Home » Posts tagged 'fcc'

Tag Archives: fcc

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

New FCC Ruling Gives Federal Government Control of 5G Rollout

October 2, 2018

As the push towards 5G-powered “Smart” surveillance cities begins across the United States the Federal Communications Commission has approved a new rule limiting the power of local authorities.

On Monday October 1st, Sacramento, Houston, Indianapolis and Los Angeles became the first cities to gain access to Verizon’s 5G Wireless service. The City of Sacramento has become a focus of Verizon’s nationwide expansion of 5G, or 5th Generation Cellular technology. “We were able to make Sacramento one of our first 5G cities because Mayor Darrell Steinberg and city leaders embraced innovation and developed a strategic vision for how 5G could be a platform for the larger Sacramento technology ecosystem,” said Jonathan LeCompte, Pacific Market president for Verizon.

The rollout of 5G is expected to herald the beginning of Smart Cities, where driverless cars, pollution sensors, cell phones, traffic lights, and thousands of other devices interact in what is known as “The Internet of Things”. The move towards the smart grid was hastened last week when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a rule that will limit the role of local authorities regarding the build of 5G networks, specifically the amount city officials can charge telecommunication companies (“Big Tech”).

The Hill reported on the new rule:

“All four commissioners offered support for the rule, with Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel dissenting over only part of the proposal. When the new rules take effect, local officials will have 60 to 90 days to review installation requests.

Republicans on the commission say that limiting what they see as exorbitant fees in major cities will free up capital for companies like Verizon and AT&T to invest in building out their networks in underserved rural areas. The commission estimated that the rule will save wireless providers $2 billion.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The FCC’s Order Is Out, We’ve Read It, and Here’s What You Need to Know: It Will End Net Neutrality and Break the Internet

November 30, 2017

Net Neutrality

The FCC’s Order Is Out, We’ve Read It, and Here’s What You Need to Know: It Will End Net Neutrality and Break the Internet

On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai released his draft order to completely eradicate Net Neutrality.

You can read the full text here. The short version is that Pai’s order takes the Net Neutrality rules off the books and abandons the court-approved Title II legal framework that served as the basis for the successful 2015 Open Internet Order.

The FCC is scheduled to vote on this dangerous proposal at its meeting on Dec. 14.

Pai’s draft is a lot of things: thin on substance and reasoning, cruel, willfully naive — and it’s everything that ISPs like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon could have wanted (and more). But what it’s not is sensible or grounded in reality. It will take away every safeguard we need to protect the open internet we’ve always had, giving ISPs the power to kill off their competition, choke innovation, charge more for different kinds of content, suppress political dissent, and marginalize the voices of racial-justice advocates and others organizing for change.

We’ve had just a few hours to read this dud, launched by the FCC the day before Thanksgiving. Here are a few of the many lowlights in the draft order and a quick explanation of why they’re wrong.

While we’ll have more analysis in the days to come, this is our first take. And if no one puts a stop to Pai’s plans — with more than 200,000 rightly outraged internet users calling lawmakers and urging them to do just that on Tuesday alone — we’ll have even more to say on this when we take the FCC to court.

Breaking the Rules

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked

November 25, 2017

More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked

I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing.

Spot the fake comment. Surprise — they’re all fake.

NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions. In this post, I will point out one particularly egregious spambot submission, make the case that there are likely many more pro-repeal spambots yet to be confirmed, and estimate the public position on net neutrality in the “organic” public submissions.¹

Key Findings:²

  1. One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
  2. There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
  3. It’s highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.

Breaking Down the Submissions

Given the well documented irregularities throughout the comment submission process, it was clear from the start that the data was going to be duplicative and messy. If I wanted to do the analysis without having to set up the tools and infrastructure typically used for “big data,” I needed to break down the 22M+ comments and 60GB+ worth of text data and metadata into smaller pieces.⁴

Thus, I tallied up the many duplicate comments⁵ and arrived at 2,955,182 unique comments and their respective duplicate counts. I then mapped each comment into semantic space vectors⁶ and ran some clustering algorithms on the meaning of the comments.⁷ This method identified nearly 150 clusters of comment submission texts of various sizes.⁸

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Goodbye Net Neutrality; Hello Competition

November 25, 2017

Goodbye Net Neutrality; Hello Competition

We should take our deregulation where we can get it.  

At long last, with the end of “net neutrality,” competition could soon come to the industry that delivers Internet services to you. You might be able to pick among a range of packages, some minimalist and some maximalist, depending on how you use the service. Or you could choose a package that charges based only on what you consume, rather than sharing fees with everyone else.

Internet socialism is dead; long live market forces.

With market-based pricing finally permitted, we could see new entrants to the industry because it might make economic sense for the first time to innovate. The growing competition will lead, over the long run, to innovation and falling prices. Consumers will find themselves in the driver’s seat rather than crawling and begging for service and paying whatever the provider demands.

Ajit Pai, chairman of the FCC, is exactly right. “Under my proposal, the federal government will stop micromanaging the internet. Instead, the F.C.C. would simply require internet service providers to be transparent about their practices so that consumers can buy the service plan that’s best for them.”

A Fed for Communication

The old rules pushed by the Obama administration had locked down the industry with regulation that only helped incumbent service providers and major content delivery services. They called it a triumph of “free expression and democratic principles.” It was anything but. It was actually a power grab. It created an Internet communication cartel not unlike the way the banking system works under the Federal Reserve.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

5 Things You Should Know About the FCC’s Proposed Privacy Rules

March 15, 2016

5 Things You Should Know About the FCC’s Proposed Privacy Rules

It stops Verizon’s zombie cookie in its tracks, but allows AT&T to keep charging customers extra if they want privacy.

Federal Communications Commisison Chairman Tom Wheeler testifies at a committee hearing on Capitol Hill in March 2015. (Lauren Victoria Burke/AP Photo)

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission proposed new privacy rules for Internet providers. The proposal was immediately praised by privacy advocates as “a major step forward” and lambasted by AT&T as an effort to place a “thumb on the scale in favor of Internet companies.”

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler stopped by our offices to explain the proposal, which will be voted on by the commission later this year after a period of public comment. Here is what you need to know about the proposed rules.

  1. The new rules would prohibit Internet providers from sharing information with third parties about a customer’s name, address, location and Internet activity, unless they have opted in to having their data shared.

    It is meant to provide the same level of privacy protection to Internet customers’ data that companies must, by law, apply to telephone customers’ data.

  2. The rules also broaden the types of data that are protected, Wheeler said. The old rules for telephone operators covered “Customer Proprietary Network Information” – such as the duration and frequency of calls placed by customers and where they were placed from.

    Wheeler said the proposal includes Internet activities tied to a unique identifying number rather than a person’s actual name or phone number. Under the proposed rules, Internet providers could not, without consent, track customers using a unique number tied to a customer’s Internet activity or phone location.

    …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress