Here's What We Know About The FCC's Plan To Roll Back Net Neutrality

Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

Andrew Harrer / Getty Images

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai outlined his plan to roll back net neutrality rules during a speech at the Newseum in Washington, DC today.

The proposal Pai outlined has three parts: First, he plans to reclassify the internet as an information service, as it was classified under President Clinton, rather than a telecommunications service. When the FCC passed net neutrality rules in 2015 and reclassified internet companies as a kind of public utility, like telephone companies, it gave the commission more solid legal footing to impose tighter regulations.

Pai said he also plans to do away with the Internet conduct standard, which he characterized as "a roving mandate to micromanage the Internet." The standard was used to investigate whether or not data cap exemptions (like those T-Mobile and Comcast sometimes offered customers) unfairly favored some content over others.

Pai is also seeking to overturn the "so-called bright lines rules" of neutrality, which prevent ISPs from blocking websites and services, slowing them down, or creating internet "fast lanes" for certain services and content in exchange for a premium.

David Segal, executive director of the internet activism nonprofit Demand Progress, called the announcement "outrageous." "Millions of Americans as well as internet companies, startups, innovators, and nonprofits have supported the order. The order’s main opponents are large ISPs that have made it clear they want to subvert the public interest by manipulating internet traffic to benefit corporate bottom lines," he said in a statement.

Pai, who was nominated to his position as chairman of the FCC by President Trump, was formerly general counsel for Verizon. The argument he and other opponents of net neutrality make is that regulating the internet as though it were a public utility puts a damper on competition, making it harder for small businesses to grow.

In his speech Wednesday, Pai argued that his proposed rules would help increase investment in building networks. "More Americans will go to work building these next generation networks," said Pai. "These are good, paying jobs — laying fiber, connecting equipment to utility poles, and digging trenches."

Pai argued that Google, Facebook and Netflix became some of the "world’s most successful online companies" as a result of the more lenient internet regulation that existed prior to 2015. But earlier this month, representatives from those three companies met with Pai via a trade organization called the Internet Association, and asked him to support net neutrality, which they argued, "preserves the consumer experience, competition, and innovation online."

Pai's proposal isn't likely to pass without a fight. Several other tech companies, including Vimeo and Mozilla, have also spoken out against Pai's proposal. And activist groups like Fight for the Future, which advocates for net neutrality and was part of an effort to get 3.7 million people to file comments on net neutrality with the FCC in 2014, are also gearing up for a fight.

"Pai’s speech was an insult to the intelligence of internet users," said campaign director Evan Greer in an email statement. "He attempts to portray basic free speech protections as heavy handed government regulation."

Pai will formally introduce his Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to the FCC on Thursday; the proposal will be discussed at a committee meeting on May 18th, after which it will be open to public comment. "In other words, this will be the beginning of the discussion, not the end," Pai said during his live-streamed speech on Wednesday.

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We’re In An Artificial Intelligence Hype Cycle

Artificial intelligence mentions in corporate earnings calls are going through the roof.

Bloomberg

The hype around artificial intelligence is skyrocketing. After going nearly-unmentioned in corporate earnings calls four years ago, the promising technology is name-checked far more frequently in such calls today.

Just six companies mentioned AI in their earnings calls in the first quarter of 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. But by the first quarter of 2017, their number had increased to 244. And between the third and fourth quarters of 2016, the number of companies name-checking AI during earnings calls rose to 191 from 107. The data comes from Bloomberg transcript wire and covers hundreds of thousands of public earnings call transcripts.

“The hype and the expectations in some cases are far beyond the technical reality.”

“We’re in a hype cycle,” Oren Etzioni, CEO of the AIlen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, told BuzzFeed News. “The hype and the expectations in some cases are far beyond the technical reality.”

Artificial intelligence is being mentioned on earnings calls by executives at companies with big AI research operations like Facebook and Alphabet. But it’s also rolling off the tongues of executives at companies you might not expect — Starbucks and Mastercard, for example.

AI’s new role in earnings calls is largely aspirational, Etzioni argued, noting that artificial intelligence is not plug and play, and typically requires a good deal of labor to develop and implement. “It’s not like now we have hundreds of companies delivering cutting edge AI applications,” Etzioni said. “It’s more the case that they perceive the potential.”

