Susan Crawford

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I’ve got bad news for everyone who is working overtime to protest Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai’s campaign to eliminate net neutrality: You are being tricked. Pai is running a kind of shell game, overreaching (“go ahead and run all the paid prioritization services you want, Comcast!”) so that we will focus our energies on the hard-to-pin-down concept of net neutrality—the principle of internet access fairness that he has vowed to eliminate.

The future of AT&T could be shaped by two big decisions in Washington this week, with the Justice Department suing the telecom giant on Monday to block its $85 billion purchase of Time Warner and the Federal Communications Commission announcing a plan Tuesday to roll back net neutrality rules, handing a big win to Internet providers...Still, consumer advocates say relying on after-the-fact enforcement is no substitute for clear, preemptive rules that seek to prevent consumers from being harmed in the first place. "Taking FCC [rulemaking] power off the table leaves us with only antitrust authority to rely on to protect consumers," said Susan Crawford, a law professor at Harvard University. "Which won't be enough, in the long run."

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Despite what Randall Stephenson thinks, the Department of Justice’s suit blocking AT&T from acquiring Time Warner’s assets in an $85 billion merger is a great moment for antitrust in America. It’s late, but it’s welcome. Stephenson, the AT&T CEO, has no one but himself to blame. He and his minions effectively tanked their own plans to merge their company—the largest major pay-TV provider in the country and the second-largest wireless carrier—with Time Warner’s must-have cable channels and sports rights.

In a matter of hours this week, the Trump administration twice weighed in on one of the central issues shaping business and society today — just how much market power big companies should be allowed to amass. Yet in back-to-back developments, two federal agencies arrived at starkly different conclusions, and one company, AT&T, found itself on opposite sides of the debate...“The F.C.C. is saying that they’re going to give up any legal authority over regulating high-speed internet,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School. “They’re handing the power to choose winners and losers online to about five companies.”

Author and broadband thought leader Susan Crawford delivers a stirring keynote address at WRAL TechWire's "Evolution of a Smarter City" event in Wilson. Yes, technology represents threats to jobs and life as we know it - but emerging opportunities, products and services also mean that humankind is at "just the beginning of an extraordinary era."...Crawford pointed out that high-speed fiber infrastructure will enable delivery of better healthcare, face-to-face interaction, augmented reality, virtual reality, "real-time translation" and much more. "Cities should be considering fiber networks" to put in place a platform over which governments can delivery a variety of services and encourage the private sector to "light up" fiber for communications, entertainment and much more, Crawford said.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Last week, San Francisco became the first major city in America to pledge to connect all of its homes and businesses to a fiber optic network. I urge you to read that sentence again. It’s a ray of light. In an era of short-term, deeply partisan do-nothing-ism, the city's straightforward, deeply practical determination shines. Americans, it turns out, are capable of great things—even if only at the city level these days.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Last week, San Francisco became the first major city in America to pledge to connect all of its homes and businesses to a fiber optic network. I urge you to read that sentence again. It’s a ray of light. In an era of short-term, deeply partisan do-nothing-ism, the city's straightforward, deeply practical determination shines. Americans, it turns out, are capable of great things—even if only at the city level these days.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Like the repeated hook of a pop song that you can’t get out of your head, mergers between the already-powerful wireless giants keep coming. In the previous greatest hits category of wireless consolidation, the Obama administration managed to stop the music for a while: Its DOJ blocked AT&T from buying T-Mobile in 2011, and a 2014 effort by Sprint to merge with T-Mobile was rebuffed by regulators. But the beat goes on, as rumors are swirling this month that Sprint and T-Mobile will soon announce plans to merge. This 2017 merger reprise—an attempt to revive the bad old days when harmful acquisitions were shooed past regulators—should also be soundly rejected.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Two very American stories about high-speed internet access are colliding right now, and the dissonance is striking. One is like a five-minute Shakespearean tragedy, neatly telling the story of what a high-priced local cable monopoly does (and doesn’t do). The other is a hopeful narrative of intelligent, effective government intervention. For the brief but evocative tragedy, you probably can guess who the high-priced local cable monopoly is: Comcast.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Hype about using enormous sets of sensor-collected data to “drive results” in US cities is getting pretty thick. Local government officials across the country are overrun by vendors offering to install soup-to-nuts systems that will monitor parking, pedestrians, pollution, and pests, among a zillion other things. It’s as if the big tech companies are baffled by why local government needs to exist at all. “We’ve got engineers! We’ll do it for you!” is the implicit pitch. McKinsey says the global Internet of Things market may be worth as much as $6.2 trillion over the next few years. But all that data won’t help if it doesn’t address the most vital issues in our cities. And one of the most vital of all is inequality of opportunity.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford...I have a suggestion for you, Jeff Bezos. How would you like to become the Andrew Carnegie of our time? Yes, I am talking about libraries. Those places where books sit on shelves, not delivered by FedEx. And so much more. Carnegie made them the center of his philanthropy, and almost became synonymous with them. More importantly, he changed countless lives with his investments in libraries. I have heard that you’re looking for big ideas, and this is one.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Microsoft recently made a Very Serious Announcement about deploying unused television airwaves to solve the digital divide in America. News outlets ate it up: "To Close Digital Divide, Microsoft to Harness Unused Television Channels," said the New York Times on July 10, in a headline that could have been written by the PR folks in Redmond. The Washington Post pegged both a really big number and a year on the plan: "Microsoft wants to bring 2 million rural Americans online by 2022," wrote Hamza Shaban and Brian Fung on July 11....Microsoft's plans aren't really about consumer internet access, don't actually focus on rural areas, and aren't targeted at the US—except for political purposes.

