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Old 14-04-21, 06:38 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 17th, ’21

Since 2002










































Fast and Spurious

Greetings fellow WiR’ers. COVID free and fully shotted and working with my ISP to upgrade service. And by that I mean they're laboring and I'm trying to make that work. In the last month I’ve gone from decades old copper POTS and DSL with some 5 down and 3/4 up to enhanced DSL (still copper) and 25 down and 2up (25/2, which is a big increase for me). But wait! This week I’ve migrated to fiber! And it's the real deal, not fiber to the node but fiber. right. to. the. home, which I know because I touched it and watched it getting strung - from the newish pole to right inside my very own place. And hey, the friggin bandwidth to the router is now a blazing 503/503 for real and my mobile devices are actually getting well over 400/400 or more (new iPad, new Pixel) so Zooming etc is as snappy as it gets. Oddly and unfortunately however my existing windows devices whether Wi-Fi or LAN are much slower. On Wi-Fi they're showing about 10 down, that’s slower than before the “upgrade,” although with upstream at about 30 they're quite a bit faster and ditto LAN at about 225/225. Last year’s Sony 65" pulls down 70 so 4k’s a cinch but it's all a far cry from what the fiber is capable of and I’m paying for. The ISP's beefy ladder swinger was at a loss to rectify, reduced to mumbling invectives against dubious speed sites, so I dialed into the dreaded hours-on-hold tech support when I had no self esteem left and nobody else to play with but all they managed to do in three spurious hours of politely agreeing there was an issue was bork the whole system so now there’s no net and no phone. They have promised to send somebody to actually do a hands on. I remain hopeful it'll get worked out at some point. FYI, this potential 100x increase is all just $17/mo more than my old DSL and POTS landline. Yes, I have a landline. And a lawn too. Don’t make me say it.

- Jack




















April 17th, 2021




FCC Urges Americans to Run Internet Speed App to Counter Big Cable's Broadband Data Fudging

Effort to get accurate info gets more serious under new chairwoman
Kieren McCarthy

The FCC is encouraging netizens to use its internet speed mobile app in an effort to finally get accurate broadband data across the United States.

In an announcement on Monday, the telecoms regulator noted that “the app provides a way for consumers to test the performance of their mobile and in-home broadband networks” and “provides the test results to the FCC.”

It stops far short of saying that the data will be used to make policy decisions, however, saying only that the figures gathered “will help to inform the FCC’s efforts to collect more accurate and granular broadband deployment data.”

Someone angry with their broken computer, network or ISP

The app itself has been available since 2014 with a second and third version produced in 2018 and the fourth, current version released last year. It was made for the FCC by internet metrics company SamKnows, which was started by software developer Sam Crawford in 2008. Crawford remains CTO and the company is well known within the internet industry for bringing together actionable stats.

The app’s development has in many respects tracked political battles around broadband provision. It was first envisioned and created under the FCC chairmanship of Tom Wheeler, who took on the might of the cable industry through several different avenues in an effort to put the subscriber first.

For years, Big Cable has been manipulating the data it is obliged to send the FCC over the speeds and provision of its broadband services, making the market appear much more competitive and internet access much faster than in reality. By putting a crowdsourcing app out there, Wheeler and his staff hoped to expose the depth of the manipulation.

Pai face

However when Ajit Pai took over as FCC chairman, he dismantled all such efforts, along with the idea of breaking the set-top box oligopoly, tried to lower the definition of broadband internet speed, and discarded net neutrality rules. With Jessica Rosenworcel now in charge, the app is back.

“To close the gap between digital haves and have nots, we are working to build a comprehensive, user-friendly dataset on broadband availability,” Rosenworcel said in a canned quote. “Expanding the base of consumers who use the FCC Speed Test app will enable us to provide improved coverage information to the public and add to the measurement tools we’re developing to show where broadband is truly available throughout the United States.”

The public push doesn’t mean that things are going to get better soon. Big Cable has aggressively – and successfully – argued in the past that data provided by users over an app is not sufficiently robust to form the basis of governmental decisions. And so the FCC will have to use the results as a way to push for change rather than use the data to make direct decisions.

Everybody, including numerous states, cities, congressfolk and the GAO, know that the official FCC data provided by ISPs is not worth the paper it’s written on. But broader usage of the app should expose just how inaccurate official figures are, which should in turn provide enough impetus for change. The bigger question is whether enough progress is made in the next four years to make any difference.

If a Republican president is selected in 2024, the FCC chair will again change and we can expect to see efforts to force Big Cable to improve their services and/or provide more accurate data dry up yet again.

Which is as good a reason as any for people to download the app and start sending real-world data to the regulator.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/...nternet_speed/





Congress, Don’t Let ISP Lobbyists Sabotage Fiber for All
Ernesto Falcon

For the first time, an American president has proposed a plan that wouldn’t just make a dent in the digital divide, it will end it. By deploying federal resources at the level and scale this country has not seen since electrification nearly 100 years ago, the U.S. will again connect every resident to a necessary service. Like with water and electricity, robust internet access, as the pandemic has proven, is an essential service. And so the effort and resources expended are well-worth it.

The president’s plan, which matches well with current Congressional efforts of Representative James Clyburn and Senator Klobuchar, is welcomed news and a boost to efforts by Congress to get the job done. This plan draws a necessary line that government should only be investing its dollars in “future-proof” (i.e. fiber) broadband infrastructure, which is something we have failed to do for years with subsidies for persistently low metrics for what qualifies as broadband. Historically the low expectations pushed by the telecom industry have resulted in a lot of wasted tax dollars. Every state (barring North Dakota) has wasted billions in propping up outdated networks. Americans are left with infrastructure unprepared for 21st century, a terrible ratio of price to internet speed, and one of the largest private broadband provider bankruptcies in history.

Policymakers are learning from these mistakes as well as from the demand shown by the COVID-19 crisis and this is the year we chart a new course. Now is the time for people to push their elected representatives in Congress to pass the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act.

Take Action

Tell Congress: Americans Deserve Fast, Reliable, and Affordable Internet

What Is “Future-Proof" and Why Does Fiber Meet the Definition?

Fiber is the superior medium for 21st-century broadband, and policymakers need to understand that reality in making decisions about broadband policy. No other data transmission medium has the inherent capacity and future potential as fiber, which is why all 21st-century networks, from 5G to Low Earth Orbit Satellites, are dependent on fiber. However, some of the broadband access industry keeps trying to sell state and federal legislatures on the need to subsidize slower, outdated infrastructure, which diverts money from going towards fiber and puts it into their pockets.

What allows for that type of grifting on a massive scale is the absence of the government mandating future proofing in its infrastructure investments. The absence of a future-proof requirement in law means the government subsidizes whatever meets the lowest speed required today without a thought about tomorrow. This is arguably one of the biggest reasons why so much of our broadband subsidies have gone to waste over the decades to any qualifying service with no thought towards the underlying infrastructure. The President’s endorsement of future-proofing broadband infrastructure is a significant and necessary course correction and it needs to be codified into the infrastructure package Congress is contemplating.

