The White House is launching an effort today to ease the global semiconductor supply crunch affecting a wide array of other industries, but any boost the administration can provide is likely to be on the far side of many more months of shortages.

President Joe Biden plans to sign an executive order this afternoon aimed at “securing America’s critical supply chains.” The order will address several challenges in the US supply chain, according to a fact sheet from the White House, with a particular focus on pharmaceuticals, mineral resources, semiconductors, and large-capacity batteries.

The order is a sort of combination of every US politicians’ favorite rallying cry—”more American jobs”—and an acknowledgement that shortages and production challenges in critical supply chains really have had a profound effect on the nation, especially in the past year. It calls for an immediate 100-day review that will “identify near-term steps the administration can take, including with Congress” to identify where the vulnerabilities in these supply chains are and what regulators or legislators can do to increase US manufacturing of these critical components.

In addition to the short-term review, the order also calls for a yearlong examination of risks and vulnerabilities in six other US technology supply chains: defense, public health, information technology and communications, energy, transportation, and agricultural tech.

While the order is framed in practical terms, there is of course a political component as well. According to a draft version CNBC obtained last week, the executive order does not mention any other nations (such as China) by name. Instead, it specifically seeks to review places where the US supply chain interacts with “nations that are or are likely to become unfriendly or unstable.”

Silicon woes

The silicon chip shortage is indeed tied to the pandemic, according to industry group research. Automotive demand dropped early in the pandemic, as people stopped going anywhere, but demand for other uses—such as devices used for virtual learning or telemedicine—went up. As every demand pattern around the world went topsy-turvy, the industry has struggled to keep up.

The shortages are beginning to affect all kinds of products. PC graphics cards are legendarily in short supply, and wafer shortages are a contributing factor. Companies are also expressing concern that shortages will affect the availability of gaming consoles and smartphones in the near future.

In both the US and worldwide, the auto industry is hit particularly hard at the moment. Several automakers have had to slow or halt production at their factories due to a lack of chips to put into new cars.

The Biden administration hopes to help increase supply in the long run in part by increasing US manufacturing capacity. “Over the years, we have underinvested in [semiconductor] production—hurting our innovative edge—while other countries have learned from our example and increased their investments in the industry,” the White House said. “Building resilient supply chains will protect the United States from facing shortages of critical products. It will also facilitate needed investments to maintain America’s competitive edge and strengthen US national security.”

Industry data backs up Biden’s point, showing that while the US has the highest percentage of market share for chips—a little under half of all sales, globally, go to US-based firms—the vast majority of actual manufacturing takes place in Asia and is expected to continue to do so. About 79 percent of chips were made in Asia in 2019, according to a Semiconductor Industry Association report (PDF); by 2025, that number is projected to rise to about 82 percent. Only 10-12 percent of chip manufacturing takes place inside the US.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1744805

Ukraine has accused the Russian government of hacking into one of its government Web portals and planting malicious documents that would install malware on end users’ computers.

“The purpose of the attack was the mass contamination of information resources of public authorities, as this system is used for the circulation of documents in most public authorities,” officials from Ukraine’s National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity said in a statement published on Wednesday. “The malicious documents contained a macro that secretly downloaded a program to remotely control a computer when opening the files.”

Wednesday’s statement said that the methods used in the attack connected the hackers to the Russian Federation. Ukraine didn’t say if the attack succeeded in infecting any authorities’ computers.
A large body of evidence has linked Russia’s government to several highly aggressive hacks against Ukraine in the past. The hacks include:

• A computer intrusion in late 2015 against regional power authorities in Ukraine caused a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity in the dead of winter.
• Almost exactly one year later, a second attack at an electricity substation outside Kyiv that once again left residents without power.
• A malicious update for widely used tax software in Ukraine that distributed disk-wiping malware to users. The so-called NotPetya worm ended up shutting down computers worldwide and led to the world’s most costly hack.

Elsewhere, Russia’s SVR intelligence agency has also been accused of carrying out the recently discovered hack that targeted at least nine US agencies and 100 companies in a supply chain attack against customers of the SolarWinds network management software.

Wednesday’s statement didn’t identify which of several known Russian hacking groups was accused of the breach.

Macro attacks like the one mentioned in the statement typically work by tricking Microsoft Office users into enabling macros, often under the guise that the macro is required for the document to display properly. The macros then download malware from an attacker-controlled server and install it.