Etzioni was careful to note that real progress in artificial intelligence field undergirds the current wave of optimism, but cautioned that too much enthusiasm could be problematic. The hype puts the AI field is at risk of another “AI Winter,” a period in which AI scientists’ failure to deliver on outsized expectations causes funding to dry up, along with technological progress. The last such winter occurred in the 1990s.

“[If] AI is currently the flavor of the month, we could swing back to an AI winter where the government and major corporations will decline to invest,” Etzioni said. But he also cautioned against dismissing true AI progress out of hand. “The challenges we’re going to have in the transportation sector of job losses there — that’s not hype,” Etzioni said. “That’s coming soon and we need to address it.”

LINK: Meet The Man Who Makes Facebook’s Machines Think

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Google Is Making It Easier To Translate India's Most Widely Used Languages

Google

Google is making translations between English and major Indian languages much better. On Tuesday, the company announced that it has begun applying its Neural Machine Translation technology to translations between English and nine of the most widely used Indian languages — Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujrati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada.

Google first talked about Neural Machine Translation in November. The technology translates entire sentences at once, rather than translating single words and stringing them together, which, the company says, leads to smoother and more accurate translations.

Supporting Indian languages is crucial for Google. According to the company’s estimates, roughly one-third of India's 1.3 billion people use the internet — more than the population of the United States. However, of these 400 million or so internet users, just 20% are fluent in English. How Google helps these people navigate the English-language internet could well decide the company's future in the country.

As a part of this push, Google is adding support for Indian languages in a few key products. Google’s Chrome browser will now let anyone quickly translate entire web pages in English to any of the nine languages mentioned above. And Google Maps in India will automatically translate restaurant reviews posted in English to any of these languages as long as users' phones are set to those.

Google is also updating the Android version of Gboard, its official keyboard, with translation support for all of India’s 22 official languages — including the ability to search for GIFs and emoji in local languages.

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Now You Can See Your Uber Rating Right In The App

Do you know your Uber passenger rating? Now you can see it right in the app.

Just as Uber passengers get to rate drivers on a scale of one to five stars after a ride, drivers get to rate passengers. And just as passengers have their dislikes, such as a driver with overly strong air freshener or who exceeds the speed limit, drivers do, too — like when passengers eat in the car or puke.

Drivers have always been able to see passenger ratings, and so have passengers, if they knew where to look. But starting today, those ratings will be front and center, right under your name and avatar in the app.

In a blog post, Uber says the update — which rolls out globally Wednesday — is part of an effort to "make [the] rating system fairer."

"Many riders forget that their driver is also rating them," the blog post reads. "We hope this update will remind riders that mutual respect is an important part of our Community Guidelines."

It's true that, with a constant reminder of the rating, riders are liable to be a little more polite. It's also possible that, as they watch their rating rise and fall, they might be a little more thoughtful about the ratings they dole out.

In addition to the rider ratings change, Uber is also introducing a tweak to how ratings work in Uber POOL, Uber's carpool feature that involves multiple passengers sharing a car on a mutually efficient route.

Starting today, if a rider rates a POOL ride anything less than five stars, they'll be prompted to say why — options include "poor route," "too many pickups," "co-rider behavior," "navigation," "driving" and "other." If the rider selects something that was outside of the driver's control, that rating won't be counted. (Riders aren't required to explain themselves, however.)

Uber has been experimenting with changes to its five-star rating system, which some people say is broken, for years, and said the tweaks that rolled out today have been in the works for some time.

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Twitter Wants To Stream Live Video Programming 24/7

Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

Get ready for nonstop live video inside Twitter.

The company, which reports first quarter earnings Wednesday, plans to air live video 24 hours a day, 7 day a week inside its apps and desktop site, building on the 800+ hours it aired in the first three months of 2017, Twitter COO and CFO Anthony Noto told BuzzFeed News. Call it Twitter TV or The Twitter Network, the always-on realization of Twitter’s current live video offering of sports, news and entertainment programming is on its way.