If every dollar the government spends on building broadband infrastructure needed to go to an infrastructure that met the needs of today and far into the future, there are a lot of older, slower, more expensive broadband options that are no longer eligible for government money or qualify as sufficient. At the same time, that same fiber infrastructure can be leveraged to enable dozens of services not just in broadband access, but other data-intensive services, which makes the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act’s preference for open access important and likely should be expanded on, given how fiber lifts all boats. One possible solution is to require government bidders to design networks around enabling wireless and wireline services instead of just one broadband service. Notably, the legislation currently lacks a future proof requirement in government investments, but given the President’s endorsement, it is our hope that it will be included in any final package that passes Congress to avoid wastefully enriching capacity-limited (and future-limited) broadband services. Building the roads to enable commerce should be how the government views broadband infrastructure.

We Need Fast Upload Speeds and Fiber, No Matter What Cable Lobbyists Try to Claim

The cable industry unsurprisingly hates the President’s proposal to get fiber to everyone because they are the high-speed monopolists for a vast majority of us and nothing forces them to upgrade other than fiber. Fiber has orders of magnitude greater capacity than cable systems and will be able to do deliver cheaper access to the high-speed era than cable systems as demand grows. In the 2020 debate on California’s broadband program, the state was deciding whether or not to continue to subsidize DSL copper broadband, the cable lobby regularly argued that no one needs a fast upload that fiber provides because, look, no one who uses cable broadband uses a lot of upload (especially the throttled users).

There are a lot of flaws with the premise that asymmetric use of the internet is user preference, rather than the result of the current standards and cable packages. But the most obvious one is the fact that you need a market of symmetric gigabit and higher users for the technology sector to develop widely used applications and services.

Just like with every other innovation we have seen on the internet, if the capacity is delivered, someone comes up with ways to use it. And that multi-gigabit market is coming online, but it will start in China, where an estimated 57% of all multi-gigabit users will reside by 2023 under current projections. China has in fact been laying fiber optics nine times faster than the United States since 2013 and that is a problem for American competitiveness. If we are not building fiber networks everywhere soon to catch up in the next five years, the next Silicon Valley built around the gigabit era of broadband access will be in China and not here. It will also mean that next-generation applications and services will just be unusable by Americans stuck on upload throttled cable systems. The absence of a major fiber infrastructure investment by the government effectively means many of us will be stuck in the past while paying monopoly rents to cable.

Fiber Is Not “Too Expensive,” Nor Should Investment Go to Starlink (SpaceEx) No Matter What Its Lobbyists Say

The current FCC is still reeling from the fact that the outgoing FCC at the end of its term granted nearly $1 billion to Starlink to cover a lot of questionable things. Despite the company historically saying it did not need a dollar of subsidy. And the actual fact that it really does not.

But if government money is on the table, it appears clear that Starlink will deploy its lobbyists to argue for its share, even when it needs none of it. That should be a clear concern to any congressional office that will be lobbied on the broadband infrastructure package. Under the current draft of the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, it seems very unlikely that Starlink’s current deployment will qualify for any money, and certainly not if future proofing was included as a condition of receiving federal dollars.

This is due to the fact that satellites are inherently capacity-constrained as a means to deliver broadband access. Each satellite deployed must maintain line of sight, can carry only so much traffic, require more and more satellites to share the burden for more capacity, and ultimately need to beam down to a fiber-connected base station. It is this capacity constraint that is why Starlink will never be competitive in cities. But Starlink does benefit from a focus on fiber in that the more places its base stations can connect between fiber and satellites, the more robust the network itself will become.

But in the end, there is no way for those satellites to keep up with the expected increases in capacity that fiber infrastructure will yield nor are they as long-lasting an investment as each satellite needs to be replaced at a fairly frequent basis as new ones are launched while fiber will remain useful once laid for decades. While they will argue that they are a cheaper solution for rural Americans, the fact is the number of Americans that cannot feasibly get a fiber line is extremely small. Basically, if you can get an electrical line to a house, then you can get them a fiber line.

For policymakers, Starlink’s service is best understood as the equivalent of a universal basic income of broadband access where it reaches far and wide and establishes a robust floor. That on its own has a lot of value and is a reason why its effort to expand to boats, trucks, and airplanes is a good thing. But this is not the tool of long-term economic development for rural communities. It should be understood as a lifeline when all other options are exhausted rather than the frontal solution by the government for ending the digital divide. Lastly, given the fact that the satellite constellation is meant to serve customers globally and not just in the United States, it makes no sense for the United States to subsidize a global infrastructure to enrich one private company. The investments need to be in domestic infrastructure.

The Future Is Not 5G, No Matter What Wireless Carrier Lobbyists Say

For years, the wireless industry hyped 5G broadband, resulting in a lot of congressional hearings, countless hours by the FCC focusing its regulatory power on it, a massive merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, and very little to actually show for it today. In fact, early market analysis has found that 5G broadband is making zero profits, mostly because people are not willing to pay that much more on their wireless bill for the new network. The reality is 5G’s future is likely to be in non-broadband markets that have yet to emerge. But most importantly, national 5G coverage does not happen if you don’t have dense fiber networks everywhere. Any infrastructure plan that comes out of the government should avoid making 5G as part of its core focus given that it is the derivative benefit of fiber. You can have fiber without 5G, but you can’t have 5G without the fiber.

So even when companies like AT&T argue for 5G to be the infrastructure plan, the wireless industry has slowly started to come around to the fact that it's actually the fiber in the end that matters. Last year, the wireless industry acknowledged that 5G and fiber are linked and even AT&T is emphasizing now that the future is fiber. The risks are great if we put wireless on par with wires in infrastructure policy as we are seeing now with the Rural Development Opportunity Fund giving money to potentially speculative gigabit wireless bids instead of proven fiber to the home. This has prompted a lot of Members of Congress to ask the FCC to double-check the applicants before money goes out the door. Rather than repeat the RDOF mistakes, it's best to understand that infrastructure means the foundation of what delivers these services and not the services themselves.

We Can Get Fiber to Everyone If We Embrace the Public Model of Broadband Access

The industry across the board will refuse to acknowledge that the private model of broadband has failed many communities before and during the pandemic, whereas the public model of broadband has soared in areas where it exists. In both President Biden’s plan and the Clyburn/Klobuchar legislation is an emphasis on embracing local government and local community broadband networks. The Affordable, Accessible Internet for All Act outright bans states from preventing local governments from building broadband service. Those state laws that will be repealed by the bill were primarily driven by the cable lobby afraid of cheap public fiber access.

By today we know their opposition to community fiber is premised on keeping broadband prices exceedingly high. We know now that if you eliminate the profit motive in delivering fiber, there is almost no place in this country that can’t be connected to fiber. When we have cooperatives delivering gigabit fiber at $100 a month to an average of 2.5 people per mile, one is hard-pressed in finding what areas are left out of reach. But equally important is making access affordable to low-income people, and given that we’ve seen municipal fiber offer ten years of free 100/100 mbps to 28,000 students of low-income families at a subsidy cost of $3.50 a month, it seems clear that public fiber is an essential piece to solving both the universal access challenge as well as making sure all people can afford to connect to the internet. Whatever infrastructure bill passes Congress, it must fully embrace the public model of access for fiber for all to be a reality.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/0...tage-fiber-all





Washington State Votes to End Restrictions On Community Broadband

18 States currently have industry-backed laws restricting community broadband. There will soon be one less.
Karl Bode

Washington State lawmakers have voted to kill telecom-industry backed restrictions that limit the reach of community broadband. The Public Broadband Act (HB1336) passed the state Senate with a 27-22 vote on Sunday, after passing the House with a vote of 60-37 last February.