...Cable providers are among the most despised businesses in the country, regularly coming in below airlines, banks, and drug companies in public-opinion polls. A mini industry of intermediaries has sprung up to help consumers deal with the providers’ notoriously terrible customer service, offering to negotiate bills and publishing online scripts for getting rates cut (“The fleecing of the U.S. continues!” a representative comment reads)...Cable is essentially a monopoly now in urban areas,” Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former policy adviser to President Obama on science, technology, and innovation, told me.

An article by Susan Crawford. A couple of months ago, I interviewed a woman in public housing in the small town of Wilson, North Carolina. She told me that the best thing that ever happened to her family was getting internet access over the city's municipal fiber network. Included in her monthly rent bill is a $10 fee for 50 Mbps symmetric access (equal uploads and downloads). Why is this so wonderful? Because her sons are getting better grades, now that they don't have to go to the library to use the internet. Sadly, New York City is far behind Wilson, NC when it comes to ensuring ubiquitous, reasonably priced fiber optic internet access for every resident.

...Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, says, “This is about Facebook’s determination to have billions of people treat its platform as The Internet… Facebook wants simultaneously to be viewed as basic infrastructure while ensuring its highly profitable ways of doing deals are unconstrained.” In the case of Facebook, or any other major platform, tech founders and leaders, who make billions off the affective digital labor of billions worldwide, have a distinct responsibility to imagine all the ways their platforms can be perverted in a world that includes murder, rape, child abuse, and terrorism, and those who will use platforms like Facebook to enact them.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Listening to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai go on about “net neutrality” last week felt just like Alice’s encounter with Humpty Dumpty in Wonderland. The large, contemptuous egg says, scornfully, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” Pai says, essentially, that he is looking for a new legal route that will satisfy consumers who care about their internet transmissions being treated fairly and, at the same time, that will lift old-fashioned Ma Bell-era regulation from the dynamic, shiny, wonderful businesses of AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, and CenturyLink. It’s all nonsense.

Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford believes the United States must offer ubiquitous, affordable, high-speed Internet to all Americans to secure its economic future. She has spent her career—which includes teaching, writing, and advising President Obama on science, technology, and innovation policy—formulating practical, detailed proposals to make this possible. She talked to MIT Technology Review business editor Elizabeth Woyke about the reasons why the U.S. lags other developed countries in Internet price and speed and how locally managed fiber networks could close this digital divide.