Issues

Verizon Sees The Light On Net Neutrality But It’s Too Little Too Late

Posted on by Eli Love

By: Mike Montgomery

Verizon’s most recent statement on net neutrality is really the height of hypocrisy. To be clear, I completely agree with the no blocking and no throttling principles outlined in the post. Yet their sudden enthusiasm to ban zero rating services and grant the FCC power to chill innovation through antiquated regulation will ultimately harm broadband investment and consumer access to modern 21st century Internet-based services and applications. It’s curious that Verizon has recently found religion on this single-most divisive and long-lasting tech public policy issue of this century.

For the past six years my organization has been pushing for a third way on net neutrality: laws that support an open, free Internet but are affirmatively enshrined into law by Congress instead of mandated by the FCC and are subject to change every 4–8 years. Unfortunately, we’re currently in legal no-man’s land, and, as we predicted, the rules are now going through the legal meat grinder as we are essentially legislating through litigation.

As we predicted, the FCC has set in motion a process where tech policy is set through litigation, rather than through collaborative and publicly vetted legislation. This creates many problems. Waiting means incredible uncertainty for anyone building a business that might be affected by changing net neutrality rules (in other words, everyone building a business on the Internet).

No one knows what the courts will decide. The legal process is, by definition, uncertain. And we’re in the middle of a heated presidential race.

Read the full article here.

Hope For Startups: US Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Design Patent Dispute

Posted on by Eli Love

By: Tim Sparapani

The annual tech startup and innovation festival held annually in Austin, Texas known as South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) has recently ended. While all the big tech companies were there strutting their stuff along with all the companies that are trying to reimagine themselves as tech companies, the real stars of the show are the start-ups. Tens of thousands of people attend annually to find or become the next big thing, which his why I applaud the US Supreme Court for giving those strivers and innovators a win this week by deciding to hear the design patent appeal in the five year old battle between Apple and Samsung.

More about the big guys in a minute and their fight, which I’ve written about before here: http://www.wirelessweek.com/article/2016/02/us-supreme-court-should-clarify-law-design-patents. But before we get there let’s talk about what’s at stake in the case for startups and why it is so important that the Supreme Court is revisiting the lower court’s mistaken ruling.

Turns out the big things all started out as small things and they all needed a lot of luck and lots of care and feeding to grow and prosper. Most especially, they needed to not have extraordinary and unnecessary barriers put in their place. Startups are like salmon swimming upstream to spawn. The odds are already long that they will reach their goal. Any additional barrier put in their way, like a dam blocking a river, can exhaust the startup and rob it of its vitality thereby preventing it from reaching its goal. The absolute last thing that a tech startup needs is to have to – after coming up with a great idea to take to the market, struggling to raise capital, forging a team and bringing a product to the market – fight unnecessarily with an incumbent about the design of their product. But, unless the US Supreme Court steps in and reverses the lower court’s decision, that’s likely to be an all too common scenario for startups. As soon as the next exciting startups get some momentum going they are likely to face a new breed of patent trolls that could halt their progress entirely by waving about an alleged infringement of a design patent.

The long festering dispute between Apple and Samsung focuses on whether Samsung infringed design patents covering elements within Apple’s iPhone. In simplest terms, a design patent historically has been intended to protect and incentivize designers and inventors creative and innovative work. The US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals unwisely ruled in these big kids’ dispute that, despite the fact that tens of thousands of patents are jammed into every smartphone, an alleged infringement of just one design for one of many elements of the device itself can lead to extraordinary damage awards against the infringer.

Read the full article here.

Truth about our crumbling infrastructure is the tweets

Posted on by Eli Love

By: Kish Rajan

Sometimes, it takes a tweet to speak the truth: Bay Area residents must recognize our crumbling infrastructure.

Last week, commuters complaining about delays were surprised when Taylor Huckaby, a social media manager for @SFBart, did the politically unthinkable. When faced with hundreds of tweets, he was frank and honest about the financial and structural challenges facing the public transit agency, and the Bay Area’s infrastructure at large.

Such is political discussion in 2016: Honesty is surprising and highlights something we’d rather ignore. Few comprehend that our public infrastructure is woefully outdated and ignored.

In 2000, the total population of the Bay Area was just a little more than 6.7 million people. In 2010, it had risen to around 7.2 million, despite the Great Recession. And in 2014, that number jumped to around 7.6 million, representing nearly a million more people in the nine-county region in about 14 years.