State Representative Drew Hansen applauded the bill’s passage on Twitter, stating it “reverses decades of bad policy” and opens the door to better, cheaper broadband.

“Washington was one of only 18 states that restricted local governments from serving the public by providing public broadband,” Hansen told Motherboard. “My bill eliminates that restriction.”

Frustrated by high prices, slow speeds, and spotty coverage, some 750 towns and cities have embraced some form of locally-owned and operated broadband networks. Studies have shown such networks consistently provide faster speeds at lower prices, while also forcing regional monopolies to upgrade their networks and lower their rates.

But more than a dozen states have passed state laws banning or restricting towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Such laws aren’t just supported by entrenched telecom giants, they’re often ghost written by large ISPs to hamstring competition. Some ban community broadband outright, while others impose costly or cumbersome restrictions.

In Tennessee, regional utility EPB routinely ranks as one of the best and fastest broadband providers in the nation. But thanks to a state law backed by companies like AT&T and Comcast, the utility is restricted from expanding access to areas outside its utility footprint.

In Washington, a twenty-one year old law let some local governments build their own broadband networks, but prohibited local utilities from delivering broadband to customers directly. Hansen, who was also the primary sponsor of the state’s new net neutrality law, says his bill finally eliminates those unnecessary limits entirely.

“The Public Broadband Act broadly authorizes all local governments to provide broadband to anyone—people who are totally unserved, people who have some internet access but it’s not affordable or reliable — any people at all,” Hansen told Motherboard. “Under the Public Broadband Act, Washington governments have completely unrestricted authority to provide broadband to the public.”

An estimated 42 million Americans lack access to broadband, while another 83 million are currently trapped under a broadband monopoly, usually Comcast. This lack of competition, especially at faster speeds, not only results in high prices and spotty coverage, but routinely some of the worst customer service of any industry in America.

While community broadband isn’t a silver bullet for America’s longstanding broadband issues, advocates say such networks play a vital role in driving more competition to market, while challenging apathetic regional monopolies to try a little harder.

The recently unveiled Biden broadband plan hopes to leverage community broadband to expand affordable access during the Covid era. In contrast, House Republicans recently passed a proposal that would largely ban community broadband networks entirely.

Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told Motherboard that if Washington Governor Jay Inslee signs HB1336, Washington will be the second state this year to back away from state-level restrictions on community broadband, after Arkansas rolled back many of its restrictions last February.

The passage of HB1336 would leave 17 states with laws restricting such efforts, though Mitchell noted that with Covid-19 highlighting the essential nature of broadband, pressure is only mounting on lawmakers to chart a new path.

“Covid-19 did a ton of damage to the credibility of cable and telco lobbyists,” Mitchell said. “Elected leaders are tired of their empty promises and are ready to try more structural solutions.”
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/...nity-broadband





Revenge: Spectrum Workers on Strike Build Their Own ISP
Whitney Kimball

If, for any number of reasons, you’d like to burn telecoms to the ground and build a new internet service provider on their smoldering remains, good news for you. New York City Spectrum workers, who’ve weathered an anguishing four-year strike, have built their own internet service provider. If the city throws its support behind it, People’s Choice Communications could liberate New Yorkers from cable gangsters once and for all.

The city itself is almost constantly fighting Spectrum. With its rise to dominance in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has tried to evict it; attorneys general had to chase it around for allegedly defrauding 2.2 million New York customers; and the company was accused of putting employees in harm’s way just one month into the pandemic. Unionized Spectrum workers just hit the four-year anniversary of their strike, during which time Spectrum’s parent company Charter made its CEO the third-highest-compensated executive in America.

The Spectrum workers behind the co-op, members of IBEW Local 3, have been on strike practically since Charter showed up in 2016 and bought Time Warner. Workers have said that the company showed no interest in good faith bargaining over the contract it inherited, attempting to jettison pensions and health insurance. “Their goal was to try to eliminate the union, and we could see that from the first time they came to the bargaining table,” survey technician, striker, and IBEW Local 3 steward Troy Walcott told Gizmodo. “They presented us with an offer that was impossible for us to accept.”

Walcott told Gizmodo that, while some have been forced to go back to Spectrum, about 1,200 of the 1,800 strikers are still holding the line and making ends meet with odd jobs. Walcott said that people are still losing homes, and the strain has broken up families, while media attention has dissipated. “Everybody kind of looks past it,” he said. “We’re kind of a ghost in the city.”

After attempting to convince the city to establish a municipal network, organizers turned to the idea of a cooperatively owned model, the kind of radical concept recently in the realm of activist dreams. Workers co-own the company; the building residents own the network; the C-Suite doesn’t extract a cent. Residents pay for the installation fee in monthly increments, which organizers believe might range from $300-$400 per apartment. But residents cover the cost similar to a mortgage, in monthly payments of around $10-$20, which also covers service.

By comparison, Spectrum’s lowest-priced offering is $50, with packages going up to $150—which represents over a quarter of a public housing resident’s monthly rent.

People’s Choice operates light, scalable infrastructure. The fixed wireless network is enabled by a “mesh network”: antennas are installed on individual buildings, which receive a wireless signal from the co-op’s central hub. Building residents then connect routers via ethernet cables and operate as normal.

Sascha Meinrath, a mesh network pioneer who helped architect People’s Choice, compared the system to a spider web. In the event of a link break, building antennas can connect and reroute through each other, reducing the likelihood of large-scale outages.

The co-op makes a radical proposal in the business structure itself. Parsing out the network to customers and the ISP company to workers implies that both groups get an equal share of bargaining power. Customers who own the infrastructure will be promised the option to bring in a new service provider; the reverse is true for workers, who can pull their services. “It means people will have to collaborate, and I think that’s really interesting,” Meinrath told Gizmodo. “It means that you’re going to pay fair wages,” he said. “It means that customer service is going to be really important.”

“This is not a charity,” Meinrath added. “This is a sustainable social enterprise.”

It also means that speeds get faster and service gets cheaper as more customers sign-on. “Once you get critical mass of people, you will be able to buy more bandwidth in bulk, which drops the cost per megabit dramatically,” Meinrath said. “By dramatically, I mean, it can drop by multiple orders of magnitude. The difference between one and two gigs is very different than the difference between ten and one hundred gigs. It’s remarkable how cheap bandwidth gets when you buy it in bulk.”

They still haven’t worked out all the costs, but they’ll certainly offer a better return on any co-owners’ investment. We rarely get a hard metric to define how much telecoms are charging through the nose, but a 2015 investigation found that Comcast was pocketing 97 percent profit margins. Co-ownership necessitates transparency. The money left over from anticipated minimal monthly payments is meant to fund community services and payback co-owners in dividends.

“Having ownership of something as big as a cable system is definitely going to be a game-changer in the community that we’re serving,” Troy Walcott said.

While a relatively small number of people are currently using the system, People’s Choice claims that it already has the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of Bronx residents.

“We have a big portion of most of the Bronx covered with our antenna,” Walcott said. “Now we have to go building by building to let people know we’re out there and start turning them on.” (You can reach out and ask for service here.) A few dozen Spectrum strikers have been actively involved in the installations, but Walcott expects that at least one hundred workers are waiting in the wings for the project to scale up.

Walcott says that they’re equipped to hit a minimum speed of 25 megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload, the requirement to legally qualify as a broadband connection.

