It’s about to get worse: President Trump’s F.C.C., under the leadership of its fiercely deregulatory chairman, Ajit Pai, wants to let these companies become even more powerful by letting them do whatever they want and allowing them to merge with one another.
.. pushed Congress to erase rules that would have constrained these companies from using and selling our sensitive online information.
And he is getting ready to wipe out the classification of high-speed data services as a utility — even though, without this legal label, the F.C.C.’s authority to require these five companies to treat their customers fairly will be fatally undermined.
Mr. Pai is responsible for a sector that accounts for a sixth of the American economy. But even that is an understatement: Everything we do, from manufacturing to governance, requires reliable, inexpensive, world-class data transmission.
.. Perhaps the most immediate concern is the commission’s so-called net neutrality rule .. Mr. Pai has put dismantling this structure at the top of his agenda.
.. It’s not just that the existing giants want free rein over their customers. They also want even greater scale and even greater involvement in content as well as distribution
- .. Comcast bought NBCU
- .. AT&T, which already swallowed up DirecTV, wants to buy HBO’s and CNN’s programming through an $85 billion merger with Time Warner.
- .. Verizon already bought AOL, is about to absorb Yahoo
.. Other countries — South Korea, Sweden, even China — have made the widespread adoption of universal, inexpensive, high-speed data transmission a priority.
.. understand that markets, if left to their own devices, won’t deliver this benefit to all citizens.
How the Internet Hurt Actively Managed Mutual Funds
Yet given that the ETF is over 20 years old, and Vanguard is more than 40 years old, the question arises…why just in the past 5-10 years has the explosive growth finally shown up?
To understand why, reflect back on what it was like 20 years ago to evaluate an actively managed mutual fund. The average consumer only knew how they were doing by getting a once-per-quarter statement showing account balances, or by pulling out The Wall Street Journal stock pages to see the prior day’s closing NAVs. While this approach was fine to monitor that the portfolio was growing–which it was, almost continuously, throughout the 1980s and 1990s–it did nothing to tell investors whether the funds were actually good, or whether the rising tide of a booming stock market was lifting all boats together (even the laggards).But with the internet, for the first time, it was possible to look up not just the closing prices of the funds, but to benchmark them, with actual performance data... And the lesson brought about by that transparency: It turned out that a lot of actively managed mutual funds weren’t beating a simple, passive index fund. And it didn’t require complex calculations and reading a 172-page prospectus to figure it out. A straightforward website could easily collect all the performance data automatically, and calculate the results instantly... The coming Department of Labor fiduciary rule in 2017 will likely drive the trend even further, as advisers who hold out as such will actually be held accountable as advisers (at least with respect to retirement accounts). Which means the adviser has to justify that the actively managed fund really is worth the additional management fee over a lower-cost passive index ETF instead.
How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth
In a 2008 book, I argued that the internet would usher in a “post-fact” age. Eight years later, in the death throes of an election that features a candidate who once led the campaign to lie about President Obama’s birth, there is more reason to despair about truth in the online age.
.. Psychologists and other social scientists have repeatedly shown that when confronted with diverse information choices, people rarely act like rational, civic-minded automatons. Instead, we are roiled by preconceptions and biases, and we usually do what feels easiest — we gorge on information that confirms our ideas, and we shun what does not.
.. There is also the looming specter of Photoshop: Now, because any digital image can be doctored, people can freely dismiss any bit of inconvenient documentary evidence as having been somehow altered.
.. But that hasn’t quite happened. Today dozens of news outlets routinely fact-check the candidates and much else online, but the endeavor has proved largely ineffective against a tide of fakery.
.. That’s because the lies have also become institutionalized. There are now entire sites whose only mission is to publish outrageous, completely fake news online (like real news, fake news has become a business). Partisan Facebook pages have gotten into the act; a recent BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time.
.. “In many ways the debunking just reinforced the sense of alienation or outrage that people feel about the topic, and ultimately you’ve done more harm than good,” she said.
Some thoughts on the Krebs situation: Akamai made a painful business call
Several people at DerbyCon pointed to a blog post by Nick Selby, who said that Akamai’s threshold has been identified.
“The substantially much larger precedent it has set has been that Akamai – a company that has bragged that it handles about 30% of the Internet’s traffic every day; delivering more than 30 Terabits per second, and delivering the pipe through which users conduct nearly 3 trillion Internet interactions each day, enabling, it claims, more than $250 billion in annual e-commerce for its online retail customers – Akamai has now announced to the world that if your site is getting attacked at a rate of 620 gigabits per second of traffic, then you’re on your own.”
It’s possible – even likely – that those with a paid contract though Prolexic (Akamai) wouldn’t be pushed aside and ditched. Akamai had to make a hard choice, and that choice sucks. It sucks that they couldn’t protect him and keep his website online. It also sucks to see them essentially throw in the towel.