Google has received nearly 145,000 requests for information removal since it started accepting requests May 29, after the European Court of Justice’s right to be forgotten ruling (WID May 14 p5), said a transparency report released Friday (http://bit.ly/1snEpBQ). From those requests, Google has considered 497,695 URLs for removal, ultimately removing 41.8 percent of them. Facebook has had the most URLs, 3,332, removed from search results, followed by data crawler ProfileEngine.com, Google’s own YouTube and popular European social network Badoo.
The California Public Utilities Commission will pause its review of Comcast’s proposed purchase of Time Warner Cable “until further ruling,” said Assistant Chief Administrative Law Judge Dorothy Duda Thursday. Duda said she’s suspending the review because of the FCC Oct. 3 decision to temporarily pause its own review of Comcast/TWC (WID Oct 7 p3), which “makes delay in the proceedings here at the CPUC reasonable.” The delay in CPUC review won’t change the Oct. 1 cutoff on new discovery requests, but opening briefs in the case are no longer due Oct. 20, Duda said. Administrative Law Judge Jean Vieth plans a hearing Thursday at the CPUC’s San Francisco courtroom to determine further action in the case. The hearing is to begin at 10 a.m. The Office of Ratepayer Advocates will need to demonstrate at the hearing why it’s seeking additional data in its discovery requests and its relevance to the scope of the review CPUC is undertaking, Duda said. Industry observers have said CPUC is likely to conduct a thorough review of the deal (WID Aug 18 p2).
Net neutrality advocates lauded President Barack Obama for his remarks Thursday during an innovation town hall meeting in Los Angeles. “I was opposed to it when I ran,” Obama said of paid prioritization deals. “I continue to be opposed to it now.” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler “knows my position” but Obama “can’t just call him up and tell him exactly what to do,” Obama said, noting that the FCC’s an independent agency. “But what I've been clear about, what the White House has been clear about is, is that we expect whatever final rules to emerge to make sure that we're not creating two or three or four tiers of Internet.” Obama said he’s “unequivocally committed” to net neutrality and “we don’t want to lose that or clog up the pipes” of the Internet. Free Press President Craig Aaron issued a statement arguing that Wheeler has “lost political support” from Obama for his net neutrality proposal, which Free Press and some others believe would not ban the prioritization deals Obama mentions opposing. Aaron called for Title II reclassification of broadband. Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said “anything short” of reclassification is now “a betrayal of Internet users, of free speech and democracy, and a violation of the President’s expressed wishes.” Internet Association President Michael Beckerman lauded Obama for his support for “enforceable net neutrality rules” that keep consumers free from Internet slow lanes. That group’s members include AOL, Facebook, Google, Netflix and Yahoo.
The roundtable of technology executives discussing surveillance last week (WID Oct 9 p14) made “loud and clear” calls for action on surveillance overhaul, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in a statement Friday. “When the Senate returns next month, it must swiftly take up and pass the USA FREEDOM Act. There is no excuse for inaction, as the important reforms in this bipartisan bill are strongly supported by the technology industry, the privacy and civil liberties community, and national security professionals in the intelligence community.” Leahy has called repeatedly for Senate action since introducing his modified version of the USA Freedom Act (S-2685) earlier this year, which is different from a version the House passed.
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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., hammered home the need for the Senate to pass the USA Freedom Act surveillance overhaul this year. “The House acted earlier this year to end the bulk collection of data by the government and provide American tech companies new ways to report data concerning government requests for customer information,” he said in a statement Thursday. “When the Senate returns in November, it must pass the USA Freedom Act in order to protect Americans’ civil liberties and to ensure that American tech companies can begin to rebuild trust with their customers and flourish in the global economy."
The government’s “broad regulatory approach” to health information technology (IT) is creating confusion about which regulations apply to various technologies, said Software and Information Industry Association Senior Director-Public Policy David LeDuc in a Thursday blog post (http://bit.ly/1pVYPMu). “There is significant confusion in the market about what technologies may be regulated, by which agencies, and to what standards,” LeDuc said. “This uncertainty is standing in the way of myriad promising technologies.” Earlier this week, a broad array of healthcare tech companies sent a letter to members of Congress (http://bit.ly/1neEgz5), urging Congress to take action following the Food and Drug Administration’s release of a risk-based framework for regulating health IT devices (WID April 4 p1). That framework was a start, but Congress needs to make categories and definitions more concrete through legislation, the organizations said in the letter. “It is now time for lawmakers to pass legislation that achieves the complementary goals of protecting patients, ensuring safe and effective care and fostering continued innovation in the rapidly-growing health IT field,” the letter said.
Two House Democrats pressed the FCC on net neutrality. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., sent FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler a letter Wednesday, as expected (WID Sept 12 p9), calling for a mix of Communications Act Section 706 and Title II authority in crafting strong net neutrality rules. “Of the proposals put forward, there is only one that currently meets the criteria of clear, unambiguous authority, strong rules, and measured restraint that has been demanded by the public,” Lofgren said in the letter, released Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/1si1buR). The FCC should “reclassify broadband Internet access as a title II service, and use a combination of its rulemaking and forbearance authority under section 706 to implement its Open Internet rules,” she said. Lofgren recognized a concern that Title II forbearance could be considered arbitrary and capricious and thus the forbearance could be nixed, urging use of the affirmative authority of Section 706 to back the rules. She told the FCC to look at “a new title II service independent from the telecommunications infrastructure used for its transmission,” saying such a split has precedence. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairman, also pushed for Title II reclassification. “Classifying broadband Internet as a common carrier would preserve net neutrality and ensure that the Internet remains a place where all Americans can bring their ideas and be heard,” Ellison said in a Wednesday op-ed for The Huffington Post (http://huff.to/1neo5C2), saying reclassification “would promote social justice and economic equality.” Ellison framed the benefits of net neutrality in terms of people of color, invoking recent racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and the role the Internet played. “Communities of color -- long underrepresented in public dialogue -- would be among those hardest hit by such censorship,” Ellison said of the concept of Internet fast and slow lanes.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched a digital privacy advocacy website Thursday, said IFightSurveillance.org, the digital rights advocate, in a news release (http://bit.ly/1yQPGhJ). EFF said the site will feature digital privacy advocates worldwide and offer a list of steps to challenge and fight “state and corporate spying.” EFF founded the site to show surveillance overreach is a worldwide issue, said EFF International Director Danny O'Brien. “Too often, the debate over surveillance is seen as a ‘domestic’ issue, only of concern to citizens of the country doing the spying,” O'Brien said. “The truth is that mass surveillance isn’t confined to national borders, and neither is the response to it.”
The European Commission freed two markets in the telecom industry from regulation. The retail market for access to fixed telephony and the wholesale market for fixed call origination were deregulated due to a decrease in volume of fixed calls as customers have turned to alternative solutions and providers, said the EU Thursday in a news release (http://bit.ly/1yb0kyv). Customers who still use fixed telephony “are now able to purchase fixed access from a number of different platforms,” like fiber or cable networks, it said. The EC also redefined two broadband markets “to limit regulatory burdens to what is strictly necessary for competitive broadband access and investment,” it said. The new rules recognize that “virtual access products” can be considered substitutes to physical unbundling when they fulfill certain characteristics, it said.