Spectrum’s “low-income internet” offering is 30 megabits per second, though the company qualifies this with the disclaimer that “wireless speeds may vary.” (Spectrum is not known for transparency, and in 2018, it settled for $174.2 million with the state for alleged lies.) Co-op organizers say that speeds for the customers online are now much higher than Spectrum’s minimum average due to the low customer base, but they hope that as they scale up People’s Choice can reach a minimum download speed of 50 megabits per second.

“Up until this past year, this idea of creating mesh networks, or fixed wireless networks, was basically something that only like anarchist nerds did, speaking as an anarchist nerd myself,” Erik Forman told Gizmodo. Forman is the education director for the Platform Cooperation Consortium, a coalition that envisions worker-owned alternatives to major tech platforms (one example of that effort is a worker-owned alternative to Uber). He describes himself as a “co-op developer.” Forman says People’s Choice was mostly built by sweat equity, with grants from partners Metro IAF, a nonprofit affordable housing developer, and BlocPower, a renewable energy startup. Brooklyn Law School’s tech clinic, BLIP, chipped in with administrative support, Forman said.

Forman says he’s been mulling over the idea of worker-owned co-ops since he attempted a unionization effort at Starbucks years ago. “A lot of people I’ve met in the restaurant industry would say their dream was to own their own restaurant someday,” he said. “So I started thinking, well, what if we direct our energies not just to unionize the employers, but to abolishing them and to putting the production under worker ownership?”

The city now has to decide whether to take Spectrum strikers up on that bid. New York City is now soliciting proposals for affordable wireless networks for underserved areas like NYCHA housing. At the time of publishing, Gizmodo was unable to immediately reach a city administrator for comment on whether it plans to consider their proposal.

Even a relatively small initial investment could propel the network into self-sustaining momentum. “With significant funding upfront, we can go after a thousand people from day one,” Meinrath said. The alternative is recruiting batches of 100 customers who have to bear higher up-front expenses for things like individual pieces of equipment that could be bulk ordered at a much lower cost.

In other words, it seems that without some help, the future is uncertain. Good service isn’t fully guaranteed yet (not that it is anywhere, now). They might have some issues with scaling, and it’s unclear if the nascent cooperative will be able to sustain employees full-time. But the fact that you’re paying down the installation with a cheap monthly bill offers little risk to people who want to try it.

And at this point, the city has scant excuse to reject a bold worker-led and coalition-backed alternative. “I know that the city is thinking outside the box on a lot of business models behind this,” Meinrath said. “The open question is whether they are then putting their money where their mouth is.”

Customers who can afford to pay Spectrum’s exorbitant rates have been sort of stuck with the company. As In These Times reported back in February 2020, the city ominously hinted that it would renew Spectrum’s franchise agreement, which is protected by federal law. The state only gets an out in “especially egregious cases.”

Gizmodo has reached out to Spectrum and will update the post if we hear back.

People’s Choice prioritizes the Bronx, a borough specifically left with an utter dearth of Spectrum service. As of November 2020, the New York City comptroller’s office estimated that 100,000 students were still entirely without internet service. Just a few months into the outbreak of the pandemic, the company petitioned the FCC to impose data caps, artificial limits on internet usage in order to charge more. Thousands of published Better Business Bureau complaints in the New York metropolitan area report service outages, surprise bills for unused service, and massive price hikes.

“Big telecoms are more interested in making fifty to a hundred dollars a month serving people on the Upper East Side than they are in the Bronx,” Forman told Gizmodo. “It would be an utter outrage if the city gave a single cent of taxpayer dollars to Spectrum after what’s done in the past four years.”
https://gizmodo.com/revenge-spectrum...isp-1846678437





Charter Must Pay $19 Million for Tricking Customers into Switching ISPs

Charter mailed false ads to convince users Windstream was going out of business.
Jon Brodkin

A judge has ordered Charter Communications to pay $19.2 million to Windstream for lying to customers in order to trick them into switching from Windstream to Charter's Spectrum Internet service. Charter also faces a $5,279 penalty for shutting off service to hundreds of Windstream's resale customers.

When Windstream filed for bankruptcy in early 2019, Charter began a "literally false and intentionally misleading advertising campaign intended to create the impression, using mailings designed to seem as if they were coming from the Debtors [Windstream], that the Debtors were going out of business," said an order issued Thursday by Judge Robert Drain of US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

Charter's goal with the mailings "was to induce the Debtors' customers to terminate their contracts and switch to Charter by sending them literally false and intentionally misleading information about the Debtors' bankruptcy cases and financial wherewithal," the ruling said. Charter premised its ad campaign "on false assertions regarding the Debtors' bankruptcy cases," the ruling said.

"We are gratified that Judge Drain's ruling means Charter will have to pay a significant price for its egregious false advertising," Windstream General Counsel Kristi Moody said, according to a FierceTelecom article. "Charter knew full well what it was doing when it embarked on a dishonest scare-tactic campaign to lure away our customers. At Windstream, we will always aggressively defend ourselves and our customers against predatory schemes and meritless allegations."

Charter declined to comment on the ruling when contacted by Ars today.

Charter mailings

A Charter mailing to Internet users came in envelopes "with Windstream's mark and distinct color pattern to make Windstream's customers believe that the letters came from Windstream," according to Windstream. The envelope was labeled "Important Information Enclosed for Windstream Customers." Inside the envelopes were advertisements that said:

Windstream Customers,

Don't Risk Losing Your Internet and TV Services.

Windstream has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which means uncertainty. Will they be able to provide the Internet and TV services you rely on in the future? To ensure you are not left without vital Internet and TV services, switch to Spectrum. With a network built for the future, Spectrum is here for the long haul.


The ads also said, "Windstream's future is unknown, but Spectrum is here to stay."

In May 2019, the bankruptcy court issued a preliminary injunction against Charter and authorized Windstream to send letters to customers notifying them that "a federal court has now ruled that the advertisement sent to you by a competitor was untrue and improper." Charter was ordered to pay for Windstream's costs in mailing the letter to all customers who had received Charter's false advertisements.

Windstream has about 1.1 million Internet customers and offers residential service in 18 states. Windstream estimated that 1,386 customers "canceled their Windstream subscription services as a result of Charter's false advertising," it said in a court filing.

Charter claimed “First Amendment” right

Charter claimed that punishment for its "literally false and intentionally misleading advertising campaign would violate their First Amendment right to free speech," the judge wrote. But First Amendment rights are not absolute and do not protect Charter's false statements about Windstream's bankruptcy proceedings and financial wherewithal, he wrote. "Such commercial speech is properly curtailed by precluding such wrongful conduct," he wrote.

Charter also claimed "that if anyone violated the stay, it was their advertising agency and their consultant, One Touch Intelligence in developing the campaign," Drain wrote. The judge dismissed this claim briefly, writing that Charter's argument "ignores the Defendants' authorization of the campaign to be modeled on a prior campaign relating to a competitor that was 'shutting down service' to create doubt whether the Debtors would remain in business... Moreover, the acts of the Defendants' agents in violation of the stay would be imputed to them."

Charter itself filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and then sued DirecTV "for 'false' advertising that it said could give customers the impression Charter is liquidating and that its cable TV services will soon end," as Reuters reported at the time.