And while the tax base expanded, there hasn’t been a corresponding improvement in infrastructure development. When Chronicle City Hall reporter Heather Knight visited San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, housing the San Francisco Police Department, the San Francisco County Jail, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office, she was shocked at what she saw. The hall, with peeling paint, stained ceilings and evidence of rats, sat mere blocks from startups working in renovated lofts — and offering free lunch.

Read the full article here.

Privacy Must Be A High Priority For The Next President

Posted on by Eli Love

By: Tim Sparapani

CALinnovates, a tech advocacy organization where I am senior policy counsel, recently sponsored a survey of 806 Americans on questions of trust concerning the presidential candidates. Assuming the race comes down to Hillary Clintonand Trump, they wanted to know whom voters trust more.

One question particularly caught my eye. It asked: “Which of these candidates do you trust more to manage the delicate balance between privacy and national security?” Almost half of all respondents (48%) said they trusted Clinton more, while 27% chose Trump.

This is going to be a big issue for the next president, but it’s about more than just who is more trustworthy. We must get the right data policies in place. That cannot happen if we focus on the wrong goals.

The notion that there is a zero-sum game going on between privacy and national security is, and always has been, the wrong way to look at the issue. Privacy and national security actually don’t need to be balanced, they need to be optimized — and by optimizing privacy you optimize security. It may sound counterintuitive, but strengthening national security does not depend on limiting personal privacy. We need strong privacy rules in order to enhance national security.

Read the full article here.

‘Music mafia’ is at it again

Posted on by Eli Love

By: Mike Montgomery

When the Copyright Royalty Board issued its rate increases last winter, it seemed like the battle over reasonable royalty rates for music was finally settled. But the music labels were furious because they were banking on extracting far more from yet-to-be-profitable digital music services, so they could enjoy even higher margins at the rest of the industry’s expense.

Undeterred, the publishing arms of these foreign-owned behemoths, already raking in record revenues from streaming services, now want to leverage their monopoly control over musical works to extract higher royalty payments to further enrich themselves instead of the songwriters they represent. But they’ve run into an obstacle: their collection goons, ASCAP and BMI (aka the performance rights organizations, or PROs) are limited by federal antitrust consent decrees.

And that’s a good thing. The Department of Justice originally sued ASCAP and BMI – which together control use of approximately 90 percent of all music – for collusive, anticompetitive behavior more than 70 years ago. Today, the consent decrees are the only obstacles keeping these cartels from throttling the growth of innovative music platforms.

And yet the music mafia is begging the DoJ to bless the very kind of collusive behavior that landed them in antitrust court in the first place; behavior that the consent decrees safeguard against.

Today, when a digital music service (or anything else that plays music) negotiates a license with the PROs, they get the full use of the song even if ASCAP or BMI controls less than the full ownership stake in that song. In other words, any partial owner of a song can license the entire work (they just need to share revenues proportionally with other owners). This is known as “100 percent licensing,” and is a bedrock of the current blanket licenses.

Read the full article here.

Is It A Match? When Companies Marry, Align Data Opportunities With Consumers Expectations

Posted on by Eli Love

By: Tim Sparapani

It is time to rethink the concept of consent and to change data privacy law to better align corporate data practices with consumers’ expectations. We should increase the flexibility to innovate for companies that directly interact with consumers while restricting the chances that companies with no relationship with consumers have to misuse consumers’ data.

Recently, I’ve read articles speculating about why the Match Group, which runs online dating services including Match.com and Tinder, would purchase the Princeton Review, a leading student test prep service. Princeton Review has been unprofitable according to those articles. Why would an online dating company buy a test prep company? Perhaps the Match Group knows how to turn money losing test prep companies around or maybe they want to use or sell Princeton Review’s customer data to create new niche dating services. If the latter is true, this unexpected use of sensitive data would confuse, frustrate or anger most customers. When I used Princeton Review to prep for my law school entrance exam neither my girlfriend nor I would have expected that I’d be offered dating services along with new test taking skills. I would never have consented to this unexpected, third party use of my data.

This got me thinking that it is high time we rethought data privacy laws to benefit consumers in two ways by focusing on consumers’ consent. Ideally, consumers should both be free to choose exciting and unexpected innovations derived from their personal data provided by companies they know and trust, and reduced downside by lessened privacy risks posed by unknown companies accessing their personal data. Legislators should empower consumers both to consent to sharing their data for more opportunities they choose and restrict or denying access to corporations they do not know would access that data.

Read the full article here.

