we’re building connected homes and cities that benefit from a more mesh-network structure where devices talk to each other as well as the public Internet?
• Peer to peer: the Internet isn’t just for serving content. It has always been a two-way communications mechanism, but in the last few years consumers have, well, consumed, more traffic than they have created online. That’s changing as more people put up videos, network their homes and communities start to use networks for sharing video content, sending medical files or other high-bandwidth applications. In some cases, while the data can be small, it tends to be sensitive to latency and distance, so sending it back to a central server doesn’t make sense.
• Named-data networks: here are a class of projects around the world and research networks that envision taking this concept to the network itself. Instead of talking to servers to get an address for a URL or device, nodes on the network are given a name and content is stored everywhere. The way content is given a name and the levels of encryption involved help define the different types of these networks.

[Commentary] Personal online security benefits everyone; well, almost everyone. Putting these measures in place wouldn’t be easy, and it would be unpopular in some quarters, but I think it would certainly be worth trying:

• Responsible disclosure: A neutral body such as the International Telecommunication Union should administer the disclosure scheme, monitoring compliance around the initial quiet-tap-on-the-shoulder stage and ensuring the transparency of subsequent public disclosures.
• Audit everything: This scheme should be funded by all countries and administered by the ITU or perhaps a standards-setting body like the IETF or the W3C. It should not be expensive, particularly when taking into consideration the public costs of dealing with attacks.
• Encrypt everything: The W3C’s HTTP Working Group is already trying to ensure that open web use will become encrypted by default. The IETF and others are also now focused on improving the usability of online security and on encouraging standards-setters to think about security from the start.
• Informed consent: The difference between opting in and out is vast. Shifting from an opt-out to an opt-in model would certainly add friction to sign-up and update processes, and it would require a standardized template that people broadly understand, but it’s the only honest way to process people’s data.
• Privacy-friendly principles and evolutionary rules: The core principles should ideally be enshrined in a global Internet bill of rights, respected by countries and translated into national law as closely as possible. And here’s the overarching principle that should set the tone for the rest: the rights people enjoy offline should apply just as much online