Calculating damages

While the preliminary injunction was issued shortly after Windstream sued Charter, further proceedings were held to determine how much Charter has to pay Windstream in compensatory damages. Ultimately, Charter was ordered to pay $19,179,329.45 to Windstream "for the losses caused by their violation of the automatic stay by intentionally and wrongfully interfering with the Debtors' customer contracts and good will."

An automatic stay is an important mechanism in US bankruptcy law "that temporarily prevents creditors, collections agencies, government entities, and individuals from pursuing debtors for amounts owed," as Investopedia notes.

Charter claimed the automatic stay law "is ambiguous or impermissibly broad in regulating their conduct," the judge wrote. However, "improper advertising such as the Defendants' clearly and objectively interfered with the Debtors' customer contracts and goodwill and thus clearly was precluded by section 362(a)(3)'s plain terms and the caselaw applying them," he wrote.

Windstream showed that it "suffered $5.1 million of lost profits" because of Charter's false ad campaign, and Charter did not challenge Windstream's "assertion of damages of $862,775 comprising the cost of corrective advertising in response to the ad campaign," the ruling said.

The court ruled Windstream should be reimbursed for $4,033,425 that it spent on "a promotional campaign comprising customer upgrades, discounts, and other pricing promotions undertaken from September through December 2019," which Windstream undertook "because of and in response to Defendants' ad campaign."

The $19.2 million judgment includes $9.2 million for litigation fees and expenses.

Charter disconnected Windstream customers

The ruling also said that Charter breached the automatic stay order by disconnecting Windstream customers who were being served over the Charter network under a reseller agreement. Charter disconnected those users despite having received notice of the bankruptcy proceedings and the automatic stay.

Charter's penalty for the service disconnection is $5,278.85 to cover credits Windstream provided to customers who were disconnected.

Charter disconnected about 350 Windstream customers on or around March 14, 2019, Windstream told the court in an April 2019 filing after suing Charter. "When Windstream customers contacted Charter to have their services reinstated, they were told by Charter that service was not being repaired because of Windstream's failure to pay certain amounts due to Charter," the filing said. "Windstream, however, is not currently authorized to make any payments to Charter on account of prepetition debt as a result of the Chapter 11 filing."

Charter continued with a "smaller number of additional shutoffs in April and May 2019," last week's ruling said. It took Charter until May 9, 2019 to complete the "restoration of the Debtors' accounts that should not have been automatically terminated in violation of the automatic stay," last week's ruling said.

Charter offered weak defense

Windstream alleged that Charter's improper disconnections of those customers "was a deliberate attempt to manufacture a problem with Windstream's services."

Charter's only response to the allegation "is a variation on the 'inability' defense to a finding of contempt, that is, that the termination of service was wholly mechanical, arising from 'automatic nonpayment protocols' programmed into its computerized billing system, or, possibly, that Charter reasonably attempted to comply," the ruling said.

The judge rejected this argument, writing:

First, it is not really a defense for a large and sophisticated entity like Charter that provides services to many customers, some of whom inevitably will file for relief under the Bankruptcy Code, to argue that its systems do not have an effective fail‐safe to prevent it from violating the automatic stay. Charter has not contended that it lacked the capacity to adopt systems to override such automated collection activity. Turning a blind eye to the automatic stay by choosing systems that are incapable of complying with it is not tantamount to an inability to comply nor with making diligent efforts to comply in a reasonable manner.

Moreover, when Charter terminated service to the Windstream customers, "they did not even comply with the VAR [value-added reseller] Agreement itself, which provides at page 2 for 30‐days' notice before service cancellation," the judge wrote.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...witching-isps/





The Government of Canada Launches Consultation on a Modern Copyright Framework for Online Intermediaries

From: Canadian Heritage
News release

OTTAWA, April 14, 2021

The Government of Canada is committed to ensuring the Copyright Act remains consistent with modern realities and that revenues of web giants are shared fairly with Canadian creators.

Building on the stakeholder engagement and committee reports from the 2019 Parliamentary Review of the Copyright Act and other research, the Honourable Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Canadian Heritage, and the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, are launching a public consultation today on Canada’s copyright framework for online intermediaries to make sure it reflects the evolving digital world.

As the distribution and use of copyright-protected content online have expanded and the services of online intermediaries have grown and diversified, it is important to ensure that Canada’s copyright framework for online intermediaries still achieves its underlying objectives. The Copyright Act must adapt to ensure that the use of copyright-protected content online is protected and individual rights and freedoms in an open Internet are safeguarded, while facilitating an environment where the digital market can thrive.

The Government is publishing a consultation paper that outlines potential options for stakeholder and public consideration. These options relate to intermediaries’ protections against liability for copyright infringement, rights holder remuneration models, transparency obligations and the effective enforcement of copyright.

The Government welcomes all comments providing additional perspectives or evidence concerning these issues and potential options. Participants have until May 31, 2021, to share their input.

Responses received will be made available following the consultation period and will help inform the Government’s policy development process as the Government considers how the Copyright Act needs to evolve and how the revenues of web giants can be shared more fairly with Canadian creators.

Quotes

“Our Government is committed to meaningful platform governance, including the modernization of the Broadcasting Act, a new framework for online harms, news media remuneration and copyright reform. These efforts will contribute to a healthier online environment for Canadians, creators and media. In the area of copyright, we need a more up-to-date framework to ensure more accountability and better remuneration and transparency.”

—The Honourable Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Canadian Heritage

“For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online. With this consultation, we aim to strike the balance between facilitating broad, lawful access to copyright-protected content, and safeguarding individual rights and freedoms in an open Internet. We have launched this process to hear the diverse perspectives of stakeholders, from online intermediaries to those holding copyrights, as well as any Canadian who wants to share input, to make sure Canada maintains a balanced copyright framework.”

—The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry

Quick facts

The Government is taking a phased approach to the review of the Copyright Act while considering the recommendations from the Parliamentary committees. From February 11 to March 31, 2021, the ministers consulted on how to implement Canada’s commitment under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement to extend the general term of copyright protection. An additional consultation on a modern framework for artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things will be launched by summer 2021.

Online Intermediaries:

• Online intermediaries are entities that facilitate access to online content, including copyright-protected content, which vary widely in the services they offer as well as their size (for example, Internet service providers, “cloud” storage services, web hosts, social media and other public content-sharing platforms and search engines).

• Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology intended to replicate human thought by analyzing, learning and reacting to challenges without human direction. AI serves a role in software and technologies by customizing the user experience, simplifying the analysis of data or reducing the costs of human labour.

• Internet of Things (IoT) refers to networks of devices equipped with software and sensors that connect and exchange data with other devices using the Internet. Common IoT devices include smartphones, televisions and vacuums. IoT is also significant for the medical, agricultural and manufacturing sectors.
https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-he...mediaries.html





Amazon Pulls Pirated Comics From Kindle – Most Of Them
Rich Johnston

Yesterday, Bleeding Cool reported on a new comic book pirating twist. That someone, using multiple Kindle Publisher accounts was uploading Marvel, DC, and Image digital comic books and selling them at a price far less than the official versions, or through Kindle Unlimited funding. The listings had been up for a week, but attempts to get Amazon to respond to concerns went updated.

