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The arrival of commercial Internet communications in the mid-1990s posed a threat to both the phone and cable companies; eventually, the FCC deregulated the entire sector, thinking that competition among various modalities of Internet access --cable, phone, wireless, satellite -- would protect Americans. And in 2002, when the five-year period of deregulation began, there was indeed rough parity in speed and price between the cable companies and telephone companies providing Internet access.

Soon, however, cable companies found a way to upgrade their networks to provide connections perhaps 100 times faster than what was possible over copper wires, and at much lower expense than the phone companies incurred replacing their phone lines. Goodbye, Copper The American copper wire telephone system is, in fact, becoming obsolete. The physical switches used in the network are reaching the end of their useful lives. But now that cable has won the battle for wired Internet service and consumers are moving to mobile phones for voice service, the telephone companies are looking to shed the obligation to maintain their networks at all.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is rapidly losing the global race for high-speed connectivity, as fewer than 8 percent of households have fiber service. And almost 30 percent of the country still isn’t connected to the Internet at all.

Google’s AdSense and the Facebook Audience Network allow websites to easily place digital ads on their pages. Instead of going out and selling ads on their own, websites can lean on Google and Facebook to do that legwork for them. The networks act as middlemen, allowing online advertisers to “bid” for space on websites that have signed up.

Google said Monday that it will no longer allow websites access to its ad network if they “misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose.” Pornography or hate-speech websites are already banned from using the AdSense platform.

Facebook, too, tweaked its policies for its Facebook Audience Network, although the company insisted the change was just a clarification. The company’s policy already banned apps and sites with “illegal, misleading, or deceptive” content, a spokesperson said. On Monday, the company updated the document to “explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news.”

Snap’s business model, which depends on TV-style advertising that (so far) offers marketers fewer of the data-targeted options pioneered by web giants like Google, feels refreshingly novel. And perhaps most important, its model for entertainment and journalism values human editing and curation over stories selected by personalization algorithms — and thus represents a departure from the filtered, viral feeds that dominate much of the rest of the online news environment.

Before Snapchat, the industry took for granted that everything users posted to the internet should remain there by default. Saving people’s data — and then constantly re-examining it to create new products and advertising — is the engine that supports behemoths like Google and Facebook.

Snapchat’s “ephemeral” internet — which has since been imitated by lots of other companies, including, most recently, Instagram — did not just usher in a new idea for online privacy. It also altered what had once been considered a sacred law of online interaction: virality.

The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes and the Associated Press, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users. If those articles do not pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will label that evaluation whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story.

Mosseri said the social network still wants to be a place where people with all kinds of opinions can express themselves but has no interest in being the arbiter of what’s true and what's not for its 1 billion users.

The new system will work like this: If a story on Facebook is patently false — saying that a celebrity is dead when they are still alive, for example — then users will see a notice that the story has been disputed or debunked. People who try to share stories that have been found false will also see an alert before they post. Flagged stories will appear lower in the news feed than unflagged stories.

creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks. It happens when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.

The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power.

the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation. It is well situated to be the center of global networks and to nurture the right kinds of networks. Building that America means doing everything possible to thicken connections: finance research to attract scientists; improve infrastructure to ease travel; fix immigration to funnel talent; reform taxes to attract superstars; make study abroad a rite of passage for college students; take advantage of the millions of veterans who have served overseas.

Emancipation should have laid waste to the Southern aristocracy. The economy was built on the forced labor of enslaved Africans, and almost half the Confederacy’s wealth was invested in owning humans. Once people could no longer be treated as chattel, that wealth evaporated.

But less than two decades after the Civil War, Southern slave-owning dynasties were back on top of the economic ladder, according to an ambitious new analysis

by 1880, the sons of slave owners were better off than the sons of nearby Southern whites who started with equal wealth but were not as invested in enslaved people.

Several years ago, Achievement First, a charter school network serving primarily low-income black and Hispanic students, got an unpleasant wake-up call: Its students had done well on tests, but fewer than a third of its high school graduates were earning college degrees on time. That was better than the 14 percent national college completion rate for students from low-income backgrounds, but it was far below the network’s hopes.

Was the schools’ highly structured, disciplined approach to behavior and learning giving students the tools they needed to succeed at the next level?

“There is a real dilemma confronting ‘no excuses’ charter networks as they shift their instructional model to encourage deeper learning,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of the Bank Street College of Education, said in an email. Their focus on discipline, he said, “can undermine the autonomy and student voice so critical to developing independent thinkers.”

