Susan Crawford

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I want to talk about the sledgehammer of usage-based billing. I take no pride in saying that I’ve been talking about it for years. The sledgehammer is not something I welcome, and I would have been happy if my fears about it never materialized. After all, the sledgehammer could cost internet users billions of dollars, enrich monopolists, and defeat the spirit — if not the law — of net neutrality. In a big way, the sledgehammer will also beat down our economic growth. This is one evil sledgehammer. And it sounds so innocent! Usage-based billing. Kind of like paying for what you use, right? Don’t be fooled.

According to the latest edition of Freedom House's annual Internet Freedom Report released this week, digital civil liberties have been curtailed across the globe for the fifth year in a row. There are now more countries with a heavily censored Internet than there are ones with a completely free Internet....But America isn’t first, second, or third on Freedom House’s list. Rather, the US takes the fifth spot after Iceland, Estonia, Canada, and Germany. “The US is not quite first on the list, but we’re very high up, and we are among the countries treated as ‘Free’ by Freedom House,” says Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “The important thing the report is telling us is that for many countries in the world — 32 of them they point to — freedom has been constrained over the last year when it comes to the global interoperable Internet.”

In this society of economic haves and have nots there is another divide that is worrisome: the digital divide. High speed access to the Internet is becoming a necessity. Google Fiber is trying to shake things up by bringing it to Charlotte and other providers are stepping up to the challenge but some see this not as the responsibility of commerce but of cities. We hear about how cities can make all the difference and about what Charlotte is doing to that end. Guests: Susan Crawford - professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. My tribe — the technophiles, the Internet enthusiasts, the conference-speakers — is thrilled about Uber. I’m not. I know I’m swimming against the tide here, but I’m going to say it: I don’t think Uber is a good idea for American cities. Before I drown under a flood of angry responses from around the Internets, hear me out: This fight is about public values. When it comes to city-wide transport and communications networks, serving everyone at a high basic level fairly — including drivers — is more important than permitting a single company to make enormous profits from a substitute basic private service.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Ed Cunningham is the front man and fiddle player for the Comet Bluegrass All-Stars, a band that has been playing every Sunday since 1996 (“except Easter,” he says) at the Comet, a bar in the Northside neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. Thus the name. The All-Stars can be heard, along with Roseanne Cash, on a new album from the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra called “American Originals.” He is also the head of the building code enforcement shop for the City of Cincinnati. That is not necessarily a likely launch pad for a thrilling data initiative that portends a tech renaissance that will shape the future of cities. But I’m here to tell you about Cunningham’s role in a project that does indeed provide that promise. With some help from an amazing program from the University of Chicago.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I’ve been excited about the Array of Things —  a network of beautifully-designed sensors poised to capture and make public real-time, non-personal data about the livability of a city — ever since it (they?) started following me on Twitter in June 2014. A sensor network with a personality and a public service mission — what more could a responsive city want? I was happy to let it follow me, and followed it back so I could read its tweets. This month, the Array of Things moved several giant steps closer to becoming a crucial general-purpose, worldwide sensor data infrastructure for researchers and policymakers. New money from the National Science Foundation is coming in, new collaborators from around the world are learning about it, and 50 devices will be installed on the streets of Chicago in early 2016, with hundreds more to be added in the years to come.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Digital-era humans are constantly optimizing — sometimes it feels as if we’re all engaged in an endless game of Frogger, continually navigating past a continual stream of obstacles, seeking the home of a thriving life. Nowhere is this practice as visible as in cities, where densely-packed populations weave past one another and new technology could provide opportunities to make life better. As mayors become more responsive to their citizens, how could adding the magic of public-enabled digital information to structures and streets help out? And what’s the role of the private sector in this transformation? One possible answer is emerging in The Big Orange, Los Angeles.

This year, the obscure tech-politics debate over whether and how we pay to use the Internet leaped into the mainstream, attracting the voices of Silicon Valley’s top brass, a late-night comedian, millions of disgruntled broadband service consumers and the president. But net neutrality’s big moment was a long time coming, with a varied group of cyber law scholars each making a push for an open Internet...[Susan] Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School, has been tackling the broader problem of lack of competition among telecom giants, comparing them to the railroad barons of the late 19th century. In the book she published last fall, Captive Audience, she argued the fight over net neutrality is a symptom of a defective market in which companies have undue influence in deciding regulations. Instead, she is pushing communities to maintain their own fiber networks separate from major Internet providers.