The statement provided no details on how or when Ukraine’s System of Electronic Interaction of Executive Bodies—a portal that distributes documents to public authorities—was hacked or how long the intrusion lasted.

Indicators that someone has been compromised include:

Domain: enterox.ru

IP addresses: 109.68.212.97

Link (URL): http://109.68.212.97/infant.php

Wednesday’s statement came two days after Ukraine’s National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity reported what it said were “massive DDoS attacks on the Ukrainian segment of the Internet, mainly on the websites of the security and defense sector.” An analysis revealed that the attacks used a new mechanism that hadn’t been seen before. DDoS attacks take down targeted servers by bombarding them with more data than they can process.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1744891

Facebook has apparently emerged victorious from its standoff with the entire nation of Australia, as lawmakers in that country have agreed to amend a proposed law that would have required Facebook to pay publishers for news content linked on its platform.

The social networking giant last week banned all news posts both in and from Australia to protest a bill under discussion in Parliament. Users inside Australia became unable to share news links of any kind from any source, and users outside Australia became unable to share links from Australian media. Facebook at the time argued that the proposed law “fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content.”

Facebook’s ban turned out to be an extremely blunt instrument, blocking sharing not only of news inside Australia but also of public communications from the government, pages for nonprofit organizations and charities, and other Australian organizations that tried to share links to off-Facebook sites. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison blasted Facebook over the ban, saying last week, “We will not be intimidated by BigTech seeking to pressure our Parliament as it votes on our important News Media Bargaining Code.”

The government, however, appears to have blinked first, and the Morrison administration is now offering several amendments to the bill, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said this week.

What’s changing?

As originally drafted, the bill would require “digital platform corporations” to negotiate in good faith with news outlets (“registered news business corporations”) to link to their content. If the outlets and the platforms can’t reach a deal on their own, they would immediately have to take the dispute into baseball-style arbitration, where a neutral third-party arbitrator looks at both offers on the table and decides which is the better one.

The definition of “digital platform corporations” in the bill is crafted such that it would at first apply to only two companies—Google and Facebook, both of which vehemently oppose the proposed law. The new amendments tweak some provisions of the bills to give platforms a little more breathing room—and basically give both firms a way to buy their way out of the regulation.

Google in January also threatened to leave Australia entirely over the bill, but this month it began reaching deals with Australian media instead. The amended bill would explicitly take those kinds of deals into consideration: “A decision to designate a platform under the Code must take into account whether a digital platform has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of the Australian news industry through reaching commercial agreements with news media businesses.”

Facebook has already reached one such deal with Australian news firm Seven West Media, the companies said Tuesday.

The amendments would also extend the notice period from the government to a corporation before it becomes designated under the law and would create a mediation/negotiation window for publishers and platforms to hash out their own payment schemes before going to arbitration.

The amendments “add further impetus for parties to engage in commercial negotiations outside the Code—a central feature of the framework that the Government is putting in place to foster more sustainable public interest journalism in Australia,” Frydenberg said.

Full Facebook service is not yet restored in Australia as of publication time but will be “in the coming days,” company executive Campbell Brown said. “It’s always been our intention to support journalism in Australia and around the world,” Brown added. “We’ll continue to invest in news globally and resist efforts by media conglomerates to advance regulatory frameworks that do not take account of the true value exchange between publishers and platforms like Facebook.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1744438

Back in 2017, we reported on the bizarre story of the Long Island Iced Tea Company rebranding itself as the Long Blockchain Corp. This happened at the peak of the last big blockchain boom, with bitcoin’s price approaching $20,000 and dubious initial coin offerings raising millions of dollars. The name change led to an immediate tripling of the company’s stock.

Beyond the name change, the Long Blockchain Corp’s blockchain strategy was vague. The company said it was “shifting its primary corporate focus toward the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology.”

The company initially planned to buy bitcoin mining equipment, but those plans were scrapped within weeks. The NASDAQ stock exchange soon got fed up and booted the company, forcing investors to trade the stock over the counter.

Now the Securities and Exchange Commission has revoked Long Blockchain’s stock registration, effectively banning the general public from trading its shares altogether. The SEC says that the company’s “blockchain business never became operational” and that the company hasn’t reported on its financials since 2018.