“We will definitely have 24/7 [video] content on Twitter,” Noto said during an extensive interview about the company’s live video strategy last week. “Our goal is to be a dependable place so that when you want to see what’s happening, you think of going to Twitter.”

Twitter's Anthony Noto

Ellian Raffoul

Noto's assertion follows the loss of Twitter's cornerstone NFL deal to Amazon. But despite losing the rights to stream the package of Thursday night games, Twitter is seeing enough benefit from live video to make it a pillar of its growth and revenue strategy. Live video is driving up conversation volume on the platform, Noto said, and it’s helping Twitter offer the type of 15 and 30 second unskippable video ads for which advertisers typically write big checks to TV networks.

Twitter will take some time to reach its 24/7 programming goal, Noto said, without offering a timetable. But he indicated much more programming in the works. “We’re working on many, many things,” Noto said. “There’s a lot in the pipeline.”

The engagement live video is driving on Twitter stems in part from the company’s decision to heavily promote it. Twitter is auto-playing videos inside its desktop site, and airing them live from its relatively-new Explore tab. And the company's decision to do so has resulted in some sizable viewership numbers. Twitter’s NFL package averaged 3.5 million unique viewers and its Oscars pre and post shows brought in a combined 6.4 million. Meanwhile, its live inauguration day coverage from PBS netted some 8.6 million unique viewers. (BuzzFeed partnered with Twitter on an Election Day show which drew about 7.7 million unique viewers.)

Next week, Twitter will pitch advertisers on the value of spending big bucks to reach its audience at its first ever NewFronts event. The company will introduce a handful of new shows in hopes of landing some big upfront ad buys from top tier sponsors. Noto declined to go into detail about what’s coming.

First And Goal

Twitter loudly touted its 2016 NFL deal in press releases and earnings calls last year, so losing it to Amazon the following year wasn’t a great look. But the company has some ideas about other programming that might fill the NFL’s shoes — the Ultimate Fighting Championship. “We have a really big audience when there’s a pay per view UFC match," Noto said. "Should we provide that content to the audience on Twitter that’s not watching it, but might like to after seeing tweets about it? That’s something we’d consider."

Meanwhile, the $10 million Twitter spent on last year’s NFL package should continue working for it even after Amazon airs a similar set of games for $50 million next season. Twitter’s NFL deal helped it plant a flag in the live video marketplace, letting programmers know it was dead serious about live, and demonstrating an infrastructure that could handle millions of viewers tuning in at once.

“It was instrumental [in generating additional interest],” Noto said of the NFL deal, declining comment on the premium Amazon seems to have paid for it. “It’s a really high profile brand and one that has really high expectations for product quality. It caused people to come and see if we could deliver.”

One entity that took notice of Twitter’s NFL deal was 120 Sports — a joint venture between MLB Advanced Media, the National Hockey League, and a handful of other big sports media brands and leagues. 120 Sports began airing a sports highlights show called The Rally exclusively on Twitter in September 2016, and its CEO Jason Coyle said the company's NFL deal played a role in the decision to do so. “We could see that our deal was not going to be a one off,” Coyle told BuzzFeed News. “We didn't want to just throw the show out there exclusively with a partner that wasn’t that serious about growing.”

Shows like The Rally — a cheap to produce, laid back version of ESPN’s Sportscenter — give Twitter the less polished, less expensive programming it needs to fill its airtime. Noto said the company will always look for a combination of ultra-premium content and not-so-ultra-premium-content. So Twitter needs Rally-like programming. Indeed, it’s already airing similarly not-so-ultra-premium shows from financial news network Cheddar and the NBA, which is now programming a sports talk show called The Starters exclusively for Twitter.

From Twitter’s perspective, becoming a source of always-on-in-the-background video in the way that CNBC is in airports would be a great outcome. “We think that is a great way to have the programming carried along with you during your day,” Noto said. “Focus in on it when you hear something that’s of interest, but then maybe not be 100% focused on it when it’s not of interest. I did that myself during the debates.”

That kind of video falls into a category Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners calls “Ambient digital video,” which he believes exploits a gap left by digital video services like Netflix and HBO Now, which are always looking for your full attention. Liew told BuzzFeed News in an email that Twitter may have hit on a potentially big opportunity here. “If Twitter can own this use case, it may be a complement to the Netflix and Amazon use cases,” he said.