The FBI Is Overstepping Its Boundaries With Apple

Posted on by Eli Love

By: Tim Sparapani

The Apple-FBI saga playing out in a very public way is a classic case of overreach by a law enforcement agency. The FBI is putting extraordinary (and unprecedented) pressure on Apple following the horrific San Bernadino shootings. The U.S. government has filed a motion in court to compel Apple to re-engineer its operating system so that the FCC can investigate whether the shooter used his iPhone to communicate or plan with other potential co-conspirators.

Forcing Apple to crack open its own code might appeal to some people clamoring for a quick fix for the ever-increasing threat of terrorism in our country. Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes and the government’s move is an extraordinary threat to civil liberty. It also won’t solve the larger problem. A backdoor won’t stop terrorism, but it will weaken smartphone security systems with no likelihood of any real public benefit. The public, and policymakers, should support Apple’s public resistance to the FBI’s pressure tactics. The FBI’s proposal is dangerous for at least these four reasons:

It Won’t Stop Terrorism

The FBI wants Apple to build a post-incident forensic investigation tool to unpack what may have happened. But that will not actually deter or prevent terrorism. Terrorists will simply switch to using encrypted phones from other countries.

It Will Open Security Loopholes

If the government is allowed to force Apple to provide a backdoor to its operating system, it will weaken security for all U.S. consumers on a go-forward basis This will not force committed terrorists to think twice, but instead could make Apple’s operating system vulnerable to the hacking of consumer data on a large scale given the way this story is playing out publicly as the hacking community will be awaiting the court decision with baited breath.

Read the full article here.

Utilities panel has too much on its plate

Posted on by Eli Love

By: Kish Rajan

Assemblyman Mike Gatto is taking a bold step with his proposed constitutional amendment to obliterate the California Public Utilities Commission. Such a drastic action may not pass into law, but it kick-starts a critical conversation about the agency’s future.

Gatto cites concerns about the PUC’s handling of a string of problems related to energy utilities, including the San Onofre nuclear plant shutdown and the San Bruno gas line explosion. The commission is also deeply engaged in overseeing California’s massive shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

If regulating the energy industry wasn’t enough of a chore, utilities are not the only sector under the PUC’s purview. The commission has divisions overseeing railroads, light rail and transit; taxis and ride-share services; and water and sewer systems.

And its jurisdiction over telecommunications is largely overlooked. As the center of the innovation economy, California relies heavily upon strong telecommunications infrastructure. But the commission is failing to keep pace with the fast-changing industry, holding back critical investments to providing more and better technology to more Californians, particularly low-income citizens on the other side of the digital divide.

According to the Milken Institute, San Jose and San Francisco are the best-performing cities in the nation for job growth, wage gains and technological advancement. While that is laudable, what is the PUC’s plan to extend that prosperity beyond the Bay Area and into every region across California?

The pathway to greater prosperity is through innovation and investment. That is driven by consumer demand supported by forward-looking thinking, rather than outdated regulatory mandates.

With Apple, The Government Is Overstepping Its Boundaries

Posted on by Eli Love

By: Tim Sparapani

What we’re seeing right now with Apple AAPL -1.92% is a classic case of law enforcement overreach. The FBI is putting extraordinary (and unprecedented) pressure on Apple AAPL -1.92% in the wake of the San Bernadino shooting which left 14 dead and 22 wounded. The U.S. government has filed a court motion to press Apple to rewrite its operating software so that it can investigate whether the shooter used his phone to communicate and plan with others.

That might appeal to some people who are looking for a quick fix for the threat of terrorism. But the truth is there are no quick fixes and the government’s move is an extraordinary threat to liberty. It also won’t work. A backdoor won’t stop terrorism, it will only weaken phone security with no likelihood of any kind of public benefit. The public, and policymakers, should help Apple resist the FBI’s pressure. The FBI’s proposal is dangerous for at least these three reasons:

It Won’t Prevent Terrorism

The government wants Apple to build an after-the-incident forensic tool to figure out what may have happened. But that will not actually deter or prevent terrorism. Terrorists will simply switch to using encrypted phones from other countries. At the same time, the government’s move will weaken security for all U.S. consumers. This cannot and will not stop committed terrorists.

It Sets A Terrible International Precedent

If the U.S. government forces this technology on Apple, it’s also giving this technology to the rest of the world. That means rogue regimes, dictatorships and oligarchs will have access to the same security busting technology as the U.S. government. One nation’s terrorist is another’s journalist, reformer, freedom fighter or human rights advocate. Limiting security on iPhones could put these people, who are often on the frontlines of fights against oppression, in grave danger.

Read the full article here.