Bleeding Cool ran the story, and we talked to people at Amazon about the issue, sending over our findings. This morning, all the accounts had been removed. All the ones we had named. There is still one we missed for an account who really likes Godzilla, but of the other pirated comics files that had for some reason filled the Non-Fiction digital graphic chart on Amazon, there was no sign. The deed had been done. But this is not entirely new. Nat Gertler of About Comics, who reprints the non-Peanuts-work of Charles Schultz, tells us

"I've been covering what I suspect is the same batch of Kindle bootleggers for two months now when they've been uploading Complete Peanuts and the Peanuts comic books (starting with this). What happens is not that the bootlegs don't get deleted, it's that they are quickly re-uploaded with new covers and generally new authors. More recently, they've also been bootlegging Wimpy Kid material and labeling it with Peanuts in the title."

"Add to that a constant stream of print-on-demand unlicensed Peanuts coloring books, and you have a sign of some of the problems arising from Kindle Direct Publishing (which is the Amazon arm for both Kindle publishing and self-publisher/small publisher Print on Demand.)"

More for Amazon to keep an eye on maybe? Last year, Amazon joined a number of authors in tackling websites that hosted pirated versions of books, that could have been taken from Kindle files. But such is the size of the organisation that sometimes it takes a little Bleeding Cool to attract the Eye Of Sauron.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/amaz...-most-of-them/





Apple Music Claims It Pays Artists Twice as Much Per Stream as Spotify
Jem Aswad

Apple Music claims it pays artists a penny per stream — nearly twice as much as Spotify — in a letter posted Friday on the streaming service’s artist dashboard, according to the Wall Street Journal, although its math is subject to debate.

The disclosure, made in a letter to artists delivered Friday via the service’s artist dashboard and sent to labels and publishers, is seemingly a response to Spotify’s “Loud and Clear” report detailing its payment processes published last month. However, while Spotify’s information is posted publicly for all to see, Apple Music has elected to keep its data limited to artists and select industry entities. A source close to the situation tells Variety that the information will be rolled out gradually over the course of Friday (April 16).

In the data, Apple’s penny-per-stream payment structure — which some in the music industry say is questionable — would mean that Apple pays roughly double the one-half to one-third of a penny that Spotify does, although that claims is undercut by the fact that Spotify has many millions more users globally. According to its most recent reports, Spotify has an industry-leading 155 million paying subscribers and 345 million active users, while Apple last reported more than 60 million Music subscribers in June 2019.

“As the discussion about streaming royalties continues, we believe it is important to share our values,” Apple said in the letter. “We believe in paying every creator the same rate, that a play has a value, and that creators should never have to pay for featuring” music in prime display space on its service — a dig at Spotify’s controversial “Marquee” advertising campaign rolled out last year, in which artists essentially pay for their own advertising.

It is also worth noting that streaming services rarely pay an artist directly: They pay the rights-holder, usually a record label, which takes its share and distributes the remainder to the artist and any other entitled parties. Both services pay rights-holders based on the share of total streams that their artists bring in.

Apple says in the letter that it pays 52% of its subscription revenue to record labels; Spotify says it pays two-thirds of every dollar of revenue to rights holders, with 75% to 80% of that going to labels. That breaks down to 50 to 53 cents on the dollar, depending on agreements between the service and different labels, according to the WSJ.

Reps for Apple Music and Spotify declined Variety‘s requests for comment.

To a degree, these competing payment claims are largely a matter of dueling calculators: The comparisons aren’t really apples-to-apples, because Spotify generates significantly more revenue for the music industry than Apple Music due to its much larger user base and, thus, its much larger number of streams per month. The comparison is also complicated by the face that Spotify has a free tier that does not generate as much revenue as its paid service, although it has essentially been proven to be an effective on-ramp for the paid service.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Spotify is observing its 15th anniversary this month.

Variety will have more on this story as it continues to develop.
https://variety.com/2021/digital/new...am-1234953179/





Why Buy a Yacht When You Can Buy a Newspaper?

Billionaires aren’t usually cast as saviors of democracy. But one way they are winning plaudits for civic-minded endeavors is by funding the Fourth Estate.
Nicholas Kulish

Billionaires have had a pretty good pandemic. There are more of them than there were a year ago, even as the crisis has exacerbated inequality. But scrutiny has followed these ballooning fortunes. Policymakers are debating new taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. Even their philanthropy has come under increasing criticism as an exercise of power as much as generosity.

One arena in which the billionaires can still win plaudits as civic-minded saviors is buying the metropolitan daily newspaper.

The local business leader might not have seemed like such a salvation a quarter century ago, before Craigslist, Google and Facebook began divvying up newspapers’ fat ad revenues. Generally, the neighborhood billionaires are considered worth a careful look by the paper’s investigative unit. But a lot of papers don’t even have an investigative unit anymore, and the priority is survival.

This media landscape nudged newspaper ownership from the vanity column toward the philanthropy side of the ledger. Paying for a few more reporters and to fix the coffee machine can earn you acclaim for a lot less effort than, say, spending two decades building the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The latest example comes in the form of a $680 million bid by Hansjörg Wyss, a little-known Swiss billionaire, and Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a Maryland hotel magnate, for Tribune Publishing and its roster of storied broadsheets and tabloids like The Chicago Tribune, The Daily News and The Baltimore Sun.

Should Mr. Wyss and Mr. Bainum succeed in snatching Tribune away from Alden Global Capital, whose bid for the company had already won the backing of Tribune’s board, the purchase will represent the latest example of a more than decade-long quest by some of America’s ultrawealthy to prop up a crumbling pillar of democracy.

If there was a signal year in this development, it came in 2013. That is when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post and the Red Sox’ owner, John Henry, bought The Boston Globe.

“I invested in The Globe because I believe deeply in the future of this great community, and The Globe should play a vital role in determining that future,” Mr. Henry wrote at the time.

Mr. Bezos and Marty Baron, the recently retired editor of The Post, famously led a revival of the paper to its former glory. And after a somewhat rockier start, experts said that Mr. Henry and his wife, Linda Pizzuti Henry, the chief executive officer of Boston Globe Media Partners, have gone a long way toward restoring that paper as well.

Across the country, for Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the physician and billionaire who bought The Los Angeles Times in 2018, it hasn’t always gone smoothly. But few prefer the alternative of hedge-fund ownership.

“There’s not a doubt in my mind that The Los Angeles Times is in a better place today than if Tribune had held on to it these last three years or so,” said Norman Pearlstine, who served as executive editor for two years after Dr. Soon-Shiong’s purchase and still serves as a senior adviser. “I don’t think that’s open to debate or dispute.”

From Utah to Minnesota and from Long Island to the Berkshires, local grandees have decided that a newspaper is an essential part of the civic fabric. Their track records as owners are somewhat mixed, but mixed in this case is better than the alternative.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill released a report last year showing that in the previous 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers disappeared, leaving behind what they called “news deserts.” The 2020 report was an update of a similar one from 2018, but just in those two years another 300 newspapers died, taking 6,000 journalism jobs with them.

“I don’t think anybody in the news business even has rose colored glasses anymore,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, a nonprofit journalism advocacy group. “They took them off a few years ago, and they don’t know where they are.”

“The advantage of a local owner who cares about the community is that they in theory can give you runway and also say, ‘Operate at break-even on a cash-flow basis and you’re good,’” said Mr. Rosenstiel.

For instance, Glen Taylor, a Minnesota billionaire who owns the Minneapolis Star Tribune, is not showering the newsroom with money, said Michael Klingensmith, publisher and chief executive of the paper. “The understanding we have with Glen is that if we generate cash, it’s ours to keep but he’s not interested in investing more,” he said. “He expects the business to be completely self-sufficient.”