At the time of its 2017 announcement, Long Blockchain said it wasn’t getting out of the iced tea business—that business would continue operating as a subsidiary. Indeed, the iced tea part of the business still appears to be working fine, so maybe the company can pivot back to its tea business and pretend that whole blockchain thing never happened.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1744519

AT&T and Frontier have let their copper phone networks deteriorate through neglect since 2010, resulting in poor service quality and many lengthy outages, a report commissioned by the California state government found. Customers in low-income areas and areas without substantial competition have fared the worst, the report found. AT&T in particular was found to have neglected low-income communities and to have imposed severe price increases adding up to 152.6 percent over a decade.

The report was written in April 2019 but kept private because data submitted by the carriers was deemed confidential and proprietary. The report finally became public after the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) ruled in December 2020 that a redacted version had to be released by mid-January.

A summary of the CPUC-commissioned report identified six key findings:

1. Service Quality has deteriorated: Both carriers exhibited a higher relative number of outages and longer time required to restore service for outages lasting more than 24 hours.
2. Demonstrated lack of resiliency: AT&T and Frontier are not maintaining networks to withstand environmental and weather-related conditions. Networks are not robust, both Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs) have cut back on preventative maintenance expenditures.
3. Disinvestment in Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS): AT&T and Frontier are putting very little investment into infrastructure that supports only Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) service. Both ILECs are relying on price increases and customer inertia to maintain revenue stream.
4. Increased investment in broadband improves POTS service quality: AT&T and Frontier areas with higher broadband investment have a higher level of POTS service quality and better performance on all [service] metrics.
5. AT&T is focusing on higher income communities: AT&T wire centers serving areas with the lowest household incomes exhibit higher trouble report rates and longer out-of-service durations than areas in higher income communities.
6. Direct relationship between amount of competition and service quality results: Areas with limited or no competition experience lower service quality results. Both AT&T and Frontier put more investment and attention in areas with higher rates of competitive offerings.

Frontier’s California network was owned and operated by Verizon until Frontier bought it in April 2016.

Long outages

AT&T and Frontier both repeatedly failed to meet the state’s minimum standard to “repair 90 percent of all out-of-service trouble reports within 24 hours.”

“The requirement to clear a minimum 90 percent of out-of-service (OOS) reports within 24 hours has never been met by AT&T since 2010. Verizon/Frontier met the OOS standard in only two of the 96 months covered by this study,” the report said.

“AT&T has the financial resources to maintain and upgrade its wireline network in California, but has yet to do so,” the report also said. “Frontier has a strong interest in pursuing such upgrades, but lacks the financial capacity to make the necessary investments.” Frontier filed for bankruptcy in April 2020 while admitting that its financial problems were caused largely by a “significant under-investment in fiber deployment.”

The report further described AT&T’s failure to invest in low-income communities in this paragraph:

Whether deliberate or not, AT&T’s investment policies have tended to favor higher-income communities, and have thus had a disproportionate impact upon the state’s lowest income areas. For example, the weighted average 2010 median annual household income for… areas that had been upgraded with fiber optic feeder facilities to support broadband services was $72,024, vs. only $60,795 for wire centers without such upgrades. Using 2010 US Census data, we find a clear inverse relationship between household income and all of the principal service quality metrics. Wire centers serving areas with the lowest household incomes tend to have the highest trouble report rates, the longest out-of-service durations, the lowest percentages of outages cleared within 24 hours, and the longest times required to clear 90 percent of service outages. The opposite is the case for the highest income communities.

AT&T’s rapidly rising prices

AT&T “has raised its rates for legacy flat-rate residential service by 152.6 percent since the service was de-tariffed by the CPUC in 2009,” the report said. The price increases support a “harvesting” strategy that maintains revenue “despite a massive drop-off in demand” for landline phone service.

AT&T “has ceased active marketing of POTS, has degraded POTS service quality, and instead relies upon successive price increases and customer inertia to maintain its declining POTS revenue stream,” the CPUC report said. Despite years of steady price increases, AT&T “made minimal investments in outside plant rehabilitation, and has also allowed service quality for its legacy services to decline.”

AT&T’s flat-rate phone price in California rose from $10.69 per month in 2006 to $27 in 2018, adding up to a 152.6 percent increase, the report said. The biggest increases began in 2009. Frontier and its predecessor Verizon raised the flat rate by 30.6 percent (from $16.85 to $22) over the same time frame.

AT&T’s “measured rate” service, in which the price varies by the number of calls made, rose in price from $5.70 in 2006 to $24.25 in 2018, a 325.4 percent increase. Frontier/Verizon’s measured rate prices increased by 34 percent in the same time period.

Telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick argued in a blog post today that phone prices should have “plummeted” over the years but that AT&T uses the revenue from its poorly maintained landline phone service to pay for upgrades to its mobile network. Kushnick and his “Irregulators” group have been calling for investigations into these “cross-subsidies.”

“In October 2020, the Irregulators filed with the CA Broadband Council and CA Public Utility Commission (CPUC) claiming that AT&T most likely has been overcharging customers billions of dollars annually, and that it has been taking the construction budgets that should have been dedicated to the cities and homes in California and instead has been diverting them to wireless instead of upgrading the state telecom utility,” Kushnick wrote today.

Though Frontier also raised prices over the years, it has not “implemented the extreme succession of significant price increases for its legacy residential POTS services” seen with AT&T, the report said. The report also said Frontier hasn’t used the “harvesting” strategy implemented by AT&T.

“Frontier, as a ‘pure-play’ ILEC, has a strong incentive to maintain and to grow its customer base, not to allow it to dissipate. These are all positives for Frontier’s future if it is somehow able to reverse its financial decline,” the report said.

Status quo

We contacted AT&T and Frontier about the CPUC report today and asked what steps the carriers have taken to improve service quality. We also asked the CPUC what actions it took in response to the report and whether AT&T and Frontier service has gotten better or worse since the report was written in April 2019. We’ll update this article if we get any responses.

Frontier recently agreed to expand its fiber-to-the-premises network and improve its poor service quality in California as part of a settlement that will help the company exit bankruptcy. Frontier also agreed to temporary price freezes on voice service through the rest of 2021.

AT&T in October stopped offering legacy DSL service to new customers despite having failed to upgrade tens of millions of legacy DSL lines across the US to fiber. AT&T continues to sell DSL to existing customers.

AT&T’s latest embarrassment occurred this month when a 90-year-old customer in California paid for a Wall Street Journal print ad to complain about his slow DSL Internet service. The bad publicity shamed AT&T into upgrading his home to fiber. But as the CPUC report notes, AT&T has failed to adequately maintain its network, leaving many DSL Internet and landline phone customers with outdated and unreliable service that continues to get worse.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1744290

A failure to update critical prison management software has kept hundreds of incarcerated people in Arizona behind bars longer than they should be, according to a whistleblower report.

Employees for the Arizona Department of Corrections have known about the bug since 2019, Phoenix-based NPR affiliate KJZZ reported. The flaw follows a change to state law that the software simply cannot handle and has not been updated to deal with.

Arizona has one of the highest imprisonment rates in the country, with drug possession convictions being one of the highest drivers behind the numbers. An amendment (PDF) to Arizona state law in June 2019 created a mechanism through which inmates convicted of certain nonviolent drug offenses can earn credits toward early release. Eligible inmates who complete a program such as a GED equivalent or substance abuse treatment while imprisoned can earn three days’ credit for every seven days served and shorten the length of time they spend behind bars to 70 percent of their assigned sentence.

The Arizona Department of Corrections’ own FAQ (PDF) about the program specifies that neither inmates nor their families should contact anyone to request an eligibility review. “This is done automatically based on system programming, which generates a list for Time Comp,” the document reads. “The reviews are being completed based on the projected earliest release dates.” According to the whistleblowers, however, that system cannot identify eligible participants and still does not make those calculations.

“We knew from day one this wasn’t going to work,” a source in the Department of Corrections told KJZZ. “When they approved that bill, we looked at it and said ‘Oh, shit.'”

The whistleblowers say they began making “repeated internal warnings” to the department’s IT officials in 2019. KJZZ obtained a copy of an October 2020 bug report detailing how the software, called ACIS, fails to keep up with the law.

“Currently, this calculation is not in ACIS at all,” the report reads. “ACIS can calculate 1 earned credit for every 6 days served, but this is a new calculation.”

The department confirmed to KJZZ that it is aware of the problem with ACIS. “Data is being calculated manually and then entered into the system,” spokesperson Bill Lamoreaux told KJZZ, saying that the department has identified at least 733 inmates who are eligible to take part in the early release program but are not yet enrolled.

Jail (mis)management software

There’s an entire sprawling US industry of “corrections” software out there. On one level, jail and prisoner management systems make sense: you need to know who’s in a facility, where they are, what their medical needs are, who their legal representation is, and so on.

