Susan Crawford

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. It's common knowledge that city curbs are fiercely contested places, what with Ubers and Lyfts hovering inconveniently and blocking traffic; piles of shared bikes and scooters being dropped off and picked up; rapidly climbing numbers of deliveries being made by double-parked trucks; and buses and taxis pulling up—not to mention all the private-car parking going on. These daily dramas will only get more boisterous and difficult in the years to come, when fleets of city-licensed driverless cars join the fray.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Policymakers at all levels of government are struggling to thoughtfully harness data in the service of public values. Many public servants grew up in an era of firmly separate disciplines: You were either an engineer or an economist, either a programmer or a social worker, but never both. In an era in which data is everything, the risks to core democratic principles—equity, fairness, support for the most vulnerable, delivery of effective government services—caused by technological illiteracy in policymakers, and policy illiteracy in computer scientists, are staggering. This has happened because traditional academic disciplines, as they currently operate, often aren't designed to help students study and apply technical expertise to advance the public interest

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, last week, 125 mostly white, mostly male, business-card-bearing attendees crowded into a brightly lit ballroom to consider "mobility." That’s the buzzword for a hazy vision of how tech in all forms—including smartphones, credit cards, and autonomous vehicles— will combine with the remains of traditional public transit to get urbanites where they need to go. There was a fizz in the air at the Meeting of the Minds session, advertised as a summit to prepare cities for the "autonomous revolution."

Comcast is taking shots at Mickey Mouse. The Philadelphia cable and entertainment giant made a $65 billion cash offer for the assets that 21st Century Fox is already selling to the Walt Disney Co. for $52.4 billion in stock, setting up what may be a punishing takeover battle between the two legacy media giants...“We know from the personalities involved there will be blood on the floor somewhere,” Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of Captive Audience, about the Comcast/NBCUniversal merger. “It’s clearly going to be a battle of male wills. These are guys who are used to being in control and want their way and will do about anything to get it.” Of Murdoch, she added that “it’s hard to imagine an 87-year-old media mogul being in the backseat.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. This week, there's a swirl of stories about Comcast, Fox, Disney, and Sky. (Nutshell: Fox and Comcast are fighting for control over Sky; Comcast and Disney are about to battle over Fox.) Although all of this has the impersonal buzz of brightly colored brands building bigger businesses, it's actually a deeply human saga. Comcast chair and CEO Brian Roberts and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, head of the 20th Century Fox empire, are looking to win long-running personal battles.

Computers will keep getting smarter. And so must US workers, if they want to hang onto their jobs. That was the consensus of politicians, academics, and entrepreneurs who discussed the disruptive effects of technology at two panel discussions sponsored by the Boston Globe Friday afternoon. Although the panelists stressed that better education will help ensure that US workers don’t lose out to computers and robots, Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun warned that today’s colleges aren’t prepared to deliver the kind of training workers will need...Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford said the Trump administration hasn’t slashed science and technology funding as much as she feared, but added, “There really isn’t anybody in the West Wing who is qualified to give advice on science and technology policy. Unless we have that, it’s hard to see that the United States is going to make a lot of progress.”

Last year, I predicted the government’s case to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner would most likely be the antitrust case of the decade. That may prove to be an understatement. Since then, a pipeline has filled with megadeals awaiting the case’s outcome, which the judge presiding over the fight has said will come in less than two weeks...A number of influential antitrust experts have rallied to the government’s side, and some, like Harvard Law School’s Susan Crawford, have gone so far as to predict a Justice Department victory...“What Trump expressed in the campaign is the feeling of the American people that five companies have too much control,” said Ms. Crawford, author of “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.” The case “raises issues that hit both American pocketbooks and ideals.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. This week, the Senate voted 52–47 to revive an Obama administration rule ensuring equal treatment for online traffic—the so-called “net neutrality” rule recently erased by the Trump FCC. But the vote wasn't really about "net neutrality." Instead, it was a deeply political, bipartisan call—three Republican senators, including Susan Collins of Maine, signed on—for internet freedom writ large. Here's why: "Net neutrality," these days, is shorthand for "We don't like how much unconstrained power Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink have over us."

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In December of 2006, Donald Trump paraded Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japan's SoftBank, through the lobby of Trump Tower. The proud president-elect called Son “one of the great men of industry.” Indeed, the two have a lot in common. They're both big talkers with deep respect for enormous numbers of zeros—Son is the world's 39th richest man—whose favorite currency is favors. Son promised over a year ago to bring jobs to the US, and, in response, Trump promised to make it easier for Son to do business in America. Last week, relentless, idiosyncratic, one-man-show dealmaker Son (sound familiar?) began the process of calling in Trump's promise of deregulation: Sprint, which is owned by SoftBank, will be acquired by T-Mobile, even though the federal government has twice in the past seven years said such a combination would be illegal. Is our government bound by the rule of law or the rule of President Trump?

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Facebook is massive. Six million advertisers use Facebook's vast data holdings to perfectly target ads reaching more than 1.4 billion daily (and 2.1 billion monthly) active users, amounting to almost 40 percent of the global internet population. That enormous user base forms a castle wall around Facebook’s core ad business, because few other companies can promise the same level of return for ad spends. It's trendy this month to call on the US government to rein in Facebook. But the government doesn't quite know how to treat the giant blue-branded company: Is it a media conglomerate or a platform?

