Jimm Phillips

Restrictions on Internet freedom continue to grow -- and the threats against it are shifting, said human rights group Freedom House’s 2012 report on worldwide Internet freedom. The report said Estonia had the most Internet freedom in the past year, followed by the U.S. and Germany. Iran was found to have the least online freedom, followed by Cuba, China and Syria. The report, released Monday, assessed events and shifts in the Internet freedom situation in 47 countries between January 2011 and May 2012. Researchers evaluated the situation in each country and assigned a numerical score, with 100 being the worst possible score. Estonia scored 10, while Iran scored 90; the U.S. scored 12, according to Freedom House (http://xrl.us/bnq8xh).The more repressive governments on the list continue to use traditional censorship methods like filtering and blocking content, but they are now supplementing those with “nuanced” tactics, Sanja Kelly, the report’s lead author, said at a Freedom House event Monday. Governments are increasingly engaging in proactive manipulation of online content, including hiring pro-government bloggers to attack anti-government bloggers’ credibility and paying people to bombard anti-government blogs with false information, she said. That tactic had previously only been found in Russia and China, but has now spread into countries like Iran and Belarus, said Freedom House. The report said 19 of the 47 assessed countries had passed new laws impacting Internet freedom since January 2011. Those have included a new law in Malaysia that holds intermediaries like ISPs responsible for “seditious” comments users post online, Kelly said. “As a consequence, in some of the environments we've seen some of the intermediaries almost voluntarily taking down the content they fear will get them into trouble."

The Democrats and Republicans agree on most fundamental aspects of Internet policy, industry policy experts said Thursday night at an Internet Society event hosted by Google’s Washington office. That lack of fundamental disagreement has mostly kept Internet issues on the backburner over the course of the parties’ 2012 campaigns for president and Congress, even though Internet issues continue to infiltrate other areas of national policy, they said. The Internet Society had intended to bring in surrogates from the campaigns of President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, but eventually decided to bring in former members of the Obama and George W. Bush administrations to articulate their parties’ positions, said Georgetown University professor and panel moderator Michael Nelson. None of the panelists were speaking on behalf of the Obama or Romney campaigns, he said.

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission (CITEL) agreed with the U.S. earlier this month on many core components of how the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) should be revised at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications, Terry Kramer, head of the U.S.’s WCIT delegation, said Friday. CITEL met in San Salvador, El Salvador, to determine its position ahead of WCIT, which begins Dec. 3 in Dubai. The U.S. delegation has been meeting with regional groups like CITEL and other ITU member nations to get them to adopt the U.S.’s position on the ITRs, which it outlined in formal documents filed with WCIT in early August (CD Aug 6 p2). The U.S. is likely to file an updated set of documents on its position in mid-November, Kramer said.

Verizon Wireless has enough spectrum to meet its needs for four or five years, Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said Thursday at a Goldman Sachs investor conference. The carrier received FCC approval in late August for its purchase of 122 AWS licenses from SpectrumCo and an additional 30 from Cox Communications (CD Aug 24 p1). “This was an absolute strategic acquisition for us,” he said. Verizon Wireless expects to complete its deployment of LTE in its current 3G coverage footprint by the middle of next year via its 700 MHz spectrum. Once that happens, the carrier could start using its newly acquired AWS spectrum for LTE coverage, Shammo said.

Mobile phone technology can help developing communities improve access to healthcare information and improve education, said Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations during a Time magazine event Wednesday. There’s “enormous” potential for mobile to improve and increase global health, she said.

Comcast’s Xfinity Wireless Gateway is the U.S.’s fastest in-home Wi-Fi router, the company said Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bnqbkh). Comcast cited the results of speed tests by Allion Test Labs that found the Xfinity Wireless Gateway, manufactured by Technicolor, could deliver about 155 Mbps through Wi-Fi. Allion also measured speeds for AT&T and Verizon devices. They found two of Verizon’s wireless routers, made by Actiontec, could deliver about 84 Mbps. An AT&T router made by 2-Wire achieved 22 Mbps, Allion said in its results report (http://xrl.us/bnqbkq). It’s not typical for broadband speeds to be measured over Wi-Fi, Verizon spokesman Bob Elek said, saying the FCC has measured broadband speeds via hardwire connections for its “Measuring Broadband America” reports. The most recent report, released in July, found Verizon’s FiOS service was one of the top two Internet service providers in terms of ability to deliver above advertised speeds; it and Cablevision each achieved an average of 120 percent of advertised speeds. Comcast also did well, achieving an average of 103 percent of advertised speeds, according to the report (http://xrl.us/bnhgkk). Wireless routers, by their very nature, will diminish the connection’s speed capacity, Elek said. “There are a lot of different things that can impact the connection,” he said, including the distance from a router and the number of devices sharing the connection. Verizon’s own findings on the average speed of its FiOS connection over Wi-Fi fall in line with the Allion speed test -- Verizon finds FiOS has an average speed of 85 Mbps over Wi-Fi compared to up to 300 Mbps over hardwire, Elek said. “What we're seeing is that satisfies a majority of our customers,” he said. Verizon recently introduced a new GigE Wireless N router for FiOS customers that can achieve up to 130 Mbps, Elek said.

Common misconceptions and “paranoia” on how the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications could affect the scope of Internet governance and censorship have distracted from important telecom issues that delegates to the WCIT will deal with when it meets in December, ITU officials said Monday. They called a news conference in Geneva with accompanying videoconference to “dispel the myths” about WCIT and proposed revisions to the treaty-level International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs).

House Intelligence Committee members said they remain skeptical and frustrated about the response from Chinese telecom firms Huawei and ZTE to their investigation into whether the companies posed a security threat to the U.S. The committee has been investigating whether the Chinese government is using the companies as agents to commit espionage and threaten critical U.S. infrastructure (CD Nov 18 p5). The committee called in executives from both companies Thursday -- Charles Ding, Huawei’s senior vice president, and Zhu Jinyun, ZTE’s senior vice president for North America and Europe -- to answer questions under oath they think the companies haven’t properly responded to during the investigation.

Opponents of the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association’s (ETNO) proposed revisions to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) have misinterpreted the proposal as an attempt to regulate the Internet, said ETNO Chairman Luigi Gambardella in an interview. The U.S. has been one of the most prominent critics of the ETNO proposal in recent months, particularly since it publicly released its own ITR position ahead of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). Delegates to the conference, beginning in Dubai Dec. 3, will seek a consensus on revisions to the treaty-level ITR. Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. delegation to WCIT, has publicly criticized the ETNO proposal and other nations’ proposals that the U.S. claims could wrest control of the Internet from current stakeholders like the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers and give it to the United Nations’ ITU (CD Aug 2 p1). The U.S.’s initial WCIT filing also reflected that position (CD Aug 6 p2).

A Chinese delegation to a joint U.S.-China roundtable discussion on spectrum issues Wednesday claimed China is not dealing with the same spectrum capacity issues as the U.S. That’s because China has not “felt our pain yet,” Cisco’s Government Affairs Director Mary Brown said Thursday during a recap of the event for the Telecommunications Industry Association, which also organized the roundtable. “Here in the U.S. ... we are gobbling up spectrum at a rapid rate,” Brown said on the webcast recap event (http://xrl.us/bnooib). “They're a little bit behind the curve,” Brown said of China. “Their technologies tend to be more purely 3G technologies; they have not started deploying LTE technologies. So they're not yet feeling the pain that we feel or our colleagues in Europe feel when it comes to spectrum."