Susan Crawford

...One activist, Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, wrote this month that sponsored data is “pernicious; it’s dangerous; it’s malignant.” And, she argued, it ought to be outlawed. At least one nation, Chile, has done just that. Crawford fears that if Facebook, for instance, pays for your data whenever you’re logged onto it, you may end up spending most of your wireless online time on Facebook. Soon all the big boys — Google, Twitter, Pinterest — will do the same. Next thing you know, any Internet service hoping to build a mobile audience must buy a sponsorship. Companies that can’t pay are frozen out.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Last week, City Controller Scott Stringer and the five borough presidents called upon Mayor de Blasio to substantially revise his plans to transform payphones across the city into wireless hotspots — with their criticism rooted in the notion that the LinkNYC system is somehow unfair to low-income New Yorkers. This is a deeply misinformed attack on a visionary plan — an attack that, if successful, could widen, not shrink, the digital divide over the long term.

An op-ed by Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford. According to a recent Harris poll, Americans ages 18 to 44 believe that five years from now most interactions with cashiers, cab drivers, and waiters will be handled by online apps. They think there will be “big data” health services that provide real-time medical monitoring and alert their doctors when they’re in danger. And they’re confident they will be asking for help from companies who can send them needed products before they have to order them. This streamlined future will happen on the streets of America’s cities, where more than 80 percent of us live. Municipalities are just starting to use data to improve urban conditions.

In his pronouncement on the open Internet Monday, President Obama called for the most stringent option among rules being contemplated – treating Internet providers like public utilities such as electricity companies and subjecting them to tight regulations....It would have the most solid legal grounds to ban "paid prioritization" deals, ones in which ISPs get payments to offer "fast-lane" Internet connections to deep-pocketed content providers that can afford them while others get to deal with slower speeds. "They have to be standing on legal authority," says Susan Crawford, a visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I keep saying that telecom policy is blood and guts stuff — giant principles of equity, speech, and the importance of free markets run headlong into the extraordinary political powers wielded by Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T. All too often the drama is buried in an avalanche of acronyms and incremental influence. Then came yesterday’s message from President Obama. Here was our best Obama, telling the FCC in plain language that it should consider acting like a regulator. The message actually brought a tear to my eye. It’s the equivalent of the moving part of the war movie when the gruff but effective leader calls his troops to their better selves, reminding them why they’re there in the first place. So although the president sounded like the law-professor-in-chief yesterday (“I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act”), to me it was a General Patton moment. This is a battle cry designed to give heart to his administration — and particularly the corner of the executive branch crouching in terror behind the walls of the FCC.

Because Sen. Ted Cruz loves political journalists and wants them to be happy and get traffic, he responded to President Obama's big net neutrality announcement by tweeting that network neutrality is like Obamacare for the internet...But if Obamacare for the internet isn't a particularly meaningful concept, a public option for the internet is. Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at the Harvard Law School, explained the idea to me in an interview.

Harvard Law School visiting Professor Susan Crawford spoke with Morning Edition host Bob Seay about Net Neutrality saying the momentum behind the issue and President Obama's recent support demonstrates the need to give oversight to the Internet. Crawford says, "Net Neutrality isn't about the roads of the Super information Highway or the Internet, it's about the cars."

An article by Susan Crawford. Devan Dewey, the Chief Technology Officer of midsize investment consultancy NEPC, has an orderly office and a highly organized mind. So naturally, when some at-home employees near Boston complained they could barely work because their connections to the company data center had slowed to a crawl, Dewey and his team determined to find out why. His team’s research led him to suspect something astonishing and dark: that NEPC, and probably many other businesses and consumers, were caught in the crossfire of an ongoing battle between “eyeball networks” run by Internet access providers, such as Comcast and Verizon; and “transit networks” used by competing video services, such as Netflix. He came to wonder whether, in their attempts to charge Netflix for access to their subscribers, Comcast and some other networks were recklessly affecting Internet connectivity for businesses like NEPC. Could that possibly be true? The answer is yes.

America’s slow and expensive Internet is more than just an annoyance for people trying to watch “Happy Gilmore” on Netflix. Largely a consequence of monopoly providers, the sluggish service could have long-term economic consequences for American competitiveness....The big Internet providers have little reason to upgrade their entire networks to fiber because there has so far been little pressure from competitors or regulators to do so, said Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and author of “Captive Audience: Telecom Monopolies in the New Gilded Age.”

...The proposed takeover is being studied by regulators, who are expected to decide whether to approve it by early next year. If the deal goes ahead, it will create the world’s biggest provider of broadband and cable television services, reshaping the media landscape in the process. The prospect of an enlarged Comcast – which will leapfrog Walt Disney as the world’s largest media company – has sparked anxiety among content companies...“If it is permitted to merge with TWC, for two-thirds of American households the only choice for high-capacity internet will be Comcast,” says Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and the author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. She equates Comcast’s power in high-speed internet provision with the great monopolies of the past, such as the railroad barons of the late 19th century.