A large share of the presidential primary season debates will not be aired on free over-the-air broadcast networks. Of the 15 primary season debates, all but five will air on cable TV. That pattern has led Susan Crawford, a Harvard University law professor, to question whether there is something terribly wrong here. Crawford published a piece last week in Medium about the cable subscription fees necessary for interested voters to watch the debates in real time. She said it amounts to nothing short of a poll tax.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Earlier this month, on the same night, we saw a sad contrast. The last Daily Show with Jon Stewart aired. But by far the largest noise came from Donald Trump in the most-watched non-sports cable show in history. Yet I remain optimistic. I have faith that the American electorate will tire of the antics of “short-fingered vulgarian” Donald Trump before the primary season begins next year...What’s more, I have faith that Americans will be able to come up with many more interesting killer apps using high-capacity networks than South Koreans have. They may have the networks, but we have the freedom to create and fail.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In the 2007 best-seller “Spook Country,” William Gibson foresaw “the locative”: virtual fantasies layered over the real-world grid, visible to anyone with the right geo-aware gear. In the book, the charismatic Bobby Chombo is the only guy around with the technical chops needed to make the locative work. So when an artist wants to, say, digitally re-create the death of River Phoenix on Sunset Strip, he or she needs Chombo’s help. Cities are real-world grids: you can see that instantly on a Google map. But it’s not so easy to see the city as a civic entity. The stuff that counts — the interaction between people and city services — is hidden in plain view, invisible to almost everyone. That may be about to change. The opportunity: make it possible for cities to show their work and engage with citizens in a meaningful way, using the existing idea of 311. And make everyone who’s interested a Bobby Chombo.

...It would follow that once infrastructure investments decline, Internet prices should go down, but that hasn’t been the case. A study by Harvard scholar Susan Crawford and telecommunications analyst Mitchell Shapiro shows that while companies’ capital expenses have declined, they make more and more profit off of what exists.

As the Internet has upended their business, cable companies have been racing to reinvent themselves as dominant broadband providers and distributors of online video. Charter Communications' $55 billion bid for Time Warner Cable, paired with a $10 billion side offer for Bright House Networks, marks the latest in a wave of deals that promise consumer benefits...Some think differently. Cable companies already have scant competition for supplying Internet service, said Susan Crawford, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. "High-speed Internet access today is a utility" that's essential for education and job searching, Crawford noted. "Yet in American cities, cable is the dominant provider of that private utility and can charge whatever it wants to whoever it wants."

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Mobile wireless — which allows you to make calls while you are driving a car, as signals are handed off from one tower to the next — is an ever-smaller part of the overall wireless marketplace. We don't always need to simultaneously move and communicate. Most of the time, in fact, we're in one place — in a room, at work, at home. And when we are stationary, it's very likely that we are using WiFi. As more tablets, smartphones, and other wireless devices (including sensors monitoring everything around us) are connected to the Internet, the demand will grow for WiFi, in which our information is transported over unlicensed airwaves made possible by wires near us.

When it was announced a little more than a year ago, it felt to many like a sure thing. After all, government regulators had approved Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011...The president may have been speaking about net neutrality, but the implications for the merger were clear. “That was just huge,” said Susan Crawford, a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “It signaled that the cable industry was no longer calling the shots.”

The case for strong government rules to protect an open Internet rests in large part on a perceived market failure — the lack of competition for high-speed Internet service into American homes...The F.C.C.’s approach makes sense, proponents say, because for genuine high-speed Internet service most American households now have only one choice, and most often it is a cable company. “For the moment, cable has won the high-speed Internet market,” said Susan Crawford, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and a former adviser to the Obama administration.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. The news that the head of the Federal Communications Commission just proposed that the agency should use its authority — under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — to oversee high-speed Internet access services should be welcomed by all who use the Internet. But let's be clear about what this is and isn't. He's not proposing to "regulate the Internet" or the websites of businesses that use the Internet to reach customers. This would not constrain what Americans can say online, nor would it constrain the extraordinary innovation that has come about because of the Internet's borderless and permission-free nature.

Clincial Professor Susan Crawford. Susan Crawford has been appointed clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School. She had been the John A. Reilly…

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I want you to remember President Obama as he appeared Wednesday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was loose, lanky, delighted; he was on his game. This was his FDR moment....President Obama’s Wednesday announcement about community fiber was the most American of statements, made in the most American of places. He had a message to deliver about opportunity, choice and freedom, for every American. This is a key moment for this president, for his legacy and for our understanding of ourselves as a country.