Because net neutrality shelters start-ups — which can’t easily pay for fast-line access — from internet giants that can pay, the rules are just about the last bulwark against the complete corporate takeover of much of online life.

When the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look like and feel like something else altogether — a network in which business development deals, rather than innovation, determine what you experience, a network that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix.

The five most valuable American companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — control much of the online infrastructure, from app stores to operating systems to cloud storage to nearly all of the online ad business. A handful of broadband companies — AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, many of which are also aiming to become content companies, because why not — provide virtually all the internet connections to American homes and smartphones.

GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run By Julia Manchester - 02/01/21 09:19 AM EST 863 17,083 AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookFacebookFacebookShare to TwitterTwitterTwitter Share   Just In... Fauci: CDC will release new guidance for vaccinated Americans 'very soon' Healthcare — 2m 39s ago Veteran PAC slams Tucker Carlson for comments on female service members BriefingRoom BlogRoll — 24m 3s ago US officials debating sending millions of AstraZeneca doses awaiting clearance overseas: report Administration — 48m 11s ago Biden denounces hate, violence against Asian Americans: 'It must stop' News — 1h 29m ago Biden administration to implement testing programs in schools as part of reopening effort field

publican strategists aligned with Georgia Gov. Brian KempBrian KempGeorgia Senate votes to repeal no-excuse absentee voting Two Republicans can stop voter suppression Trump fires back at WSJ editorial urging GOP to move on MORE (R) on Monday launched an outside group aimed at stopping a potential 2022 gubernatorial run by Democrat Stacey Abrams.

"We will do whatever it takes to expose Stacey Abrams’ radical network, highlight her dangerous agenda, and ultimately defeat her — and her left-wing candidates — at the ballot box," the group's senior strategist, Jeremy Brand, said in a statement. "There is no time to waste: We must stand up, fight back, and Stop Stacey.”

Amazon is building a wireless network – using your internet bandwidth.It's called Amazon Sidewalk, and the company touts it as a way to help its devices work better, by extending the range of low-bandwidth devices to help them stay online.It does that by pooling neighbors' bandwidth to help connectivity for devices that are out of range.

Here's how it works.Let's say you and your next-door neighbors both have devices that Amazon has added to its Sidewalk scheme, and neither of you have opted out

Your neighbors decide to put a Ring security camera on their garage, but the device is too far from their Wi-Fi router to get a good signal. Perhaps your router is closer, or you pay for better connectivity. Their camera will be able to send small amounts of data using your Internet bandwidth. Amazon says the maximum bandwidth of a device on the Sidewalk server is 80 kilobits per second, or about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high-definition video. The total monthly data used by Sidewalk-enabled devices, per customer, is capped at 500 megabytes, which Amazon says is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high-definition video.

Frustrated with what it sees as a lack of progress, Muslim Advocates on Thursday filed a consumer protection lawsuit against Facebook, Zuckerberg and Sandberg, among other executives, demanding the social network start taking anti-Muslim activity more seriously.

The suit alleges that statements made by the executives about the removal of hateful and violent content have misled people into believing that Facebook is doing more than it actually is to combat anti-Muslim bigotry on the world's largest social network.

The suit cites research from Elon University professor Megan Squire, who found that anti-Muslim bias serves "as a common denominator among hate groups around the world" on Facebook. Squire, in 2018, alerted the company to more than 200 anti-Muslim groups on its platform. According to the suit, half of them remain active.

In at least two experiments over the years, Facebook has explored what happens when it turns off its controversial news feed ranking system — the software that decides for each user which posts they’ll see and in what order, internal documents show. That leaves users to see all the posts from all of their friends in simple, chronological order.

The internal research documents, some previously unreported, help to explain why Facebook seems so wedded to its automated ranking system, known as the news feed algorithm.

previously reported internal documents, which Haugen provided to regulators and media outlets, including The Washington Post, have shown how Facebook crafts its ranking system to keep users hooked, sometimes at the cost of angering or misinforming them.

A decade ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the Maritime Silk Road, the oceanic component of his flagship Belt and Road Initiative aimed at improving China’s access to world markets by investing in transportation infrastructure

China has already secured a significant stake in a network of global ports that are central to world trade and freedom of navigation. Although the stated goal of the investments was commercial, the United States and its allies have grown increasingly concerned about the potential military implications.

Xi has frequently talked of his ambition to turn China into a “maritime superpower.” The port network offers a glimpse into the reach of those ambitions.