Rarely is the term “city hall” considered synonymous with the words “innovation” or “efficiency.” Too often, the public image of municipal government is of a static bureaucracy staffed with disinterested clock-watchers focused on petty tasks and arcane processes. But two Harvard authorities on government and technology say it doesn’t have to be that way. In their new book, “The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance,” Stephen Goldsmith, the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), and Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at Harvard Law School (HLS), offer a road map for managers who want to move beyond the traditional silos of urban government.

Former mayor Thomas Menino hasn’t wasted much time since he left office in January...What kind of books do you like?...I also like to read books about cities. There’s a new book I picked up,“The Responsive City” by Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford about art and technology and cities. I’m proud to say the first chapter is about Boston.

In 2011, after nine years and a $2-billion investment, New York City’s revamped 911 system still had a major problem: trouble in tracking emergency responses, especially when multiple calls came in about the same incident, or one call involved multiple incidents. This made it nearly impossible for officials to tease out why some city residents waited longer for aid—a matter, potentially, of life and death...These are the kinds of challenges that former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith, Paul professor of the practice of government at Harvard Kennedy School, and Susan Crawford, Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School (and co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society), tackle in their new book, The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance (Wiley). They argue for the transformative power of analytics in city governments, so that—once innovators cut through the red tape—simple changes can connect elected officials and city employees to each other and to the citizens they serve.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Jean Tirole's Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is being celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic by academics and economists. But there is no joy in the power circles of U.S. telecommunications policy. More than a decade ago, federal policy makers turned their backs on Tirole's sensible assessments of private communications utilities -- and with disastrous results. Tirole's insight was that any company controlling physical lines into homes and businesses, left to its own devices, would act as a natural monopoly, extracting tribute from every other business and customer that depends on communications capacity. To constrain that power, regulators might need to separate wholesale and retail communications-access services, and require interconnection with other networks.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Three years ago, cable titan John Malone -- chairman of Liberty Global, the largest cable company in the world -- said that when it comes to high-capacity data connections in the U.S., "cable’s pretty much a monopoly now." Last month, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler proved Malone's point: For high-capacity wired data connections to the Internet, Wheeler said that more than 80 percent of Americans have just one choice -- their local cable company. The cable companies long ago divided the country among themselves, and it's about to get worse. A proposed $45 billion merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable would strengthen the industry's near-monopolistic power. If the merger goes through, the chances of fiber competition emerging to challenge cable's dominance become even lower than they already are.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Democratic Governor Mike Beebe of Arkansas is one of the most popular state-level officials in the country, but even he is having a tough time fixing an Arkansas state law that lets telecommunications companies charge K-12 schools sky-high prices to connect their students to the Internet.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In the tiny town of Jun, Spain, (population: 3,000) meeting rooms in city hall have their own Twitter accounts. When residents want to reserve them, they send a direct message via Twitter; when it's time, the door to the room unlocks automatically in response to a tweet. Jun's mayor, Jose Antonio Rodriguez, says he coordinates with other public servants via Twitter. Residents routinely tweet about public services, and city hall answers. Every police officer in Jun has a Twitter handle displayed on his uniform. Now the New York Police Department, the largest in the U.S., is starting a broad social media initiative to get every precinct talking and listening online via Twitter, to both serve citizens and manage police personnel. The question is whether the kind of positive, highly local responsiveness the residents of Jun expect is possible across all parts of local government -- not just from the police -- in a big city. If it works, the benefits to the public from this kind of engagement could be enormous.

It started with the iPod. In 2001, Apple promised to do away with stacks of CDs and put 1,000 songs in your pocket. Thirteen years later, the music industry is unrecognizable: most brick-and-mortar record stores have shuttered and a pocket-sized hard drive filled with music seems quaint in a world with YouTube and Spotify. ...Susan Crawford, an Internet policy expert and visiting professor at Harvard Law School, sees the payment system as a way of locking in increased loyalty for already-adoring Apple fans. If Apple can leverage its customers' preexisting trust to help consumers jump over their privacy concerns associated with e-payments, she says, the company may have made one more reason for users to keep their iPhones clutched tightly in their hand at all times. "Really this is all about affection for these devices, which are literally very close to people's hearts," Crawford says.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford: Amazon.com Inc.'s announcement last week that it would pay $970 million in cash to buy Twitch Interactive Inc., a hugely popular game-streaming service that is just over three years old, marks a key moment for telecommunications policy in the U.S. But the reason might be unexpected. E-games substituting for "real" sports is not news: There is nothing more human than the desire to be close to the lives of gladiators and other celebrities, and online interaction will fulfill that need at an enormous scale. What is crucial is that the destiny of Twitch, Netflix Inc. and any other future high-capacity streaming service -- think telemedicine, education and civic engagement -- is utterly dependent on the goodwill of just four companies: Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc.

Experts say the limited number of Internet service providers—and unimpressive bandwidth speeds—available to many Americans is a major issue. “This outage sheds light on one of the most significant challenges facing the United States: our lack of a plan for world-class, stable, resilient communications capacity,” Susan Crawford, a professor at Cardozo Law School, visiting professor at Harvard Law School