Is this helpful?

But at 240 staffers, the newsroom is as big as it was when Mr. Klingensmith arrived in 2010, something relatively few papers can boast of over the same period. The Star Tribune’s goal was to reach 100,000 digital subscribers by the end of last year, and it hit that mark by May. And the paper just won a prestigious Polk Award for its coverage of the killing of George Floyd and the aftermath.

“The communities that have papers owned by very wealthy people in general have fared much better because they stayed the course with large newsrooms,” said Ken Doctor, on hiatus as a media industry analyst to work as C.E.O. and founder of Lookout Local, which is trying to revive the local news business in smaller markets, starting in Santa Cruz, Calif. Hedge funds, by contrast, have expected as much as 20 percent of revenue a year from their properties, which can often be achieved only by stripping papers of reporters and editors for short-term gain.

Alden has made deep cuts at many of its MediaNews Group publications, including The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News. Alden argues that it is rescuing papers that might otherwise have gone out of business in the past two decades.

And a billionaire buyer is far from a panacea for the industry’s ills. “It’s not just, go find yourself a rich guy. It’s the right rich person. There are lots of people with lots of money. A lot of them shouldn’t run newspaper companies,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the former editor of The Chicago Tribune. “Sam Zell is Exhibit A. So be careful who you ask.”

Mr. Zell, the real estate maverick and billionaire whose nickname is “the grave dancer,” took Tribune Publishing private in a leveraged buyout in 2007. The company filed for bankruptcy the next year. His brief tenure helped set in motion the events leading to the Alden Capital bid.

Other rescuers have come and gone. There was a time when Warren Buffett looked like a potential savior for newspapers, investing in them through his company, Berkshire Hathaway. He has since beaten a retreat from the industry. And there have even been reports that Dr. Soon-Shiong has explored a sale of The Los Angeles Times (which he has denied).

“The great fear of every billionaire is that by owning a newspaper they will become a millionaire,” said Mr. Rosenstiel.

Elizabeth Green, co-founder and chief executive at Chalkbeat, a nonprofit education news organization with 30 reporters in eight cities around the country, said that rescuing a dozen metro dailies that are “obviously shells of their former selves” was never going to be enough to turn around the local news business.

“Even these attempts are still preserving institutions that were always flawed and not leaning into the new information economy and how we all consume and learn and pay for things,” said Ms. Green, who also co-founded the American Journalism Project, which is working to create a network of nonprofit outlets.

Ms. Green is not alone in her belief that the future of American journalism lies in new forms of journalism, often as nonprofits. The American Journalism Project received funding from the Houston philanthropists Laura and John Arnold, the Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, which also bought The Atlantic. Herbert and Marion Sandler, who built one of the country’s largest savings and loans, gave money to start ProPublica.

“We’re seeing a lot of growth of relatively small nonprofits that are now part of what I would call the philanthropic journalistic complex,” said Mr. Doctor. “The question really isn’t corporate structure, nonprofit or profit, the question is money and time.”

The scion of a wealthy Utah family, Paul Huntsman, bought The Salt Lake Tribune in Utah from a hedge fund in 2016. Circulation fell by half, ad revenue plummeted and he cut more than a third of the journalists. He has since turned it into the first metropolitan daily operating as a nonprofit.

After the cable television entrepreneur H.F. (Gerry) Lenfest bought The Philadelphia Inquirer, he set up a hybrid structure. The paper is run as a for-profit, public benefit corporation, but it belongs to a nonprofit called the Lenfest Institute. The complex structure is meant to maintain editorial independence and maximum flexibility to run as a business while also encouraging philanthropic support.

Of the $7 million that Lenfest gave to supplement The Inquirer’s revenue from subscribers and advertisers in 2020, only $2 million of it came from the institute, while the remaining $5 million came from a broad array of national, local, institutional and independent donors, said Jim Friedlich, executive director and chief executive of Lenfest.

“I think philosophically, we’ve long accepted that we have no museums or opera houses without philanthropic support,” said Ms. Lipinski. “I think journalism deserves the same consideration.”

Mr. Bainum has said he plans to establish a nonprofit group that would buy The Sun and two other Tribune-owned Maryland newspapers if he and Mr. Wyss succeed in their bid.

“These buyers range across the political spectrum, and on the surface have little in common except their wealth,” said Mr. Friedlich. “Each seems to feel that American democracy is sailing through choppy waters, and they’ve decided to buy a newspaper instead of a yacht.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/b...re-owners.html





EXPLAINER: Starving for more Chips in a Tech-Hungry World
Michael Liedtke and Tom Krisher

As the U.S. economy rebounds from its pandemic slump, a vital cog is in short supply: the computer chips that power a wide range of products that connect, transport and entertain us in a world increasingly dependent on technology.

The shortage has already been rippling through various markets since last summer. It has made it difficult for schools to buy enough laptops for students f orced to learn from home, delayed the release of popular products such as the iPhone 12 and created mad scrambles to find the latest video game consoles such as the PlayStation 5.

But things have been getting even worse in recent weeks, particularly in the auto industry, where factories are shutting down because there aren’t enough chips to finish building vehicles that are starting to look like computers on wheels. The problem was recently compounded by a grounded container ship that blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week, choking off chips headed from Asia to Europe.

On Thursday, General Motors and Ford said they would further cut production at their North American factories as the global shortage of semiconductors appears to be growing tighter.

These snags are likely to frustrate consumers who can’t find the vehicle they want and sometimes find themselves settling for a lower-end models without as many fancy electronic features. And it threatens to leave a big dent in the auto industry, which by some estimates stands to lose $60 billion in sales during the first half of his year.

“We have been hit by the perfect storm, and it’s not going away any time soon,” said Baird technology analyst Ted Mortonson, who said he has never seen such a serious shortage in nearly 30 years tracking the chip industry.

___

IS THE PANDEMIC TO BLAME?

Sort of. The pandemic prompted chip factories to start shutting down early last year, particularly overseas, where the majority of the processors are made. By the time they started to reopen, they had a backlog of orders to fill.

That wouldn’t have been as daunting if chipmakers weren’t then swamped by unforeseen demand. For instance, no one entered 2020 expecting to see a spike in personal computer sales after nearly a decade of steady decline. But that’s what happened after government lockdowns forced millions of office workers to do their jobs from homes while students mostly attended their classes remotely.

___

ARE OTHER FACTORS ARE AT WORK?

Yes. Both Sony and Microsoft were preparing to release highly anticipated next-generation video game consoles for their PlayStation and Xbox brands, respectively, that required more sophisticated chips than ever. To add to the demand, wireless network providers are clamoring for chips to power ultrafast “5G” services being built around the world.

President Donald Trump’s trade war with China probably didn’t help either. Some analysts believe the Trump administration’s blacklisting of Huawei Technologies prompted that major maker of smartphones to build a huge stockpile of chips as it braced for the crackdown.

___

WHY IS THE AUTO INDUSTRY BEING HIT SO HARD?

Stay-at-home orders drove a surge in consumer electronics sales, squeezing auto parts suppliers who use chips for computers that control gas pedals, transmissions and touch screens. Chip makers compounded the pressure by rejiggering factory lines to better serve the consumer-electronics market, which generates far more revenue for them than autos.