The social network remains massive, indispensable for many, and isn’t going away anytime soon. This is not Facebook’s “Myspace moment,” at least not yet.

it’s a harbinger of a shift already well underway in Menlo Park, one in which Facebook is no longer the center of Meta’s attention or the locus of its most important innovations, but a profitable legacy product to be maintained.

When they built Facebook, Zuckerberg and company didn’t just want to build the largest social network. They set out to build something truly ubiquitous, something that everyone would use, something that would become part of the fabric of global society — something that everyone had to use, if only because everyone else was. And they got further than almost anyone could have imagined. Just not all the way.

for African-Americans, the pain continues — over 13 percent of black workers are unemployed, nearly twice the national average. And that’s not a new development: regardless of the economy, job prospects for African-Americans have long been significantly worse than for the country as a whole.

The most obvious explanation for this entrenched disparity is racial discrimination. But in my research I have found a somewhat different culprit: favoritism.

The mechanism that reproduces inequality, in other words, may be inclusion more than exclusion. And while exclusion or discrimination is illegal, inclusion or favoritism is not — meaning it can be more insidious and largely immune to legal challenges.

Facebook scrambled on Monday to respond to a new and startling line of attack: accusations of political bias.

Gizmodo, which said that Facebook’s team in charge of the site’s “trending” list had intentionally suppressed articles from conservative news sources. The social network uses the trending feature to indicate the most popular news articles of the day to users.

The journalist Glenn Greenwald, hardly a conservative ally, weighed in on Twitter: “Aside from fueling right-wing persecution, this is a key reminder of dangers of Silicon Valley controlling content.”

The TV producer in Ailes saw a marketing niche, and the political operative in him saw a direct way of courting voters. Rupert Murdoch owned the network, but Ailes was its intellectual author. In the two decades since, the network has thrived without legitimate competition of any kind. It has proved to be a big tent, sheltering beneath it some excellent reporters but also a collection of blowhards, performance artists, cornballs, and Republican operatives in rehab from political failures and personal embarrassments. With the help of this antic cast, the Fox audience has come to understand something important that it did not know before: The people who make “mainstream” news and entertainment don’t just look down on conservatives and their values—they despise them.

Her understanding of the legal aspects of news stories and her tendency to conduct interviews as hostile cross-examinations (“Stay in bounds!” “I’ve already ceded the point!” “Don’t deflect!”) made her a riveting journalist-entertainer

Almost as soon as the election ended, Fox News went back to work on the mission, emphasizing a variety of themes, each intended to demonize the left. At the top of the list was the regular suggestion that Barack Obama was an America-hating radical, an elaboration of Glenn Beck’s observation (on Fox) that the president had “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Other themes included the idea that straight white men were under ever-present threat from progressive policies and attitudes; that Planned Parenthood was a kind of front operation for baby murder; that political correctness had made the utterance of even the most obvious factual statements dangerous; and that the concerns of black America—including, especially, those of the Black Lives Matter movement—were so illogical, and so emotionally expressed, that they revealed millions of Americans to be beyond the reach of reason.

Sergey Kislyak, Russian Envoy, Cultivated Powerful Network in U.S.

Sergey I. Kislyak, the longtime Russian ambassador to the United States, hosted a dazzling dinner in his three-story, Beaux-Arts mansion four blocks north of the White House to toast Michael A. McFaul just weeks before he took up his post as the American envoy to Russia.

Mr. Kislyak’s networking success has landed him at the center of a sprawling controversy and made him the most prominent, if politically radioactive, ambassador in Washington. Two advisers to President Trump have run into trouble for not being more candid about contacts with Mr. Kislyak: Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser, and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who admitted two previously undisclosed conversations. Mr. Kislyak also met during the transition with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner.

what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing.

Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a “neutral network,” a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform. And though there are crucial partners who are essential to bring the product to market, the cost of proving viability on this platform has dropped dramatically. You don’t even have to possess Zuckerberg’s technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today.

Our circle of actual friends remains stubbornly small, limited not by technology but by human nature. What Facebook has done, though, is provide us a way to maintain those circles in a fractured, dynamic world.

The critical component in social networking is the removal of time as a constraint. In the real world, according to research by myself and others, we devote 40 percent of our limited social time each week to the five most important people we know, who represent just 3 percent of our social world and a trivially small proportion of all the people alive today. Since the time invested in a relationship determines its quality, having more than five best friends is impossible when we interact face to face, one person at a time.

our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited.