Tag: AT&T

Categories
Tech

AT&T disregards the end of net neutrality

The U.S. elections of 2016 marked a shift in spending on political advertising as money for ads moved to cable TV and the internet, which allow campaigns to target with precision the audience for their ads and, in the case of the internet. to collect information from supporters.

Spending last year for political ads that appeared on mobile phones, across social networks and in search results grew 789% from 2012, to $1.4 billion, AdAge reported in January. Candidates and their allies spent roughly the same total on cable TV, where spending rose 52% from four years earlier. Purchases of ads on broadcast TV fell 20%, to $4.4 billion, over the same period.

Candidates “are engaging in more internet communications with each passing election, and citizens and civil society organizations are increasingly able to express their views and organize online,” Facebook told the Federal Election Commission in comments filed in November.

The shift points to more than political activity.

The internet is “the common medium,” as Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, predicted seven years ago that it would become. Forty-three percent of Americans get their news online, up from 38% a year earlier, the Pew Research Center reported in September. The gap between the share of Americans who get their news online as opposed to via TV shrank to seven points in the past year, down from 19 points in 2016.

Thus, the pushback by AT&T against a lawsuit by the Trump administration to block the company’s proposed purchase of Time Warner stands out.

Whatever you think of the merger and regardless (for the moment) of the administration’s motives for opposing it, the consequences for competition will be intensified by developments elsewhere in Washington, where the FCC is moving to scrap rules that prevent internet services providers from blocking or slowing traffic from companies they don’t own.

AT&T is among the world’s largest carriers  of content. Anyone who aims to reach readers, listeners or viewers relies on AT&T, Verizon and other ISPs. The ISPs set the terms of carriage.

Under a proposal likely to be adopted by the FCC this month, ISPs would need only to post their terms of service for all to see. “Individual consumers, not the government, decide what Internet access service best meets their individualized needs,” the FCC says in its proposed order.

But transparency only counts when consumers have a choice. Forty-six million households are served by just one provider of broadband internet, data from the FCC show. (Another 10.6 million households have no broadband service.)

“It’s an ‘open the champagne bottles’ moment for AT&T,” Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia who coined the term net neutrality to describe the principle of equal access to the internet, told the Times. “They can just tell people to pony up.”

Pony up is unlikely to be in the public interest, particularly for the internet, which serves all members of society. “Everybody in the internet community was extremely eager to operate under the delusion that government played no role in the growth of the internet,” noted Hundt, who listed some of the ways that government made the internet the common medium that it has become.

The government allowed computers to use the telephone network to connect to the internet for free, he noted. The government did not tax internet commerce and mandated that a portion of revenue from users be redirected to connect all Americans, including those in classrooms and libraries as well as those who live in tribal lands and rural areas.

A common medium is easy to use, reaches all people, fosters economic growth, provides access to the government, is full of news and – in the U.S. at least – needs to be private, Hundt observed.

AT&T is not Netflix, YouTube, Hulu or Facebook, to name several companies that AT&T cites as evidence of competitors who AT&T says are encroaching on its business. We look to those companies for content, but we count on AT&T and its fellow ISPs for connection.

Categories
Law Privacy

For AT&T customers, opting out of online ads more hassle than necessary: LA Times

Writing in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times, David Lazarus, the paper’s consumer columnist, chronicles the difficulty that customers of AT&T can encounter when they elect to opt-out of advertising from the company and its partners.

As one who switched my mobile service recently to AT&T, I decided to sample the process Lazarus describes. I went to an online site where AT&T customers can decline ads delivered by the Network Advertising Initiative, a self-regulatory organization whose members serve up ads based on predictions about users’ interests “generated from your visits over time and across different websites.”

According to Lazarus, AT&T customers have to opt out of ads delivered by as many as 21 digital advertising companies. In my case the number totaled 79. NAI counts 93 members in all, which leaves 14 companies that have yet to place a cookie in my browser. (To those companies: It’s fine, really.)

NAI members include a mix of household names such as Google and AOL, as wells as firms such as MediaMath, NetSeer, LiveRail and TubeMogul.

The companies tailor ads by embedding a fragment of code in your browser that tracks your comings and goings on the Internet. That means to avoid such advertising completely you have to opt out for each browser on each device you use. As Lazarus notes, opting out of ads delivered via your smartphone or satellite TV requires going to discrete links for each platform.

Though technology exists that allows customers to register their preference for all their devices, the phone companies have yet to adopt it. A spokeswoman for AT&T tells Lazarus that the company’s procedures are “consistent with industry practice.” Still, opt outs “should be as streamlined as possible,” he argues.

“The letter of the law may allow them to do things as they are now,” Jill Bronfman, director of the Privacy and Technology Project at UC Hastings College of the Law, told Lazarus, referring to the phone companies. “But the spirit of the law is that they need to offer consumer-friendly privacy options.”

Categories
Privacy

AT&T aided NSA in spying on a massive scale: reports

Thanks to Edward Snowden and reporters at the Times and ProPublica, we now know that AT&T likely handed over to the National Security Agency billions of cellphone calling records over roughly two years beginning in August 2011.

According to documents reported Saturday by the Times, AT&T gave the NSA as many as 1.8 billion sets of data each day about who people called, when and for how long. Though Verizon, also provided the NSA access to similar metadata, AT&T appears to have been a partner without peer. According to ProPublica:

“While it has long been known that American telecommunications companies work closely with the spy agency, the documents we’ve published show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative” and another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

It appears the calling records allowed intelligence agencies to run queries, relying on orders issued by a court pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, on calls that originated overseas but passed across AT&T’s network. In addition, the company reportedly gave the NSA billions of emails that flowed across its network in the dozen years that followed the 9/11 attacks.

AT&T also provided the NSA with access to high-capacity broadband lines that serve the United Nations in New York, according to the documents.

“We do not voluntarily provide information to any investigating authorities other than if a person’s life is in danger and time is of the essence,” Brad Burns, an AT&T spokesman, told ProPublica without elaborating.