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Palantir Cofounder Says Social Justice Warriors Are Responsible for Trump

J Rumans Photography

On Monday night, in the basement of a posh coworking space in downtown San Francisco, about 200 people gathered to hear the umpteenth panel discussion about how Silicon Valley should deal with Donald Trump. This event, however, had something most industry gatherings don't: a conservative bent.

Speakers included libertarian Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir cofounder turned high-profile venture capitalist; Steve Hilton, the CEO of the political startup Crowdpac, who has an upcoming show about populism on Fox; and Sam Altman, who runs Y Combinator’s parent company. The event was hosted by Lincoln Network, a right-of-center San Francisco-based political group whose motto is “where liberty and technology meet,” and whose logo used to be a drawing of Abraham Lincoln wearing pair of Google Glass. (With Glass on life support, now the logo is a drawing of Lincoln sporting noise-cancelling headphones favored by engineers or an Oculus Rift.) Panelists defended billionaire Elon Musk’s decision to join Trump’s business advisory council against the backlash that played out on social media. “This is one of the least healthy things that has happened to our country, really, in the last five or 10 years — is this kind of online mobs of social justice warriors trying to take [you] down if you misspeak,” said Lonsdale.

“— There’s your quote for tomorrow,” said Altman, calling back to a prediction that Lonsdale’s made earlier in the evening: if you “screw up” talking about Trump, your quote shows up in the newspaper. The crowd — which included political consultants who advise tech people, tech people who advise politicians, a representative from the Cato Institute, various associates of billionaire Peter Thiel, and the occasional beer bottle rolling past the folding chairs on the concrete floor — cracked up.

“I can’t help myself, that’s why I shouldn’t do this in public,” Lonsdale said, explaining that groups who use social media to “demonize their foes” helped trigger the rise of Trump. “Ironically,” Lonsdale argued, “the same people who are saying, ‘You’re not allowed to work with [Trump] at all. We’re going to attack you, even if you think you’re trying to help the country,’ They have a responsibility for causing this in the first place.”

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Lonsdale’s media prediction came at the start of the panel, when he claimed that he wasn’t expecting to discuss Trump. “Actually, Sam [Altman] and I were going to do a debate earlier on the future of jobs, and I just had my first kid a few weeks ago and I found out today we’re talking about Trump instead, which is terrifying because it’s slightly less easy to talk about in public. But anyways, this is better because now I can give a quote and be on the front page the next day if we screw up!”

Lonsdale’s comments were hardly a screwup, certainly not with this crowd. Since before the election, prominent members of Silicon Valley’s priesthood have argued for more tolerance and acceptance towards Trump’s supporters (now his collaborators). This argument has persisted even as Trump’s actions in the first 100 days have actively undermined sacrosanct Silicon Valley causes like fighting climate change (Musk’s corporate raison d'etre), and promoting immigration of highly skilled workers.

On the panel, Altman — an independent who dines out on his anti-Trump stance — also insisted that cooperation with Trump was necessary. But the panelists’ hyper-awareness to the media doesn’t always stretch to self-awareness about Silicon Valley’s role in creating polarized public discussion. “I think absolutism is bad in any form and it has gotten us into this current mess we’re in," said Altman. "The Internet has amplified the two-party political system so much and pushed us to the extremes of both parties that they’re both kind of imploding on themselves."

“People can engage in different ways. Some people will run the resistance, some people will run for office, some people will join [Trump’s] advisory board, whatever that is, but I don’t think it’s an acceptable option to say I’m going to completely disengage and do nothing,” Altman argued, building up the image of a plug-your-ears progressive that doesn't accurately describe his critics.

Hilton, who was David Cameron’s BFF until Hilton started backing Brexit, is better known as the husband of Rachel Whetstone, Uber’s very recently departed head of policy and communications, and he had his own caveat about the media.

Through his relationship with Whetstone, “I did see the dynamics of that unfold, for perspective, that’s all I’m saying, so I don’t want a headline about that,” Hilton said.

“Can we get the inside story?” Altman, butted in, asking the question on everyone’s mind.