As elements of the criminal justice system are increasingly handed over to algorithms for management, however, real people are becoming more affected by the flaws in these software packages. The ACIS deployment in Arizona took three years longer than it was supposed to and consistently went over budget, local media reported at the time.

Since it was finally implemented over Thanksgiving weekend in 2019, ACIS has remained plagued by bugs, sources told KJZZ. Several modules in the software have failed to perform correctly, “including modules that track inmate health care, head counts, inmate property, commissary and financial accounts, religious affiliation, security classification, and gang affiliations.” And when human error introduces something incorrect into an inmate’s file, employees may not have a way to remove or correct the mistake.

“In one instance, there was a disciplinary action erroneously entered on an inmate’s record,” a source told KJZZ. “But there’s no way to back it out. So that guy was punished and he wasn’t able to make a phone call for 30 days. Those are the kinds of things that eat at you every day.”

Software suites used by police departments and courts—long before someone is subject to prison management software—have also been widely criticized in recent years, both for a lack of transparency and for exhibiting racial bias. ProPublica in 2016 published a deep, detailed report finding that courts’ risk assessment software ranked Black suspects as more likely to commit further crimes than white suspects who allegedly committed similar acts.

Researchers in 2018 analyzed the software and found that groups of random amateurs had equal accuracy when projecting suspects’ re-offense rates; both people and algorithms were wrong about a third of the time.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1744189

While the National Transportation Safety Board investigates an aircraft engine failure that occurred in flight on Saturday, manufacturer Boeing has recommended that airlines suspend flying certain versions of the 777 wide-body airliner.

“Boeing is actively monitoring recent events related to United Airlines Flight 328,” the company stated on Sunday. “While the NTSB investigation is ongoing, we recommended suspending operations of the 69 in-service and 59 in-storage 777s powered by Pratt & Whitney 4000-112 engines until the FAA identifies the appropriate inspection protocol.”

There are versions of the 777 aircraft with engines built by three different manufacturers. For about the last 15 years, new 777s have all been delivered with GE-made engines. So this recommendation applies to older models of the aircraft still in service.

Before Boeing’s announcement on Sunday, Japan’s transport ministry had already told its domestic airlines, All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines, to ground their fleets of 777 aircraft flying with Pratt & Whitney engines.

This was to give investigators more time to determine what happened with United Airlines Flight 328 on Saturday, when a passenger plane took off from Denver International Airport bound for Honolulu, Hawaii. None of the 229 passengers or 10 crew members was injured.

On Sunday, the NTSB released a preliminary update on the incident, when the plane experienced a right engine failure shortly after flying from the Denver airport. Investigators found that the inlet and cowling separated from the PW4077 engine and that two fan blades were fractured. The other fan blades in the engine were damaged. Many of the engine components fell over populated areas.

“Shortly after the NTSB was notified of the event, a senior NTSB investigator who lives in the Denver area began working with local law enforcement officials to coordinate the recovery of the components that separated from the engine, many of which landed in residential areas,” the agency said.

The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder have already been recovered and transported to the NTSB laboratory in Washington where each will be downloaded and analyzed.

Also on Sunday, engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney withheld detailed comment about the investigation, pending findings from the NTSB. “Pratt & Whitney is actively coordinating with operators and regulators to support the revised inspection interval of the Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines that power Boeing 777 aircraft,” the company said.

The problems with the 777 aircraft engine come just months after Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft returned to service, with an American Airlines flight in December 2020. That smaller aircraft had been grounded in March 2019 following two crashes. Over the course of 20 wrenching months, Boeing sought to address both that failure and its safety culture.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1744177

Bitcoin’s price soared past $56,000 on Friday, pushing the combined value of all bitcoins past the $1 trillion mark—at least in theory. That’s more than the market capitalization of Facebook, though Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft are worth more. Bitcoin’s value has almost doubled from $29,000 since the start of the year.

I say “in theory” because not all bitcoins are actually available for use. Each bitcoin (or fraction of a bitcoin) is secured by one or more cryptographic signatures. To transfer a bitcoin, you need to know its corresponding private key. And some of those keys have been lost—and it’s impossible to know how many.

For example, a British man says he threw away a hard drive in 2013 that contained the keys to 7,500 bitcoins—worth around $400 million at today’s price. He sought permission to excavate the dump containing the hard drive, but the request was denied.