After eight weeks of pandemic-induced shutdown in the spring, automakers started reopening factories earlier than they had envisioned. But then they were hit with unexpected news: chip makers weren’t able to flip a switch quickly and make the types of processors needed for cars.

___

HOW ARE AUTOMAKERS DEALING WITH THE SHORTAGE?

They’ve canceled shifts and temporarily closed factories. Ford, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler (now Stellantis), Volkswagen and Honda seem to have been hit the hardest. Others, most notably Toyota, aren’t being affected as dramatically. That is probably because Toyota was better prepared after learning how sudden, unexpected shocks can disrupt supply chains from the massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, said Bank of America Securities analyst Vivek Arya.

The harder hit automakers have diverted chips from slower-selling models to those in high demand, such as pickup trucks and large SUVs. Ford, GM and Stellantis have started building vehicles without some computers, putting them in storage with plans to retrofit them later.

GM expects the chip shortage to cost it up to $2 billion in pretax profits this year from lost production and sales. Ford is bracing for a similar blow. Chip makers probably won’t fully catch up with auto-industry demand until July at the earliest.

___

HOW WILL THIS AFFECT PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BUY A NEW CAR?

Expect to pay more. Supplies of many models were tight even before the chip shortage because automakers were having trouble making up for production lost to the pandemic.

IHS Markit estimates that from January through March, the chip shortage reduced North American auto production by about 100,000 vehicles. In January of last year, before the pandemic, the U.S. auto industry had enough vehicles to supply 77 days of demand. By February of 2021 it was down almost 30% to 55 days.

___

WILL OTHER POPULAR PRODUCTS BE AFFECTED THIS YEAR?

Samsung Electronics, one of the world’s biggest chipmakers, recently warned that its vast line-up of consumer electronics could be affected by the shortage. Without specifying which products might be affected, Samsung co-CEO Koh Dong-jin told shareholders that a “serious imbalance” between the supply and demand for chips could hurt sales from April through June.

___

WHAT’S GOING TO PREVENT THIS FROM HAPPENING AGAIN?

There are no quick fixes, but chipmakers appear to be be gearing up to meet future challenges.

Intel, which for decades has dominated the market for PC chips, recently made waves by announcing plans to invest $20 billion in two new factories in Arizona. Even more significant, Intel revealed said it is starting a new division that will enter into contracts to make chips tailored for other firms in addition to its own processors. That’s a major departure for Intel, aligning it more closely with a model popularized by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, which already had been building a plant in Arizona, too.

Compelled by the current shortage, TSMC also has committed to spending $100 billion during the next three years to expand its worldwide chip manufacturing capacity. About $28 billion of that investment will come this year to boost production at factories that have been unable to keep up with the surge in demand since the pandemic began, according to TSMC Chief Executive Officer C.C. Wei.

And President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion plan to improve U.S. infrastructure includes an estimated $50 billion to help make the the country less reliant on chips made overseas. The U.S. share of the worldwide chip manufacturing market has declined from 37% in 1990 to 12% today, according to Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group.

But chips won’t start coming out of any new factories built as part of the spending splurge for two to three years. And even as existing factories ramp up and expand to meet current demand, some analysts wonder if there might be a glut of processors a year from now.
https://apnews.com/article/video-gam...c4cfab19804197





Why it’s Easier to Move Country than Switch Social Media

When we talk about social media monopolies, we focus too much on network effects, and not enough on switching costs. It's time to tear down the walls
Cory Doctorow

For my grandmother, Valentina Rachman, leaving the USSR was a momentous and difficult choice. Making her way across Europe to a camp in Germany, and thence to a Displaced Persons ship to Canada, meant facing enormous danger – including nearly being burned to death in an antisemitic arson attack in Poland – and then starting over in a new country where she had few contacts and could not speak the language.

But even after she learned English and established herself and her family in Toronto, she continued to pay a price for leaving: she was utterly cut off from her mother, brother, cousins and other family in Leningrad. She didn't even know if they were alive. It was a decade before her phone rang and my father heard his mother cry out "Mama!" for the first time.

I moved from Toronto to San Francisco to London to Los Angeles. Each time, the move has gotten easier. When I left London five years ago, I shipped over my books, my clothes – even my appliances! (I bought voltage adapters.) I videoconference with my in-laws in London and Wales weekly on Saturdays, and with the Toronto bunch every Sunday. If I change my mind, I can always move back.

When we talk about social media monopolies, we focus too much on network effects, and not enough on switching costs. Yes, it's true that all your friends are already stuck in a Big Tech silo that doesn't talk to any of the other Big Tech silos. It needn't be that way: interoperable platforms have existed since the first two Arpanet nodes came online. You can phone anyone with a phone number and email anyone with an email address.

The reason you can't talk to Facebook users without having a Facebook account isn't that it's technically impossible – it's that Facebook forbids it. What's more, Facebook (and its Big Tech rivals) have the law on their side: the once-common practice of making new products that just work with existing ones (like third-party printer ink, or a Mac program that can read Microsoft Office files, or an emulator that can play old games) has been driven to the brink of extinction by Big Tech. They were fine with this kind of "competitive compatibility" when it benefited them, but now that they dominate the digital world, it's time for it to die.

To restore competitive compatibility, we would need reform to many laws: software copyright and patents, the anti-circumvention laws that protect digital rights management, and the cybersecurity laws that let companies criminalize violations of their terms of service.

New proposals from the UK Competition and Markets Authority, as well as the EU's Digital Services and Digital Markets Act and the US ACCESS Act of 2020, all contemplate some form of interoperability mandate - forcing the dominant platforms to open up the APIs they already use to let various parts of their own business talk to one another. These mandates are a great floor under interoperability, but they can't be the ceiling. That's because they would be easy for big companies to subvert: if a lawmaker forces you to open a specific conduit to your competition, then you can respond by moving all the interesting data away from that conduit. You're still providing a jack that competitors can plug into, but you've moved all the important stuff to another jack.

But with both mandates and competitive compatibility, a new equilibrium emerges. A tech giant that nerfs its mandated interfaces doesn't send the upstarts who relied on it packing: rather, it embarks upon a costly and chaotic arms-race, where those competitors use scrapers, bots and other tools to maintain the link between their users and the dominant platform's hostages.

Big Tech companies (with the exception of Twitter) have objected to this. If we don't get a veto over who connects to our services and how, they say, how will we safeguard those users' privacy? They won't. And they don't. The rules that determine when someone is abusing your privacy should come from democratic deliberation: from law and regulation. How your data can – and can't – be used is too important to leave up to the whims of tech executives.

2.6 billion people are locked up in Facebook's walled garden and that means that you very well might submit to being locked in alongside them. That's network effects. Once you're there, you might hate it, but you still stick around because you don't want to leave your friends.

Network effects are why my grandmother's family stayed behind in the USSR. Low switching costs are why I was able to roam freely around the world, moving to the places where it seemed like I could thrive.

Network effects are a big deal, but it's switching costs that really matter. Facebook will tell you that it wants to keep bad guys out – not keep users in. Funnily enough, that's the same thing East Germany's politburo claimed about the Berlin Wall: it was there to keep the teeming hordes of the west out of the socialist worker's paradise, not to lock in the people of East Germany.

Mr Zuckerberg, tear down that wall.

Cory Doctorow is a journalist, activist and science fiction author
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/soci...-compatibility

















Until next week,

- js.



















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Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


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