Internet activists are gathering in Cleveland this week for a conference about getting better internet access to more people. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance wants to reduce the inequity in broadband connections for people in rural areas or poor urban neighborhoods...Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford says America needs to treat high-speed internet as a utility like electricity or water, as other countries do. “It is embarrassing to have a Korean tell me that coming to America is like taking a rural vacation because life is so slow here. It is embarrassing for the mayor of Stockholm, the mayor said to me 'What can I do to help America?' ”

As Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, defends his company's data practices this week before Congress, one of the nation's largest cable companies is asking federal lawmakers for a bill that would rein in social media platforms, search engines and other tech giants that have access to their users' personal data. The proposal by Charter Communications on Monday calls for requiring "greater privacy and data security protections" of companies such as Google and Facebook, whose Cambridge Analytica fiasco has inflamed a debate about Silicon Valley's handling of consumers' personal information...The disarray and tumult afflicting the tech industry is an opportunity for Internet providers to gain a bigger foothold with policymakers, according to Susan Crawford, a Harvard University law professor. "Charter is using the current kerfuffle over Facebook to divert any regulatory energy that might have been heading its way towards Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google," Crawford said.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. The Nixon Administration saw it coming. In a stunning January 1974 report, the Nixon White House Cable Committee foretold that the new telecom platform known as cable would, eventually, be a monopoly service wherever it was offered...Nixon's plan fell victim to the lobbying efforts of the cable industry—powerful then, much more powerful now—on Capitol Hill. Today, the Cable Committee's predictions have come true: Both the cable and wireless industries, the transport networks on which everyone else rely, are fully mature, vertically integrated, and unruffled by competition. And they're planning to erect separate kingdoms.

Kyle Corkum imagines a “smart city” with futuristic amenities like driverless shuttle services, heated sidewalks and a super-resilient energy grid that keeps humming through the harshest of storms.As chief executive of LStar Ventures, a developer of planned communities, he has a chance to build the neighborhood of his dreams from the ground up on the site of a long-shuttered naval air station in this town just 12 miles south of Boston’s booming technology hub...The need for greater regulation of driverless vehicles has also come up for debate after the death last month of a woman who was struck by one of Uber’s self-driving cars in Tempe, Ariz. Very few local governments have thought through the long list of public- and private-sector values and concerns that should be deployed to constrain” the use of autonomous cars, as well as the technologies being used to monitor city streets, said Susan Crawford, a Harvard Law School professor. “Once you’ve given a developer license to deploy total surveillance, with no public limitations, you’re done.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Never waste a good crisis. The awful news is that one of Uber’s self-driving cars hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. If anything good is to come from the tragedy, cities need to seize this opportunity to change minds. Right now, while the companies running testbeds in American metropolises are forced to pause, city leaders have a chance to shape the future of autonomous vehicles and ensure they are part of holistic efforts to improve equity and quality of life for all residents. But if politicians simply introduce self-driving cars without conditions, we can expect tragedies on multiple levels.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In the American internet access world, public assets are privatized all the time. Sometimes this happens when private companies are handed direct payments in the form of subsidies: public money, amounting to at least $5 billion a year, which is showered on companies to incentivize them to provide access in places where they feel it is too expensive to build. Sometimes this happens when companies are handed low-cost or no-cost access rights to infrastructure by state legislatures. And sometimes it happens in the form of broad public/private partnerships for "smart city" services. But the federal government doesn’t set high enough standards for the quality and price of the services the public subsidizes—and we're certainly no good at requiring competition.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. ...New York was supposed to be a model for how the modern city could launch high-speed internet for its residents. When the Bloomberg mayoral administration re-signed an agreement with Verizon in 2008, it required that the company wire all residential buildings with its fiber service, FiOS. The agreement was heralded by the press as a way of triggering competition— the presence of Verizon’s fiber product would end the local monopoly of Time Warner Cable, now Spectrum, which provides internet access over a different, lower-capacity wire called hybrid fiber-coaxial. Cable internet access dominates most cities, but it often loses market share to more reasonably priced fiber offerings.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. A hundred years ago, it was hard to imagine that domestic electricity could be good for anything beyond powering a few light bulbs in the front hall. That is, until refrigerators, washer-dryers, air-conditioners, and other high-capacity uses for electrical connections became popular and widely available. Today, fiberoptic connections present a similar conundrum. A giant middle class of consumers and producers will eventually be supported by the new businesses and new ways of thriving that very high-capacity networking will make possible.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. A decade ago, Chicago handed over control of its parking meters to a cadre of private investors. Officials pitched the deal as an innovative win-win. In exchange for a 75-year lease, the cash-strapped city got a lump sum. In fact, that large upfront payment was far less than the meters’ potential revenue—it was more than $1 billion too low...Beginning last fall, Toronto has been getting a flood of publicity about a deal with Sidewalk Labs, part of Google spinoff Alphabet. Reports describe the deal as giving Sidewalk the authority to build in an undeveloped 12-acre portion of the city called Quayside.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. The three Republican commissioners now in power at the FCC voted this week to erase the agency's legal authority over high-speed Internet providers.They claim that competition will protect consumers, that the commission shouldn't interfere in the "dynamic internet ecosystem," and that they are "protecting internet freedom." Now that the vote is done, the agency has little to do but mess around with spectrum allocations. The mega-utility of the 21st century officially has no regulator.