This kind of incident has been repeated many times over the past 12 years. It was likely an especially common occurrence in the first two years of bitcoin’s operation, when you could get a bitcoin for a fraction of a penny. In 2010, a man paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas—a transaction now widely recognized as the first commercial bitcoin payment.

Back then, it was common for people to mine a few hundred bitcoins—or even many thousands—and then forget about them, since they might be worth too little to be worth the trouble of selling them. By the time owners realized the bitcoins were valuable, the data might have been lost.

The world’s biggest stash of bitcoins is probably the one owned by the pseudonymous bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. In the cryptocurrency’s early months, Nakamoto is estimated to have mined more than 1 million bitcoins.

Nakamoto never revealed his true identity, and he disappeared from public view in 2011. No one knows if he’s still alive; those 1 million bitcoins haven’t been transferred since they were created more than a decade ago.

But if Nakamoto held on to the private keys, his net worth would be more than $50 billion today—sufficient to make him among the 20 wealthiest people in the world.

Two other likely bitcoin billionaires are Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The Harvard alums first came to prominence during a legal battle over Facebook’s origins as a social network for Harvard students. After they settled their legal battle with Mark Zuckerberg, they spent $11 million to buy bitcoins in 2013. At a reported price around $120, they might have gotten nearly 100,000 bitcoins—which would give them a net worth of several billion dollars today.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1743919

Comcast is delaying a plan to enforce its 1.2TB data cap and overage fees in the Northeast US until 2022 after pressure from customers and lawmakers in multiple states.

“[W]e are delaying implementation of our new data plan in our Northeast markets until 2022,” Comcast said in an announcement yesterday. “We recognize that our data plan was new for our customers in the Northeast, and while only a very small percentage of customers need additional data, we are providing them with more time to become familiar with the new plan.”

Comcast has enforced the data cap in 27 of the 39 states in which it operates since 2016, but not in the Northeast states where Comcast faces competition from Verizon’s un-capped FiOS fiber-to-the-home service. In November 2020, Comcast announced it would bring the cap to the other 12 states and the District of Columbia starting in January 2021. But with yesterday’s announcement, no one in those 12 states and DC will be charged overage fees by Comcast in all of 2021.

“Delaying this ill-timed data cap until at least 2022 is the right call,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said yesterday. “I have heard from families across Connecticut who easily exceeded this cap while studying and working remotely. Far from so-called super users, these were stories from typical Connecticut families merely trying to stay employed and educate their children during a global pandemic. To raise rates on these families at the very moment they were most reliant on broadband access and least able to pay more was simply unconscionable.”

The delay applies to Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

Comcast vague on plans for 2022

Comcast’s original plan for the Northeast imposed the cap in January 2021 while providing courtesy months in which newly capped customers can exceed 1.2TB without penalty, resulting in the first overage charges being assessed for data usage in the April 2021 billing period. That plan drew condemnation from lawmakers, including legislation in Massachusetts that would ban data caps and price hikes until the pandemic is over.

Comcast responded in late January by delaying overage charges until the July billing period, but the extra few months didn’t quiet the controversy. Yesterday’s announcement of a delay until 2022 did not specify in which month of 2022 the first overage charges will appear. We asked Comcast if it plans to impose the caps on the Northeast in January 2022 or sometime later but didn’t get an answer.

Unlucky customers in 27 other states

Comcast did tell us that there are no changes in the other 27 states, where customers will continue to face caps and overage fees. Comcast’s insistence on continuing to charge overage fees in most of its territory maintains the unequal status quo in which a customer’s state of residence determines whether they have to deal with Comcast’s most unpopular policy. Comcast’s overage charges are $10 for each additional block of 50GB, up to a maximum of $100 each month. Customers can avoid overage charges by spending an extra $30 a month on unlimited data or $25 for the “xFi Complete” plan that includes unlimited data and the rental cost for Comcast’s xFi gateway modem and router.

As we noted in previous coverage, Comcast said it wouldn’t charge Northeast users for unlimited data plans until at least April. “Customers in our Northeast markets who have signed up for xFi Complete or Unlimited haven’t actually been billed because of the complimentary months. So [there is] no need for refunds or credits,” Comcast told us today.

Though Comcast claims the 1.2TB cap only affects “super users,” the percentage of Internet users hitting that mark is always increasing, and broadband usage has risen more than usual during the pandemic. OpenVault research found that over 14 percent of US-based subscribers used over 1TB a month in Q4 2020, up from 8.8 percent of subscribers in Q3 2020, as we reported last week. The percentage of customers using over 2TB a month more than doubled to 2.2 percent in the same time period. Median monthly usage in Q4 2020 was 293.8GB and average usage was 482.6GB.