Perhaps part of their willingness to cooperate stems from the fact that Trump’s policies are pro-business. “If we don’t figure out a way to unrig the system, which is currently in favor of a small number of deeply entrenched interests, then we’re going to continue to have a lack of economic justice and deeply frustrated people and candidates like this,” Altman argued. (In this case, he was talking about San Francisco real estate developers and not Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google, which have recently been under antitrust attack.)

Lonsdale’s latest effort, 8 VC, is a group of financiers and entrepreneurs, who raised more than $300 million to make a positive impact on the world. He told the crowd that he was most bothered by Trump’s immigration policy, which went against Silicon Valley’s culture. “I thought it was a mess and I thought it was bad branding for our country.”

But even there, Lonsdale saw a silver lining in increasing salaries for highly-skilled tech workers, and his own personal communication with the administration about top computer scientists who are unable to get visas to attend a computer science competition. “I sent an email to my friends at the White House at the request of a couple of CEOs a few days away — 'This is ridiculous. This is obviously bad for our country not to allow the people who are being invited here, the top computer scientists, to compete. We should get them visas.' And my friends there agreed and said they’d work on it. So I guess that’s a positive thing I’d say: is there are a lot of practical good people who seem to be winning out in terms of how the White House works."

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The Uber Exec At The Center Of Waymo’s Self-Driving Lawsuit Was Just Dealt A Blow

A self-driving Uber Ford Fusion in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jeff Swensen / Getty Images

The head of Uber's self-driving unit suffered a blow on Tuesday in a legal battle with Waymo over whether he stole its self-driving technology.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday denied Anthony Levandowski’s request to avoid self-incrimination by withholding certain documents from the court’s view. (Levandowski, who is at the center of the lawsuit directed at Uber, had said that producing these documents might infringe on his Fifth Amendment rights.) That means Waymo’s lawyers will be able to see potentially critical information that Levandowski and his legal team have not presented to the court, and then make a case for those documents to be turned over. It’s a critical juncture in the case: Uber says it does not have the files Levandowski allegedly stole, but Waymo says that’s in part because Uber has has not examined Levandowski’s devices.

“The disclosure of this information could put substantially more pressure on Levandowski,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University who is not involved in the case, told BuzzFeed News. “If in fact he is worried about his criminal liability, Waymo getting more critical information might make him feel stressed.”

A spokesperson for Uber said the company did not have a comment. Waymo did not immediately return a request for comment.

The technology at hand is called LiDAR, which stands for “light detection and ranging” systems, which uses lasers to help self-driving cars see and navigate the world. Waymo alleges Levandowski downloaded 14,000 company files before leaving the company to start Otto, a self-driving truck startup that Uber purchased last year.

Waymo has asked a federal judge to halt Uber’s self-driving program to stop the company from using the allegedly stolen technology. Uber disputed that request, saying that its own work is “fundamentally different” from Waymo’s designs.

Judge William Alsup told Uber’s lawyers during a tutorial of LiDAR technology on April 14 that while the ride-hail giant’s self-driving vehicles may use LiDAR systems that are different from Waymo’s designs, it’s possible Uber could have worked on alternate designs that have not yet made it to the prototype stage – designs that perhaps used Waymo information.

“You always talk about the professor, but you never say what he was working on,” Alsup said, according to transcripts of court proceedings viewed by BuzzFeed News. “Well, why did you hire that guy for $680 million if he wasn’t doing anything? So I wonder, what was he working on?”

Uber replied to that question in a court filing on Tuesday. “Mr. Levandowski was not a LiDAR engineer, but contributed some high-level ideas to the concept,” the filing says. Uber described him as a manager who “did a lot of cheerleading on the sidelines” at Otto, and said that after taking the helm of Uber’s self-driving team, Levandowski was “much more focused on management duties. Mr. Levandowski does not provide input on detailed technical LiDAR design choices at Uber.”

Earlier this month, Waymo’s lawyers told a judge that they found evidence that Uber’s lawyers were anticipating litigation with Google if they purchased Levandowski’s startup as early as three days after Levandowski resigned from Waymo.

Uber’s official reply to Waymo’s allegations is due to the court by Friday.

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