“The explosion in data consumption during 2020 has established a new normal of bandwidth usage that is especially visible when compared with pre-pandemic time periods,” OpenVault said.

Network capacity not a “valid excuse”

Data-overage fees boost Comcast’s revenue, but limiting monthly data usage regardless of when in the month that usage occurs is not an effective tool for preventing network congestion in real time. Comcast has boasted of its network’s strong performance in the pandemic, once again showing that data caps are a profit play rather than a necessity.

Tong told Comcast in a letter earlier this month that “[b]roadband Internet access is an essential public service, particularly during the ongoing pandemic… The last thing our residents need to worry about at this time is whether they will run afoul of data caps, or incur significant unanticipated expense in order to remain connected.”

“Network capacity is not an issue for Comcast or a valid excuse to charge customers more,” 71 Massachusetts lawmakers told Comcast in a letter in late December. “Comcast itself claims it has plenty of capacity across its network, including areas where no caps are currently imposed… It is inconceivable that Comcast would choose to impose this ‘cap and fee’ plan during a pandemic, when many Massachusetts residents are forced to work and attend school from home via the Internet.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1743804

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has ruled that Uber drivers are legally workers, not self-employed contractors as Uber has argued in courts around the world. The ruling means that drivers in Britain and Northern Ireland are eligible for additional benefits and protections, including a minimum wage.

Uber claims that it merely acts as a technology provider and broker between independent drivers and their customers—much as eBay facilitates sales between buyers and sellers. In Uber’s view, this means that it doesn’t owe its drivers benefits like unemployment insurance, doesn’t need to reimburse drivers for their costs, and isn’t bound by minimum wage and overtime rules. Uber emphasizes that its drivers are free to decide when, where, and how much they work.

But critics point out that Uber exerts a lot more control over its drivers—and over the driver-passenger relationship—than a conventional platform like eBay or Airbnb. Uber sets fares, collects payments from customers, deducts its own fee, and remits the remainder to the driver. It requires drivers to accept a large majority of the rides they are offered. It handles customer complaints and kicks drivers off the platform if their average rating falls too low.

“A position of subordination and dependency”

So the UK Supreme Court ruled Friday that Uber drivers are legally Uber workers, not independent business owners who happen to get most of their business from Uber.

“Drivers are in a position of subordination and dependency in relation to Uber such that they have little or no ability to improve their economic position through professional or entrepreneurial skill,” said Lord George Leggatt, one of the justices of the Supreme Court, as he handed down the ruling.

One consequence is that Uber drivers must be paid at least the minimum wage. And importantly, the high court held that drivers must be paid not only for the time when they’re driving but also for time they’re logged in to the app waiting for another fare.

This could have significant implications for Uber’s relationship to drivers. While drivers will presumably appreciate a minimum earnings guarantee, this could also mean that Uber will restrict when drivers are allowed to work—since having too many drivers online during periods of low demand could cost Uber more than it earns in fares.

According to the Financial Times, the ruling means Uber must set up a pension program for its drivers. Thousands of drivers could be eligible to sue for back pay as a result of the ruling.

A global battle

In recent years, Uber has been fighting over the same issue in jurisdictions around the world. California passed legislation in 2019 requiring Uber (and Lyft) to treat its drivers as employees. Uber and Lyft fought the law in court for the next year, delaying its implementation until voters overturned it in a November 2020 vote.

According to the Financial Times, UK law has three legal categories—employees, workers, and independent contractors. Workers in the UK have more rights than independent contractors, but not as many as employees. Employment law in the US generally just has two categories—employees and independent contractors.

Last year, France’s top court ruled that Uber drivers must be treated as employees. Spanish courts reached a similar conclusion in September. Uber is facing a class-action lawsuit in Canada over the same issue.

Uber is also facing litigation in Massachusetts over the legal status of its drivers.

Of course, Uber may ultimately overturn some of these rulings in the courts or national legislatures, or through referenda. But it seems unlikely that Uber will prevail in all of these fights. Which means that unless Uber wants to abandon broad swaths of hard-won territory, it’s going to have to figure out how to make its business model work while treating drivers as employees.

That might mean higher prices for consumers and less flexibility for the drivers. But advocates say that drivers will ultimately benefit from having the same legal protections as most other workers.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1743797