Tag Archives: Google

AI Bots and Web Traffic

One of the fastest-growing uses of the Internet is coming from AI scrapers. These are companies that crawl the web and scrape content to sell to AI companies to train models or sell to others looking for specific kinds of content. The scraping is done by bots that visit a website and copy the content. This is all machine-to-machine traffic with no human involvement. This traffic doesn’t reach to homes or businesses but instead impacts the Internet by increasing the traffic between data centers on backbone fiber routes and at Internet hubs.

According to a report from Tollbit, at the beginning of 2025, there was one visit by an AI bot to a website for every 200 human visits. By the end of the year, that ratio dropped to one AI bot visit for every 31 human visits.

Scraping websites for content is a controversial activity since it often involves grabbing copyrighted materials from news sites and other sources. A lot of companies have tried to make it hard to scrape the content from their site, but even the most sophisticated tech companies are finding the practice difficult to stop or block. The scraping bots are often successfully snagging content that is behind paywalls.

The practice is playing havoc with the traditional web compensation model of paying for click-throughs to websites. The click-throughs generated to websites are dropping as people use AI sites to answer questions instead of visiting the raw source of information. As an increasing percentage of searches are done through AI, the traditional compensation model will become obsolete – which is bad news for content providers. This also spells long-term trouble for search engines like Google that make money by directing users to websites.

Content providers claim that the AI bots are bypassing the robot.txt web protocol that provides a directory to web scrawlers to define the parts of a website that are open to scraping and areas that are copyrighted and off limits.

The AI bots are becoming increasingly able to mimic human users to avoid capthca and other tools used to frustrate bots. There is a technology battle being waged as content providers try new ways to frustrate bots and bots find new ways to bypass any blocking tools.

There are some well-known lawsuits from content providers to try to stop scrapers. In October 2025, Reddit sued Perplexity and related businesses. The Reddit suit claims that bots are illegally taking copyrighted materials. The Reddit suit also attacks the tactic of bots that mimic human users to grab content.

Google filed a suit in December 2025 against SerpApi for grabbing copyrighted materials, and also complains that the bot company uses illegal tactics such as armies of bots to overwhelm servers and fake and constantly changing user names to frustrate security measures.

There are a lot of consequences from this growing traffic for the companies that control the web. AI bot traffic is growing at a rate of over 25% annually while human visits to websites have started to decline. People don’t feel a need to visit websites when they can get questions answered by an AI search engine. The companies funding the basic Internet infrastructure are getting no compensation for the giant use of web resources.

There is no question that this is going to change the way that content providers get compensated. A lot of content providers sell access to articles behind paywalls, and that will fail as a revenue model if their content is made widely available through AI by scrapers.

Major Outages in 2024

2024 was like most recent years where there were a few major broadband outages and a lot of smaller regional ones. Most carriers claim to be investing more money in increased redundancy to avoid major outages and one hopes that is cutting down on outages.

AT&T suffered a big outage in February when it lost cellular coverage in markets like Dallas Houston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. The outage particularly affected first responders served by AT&T’s FirstNet network. The company said the outage was “caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyberattack” Basically, the company messed something up during a network update.

The biggest telco outages for the year came from hurricanes. In western North Carolina alone, 80% of cell sites went out of service by the day after the storm hit. Fiber networks were severed as entire roads washed away, and something like a million trees were damaged. I live in Asheville, and we experienced a total communications blackout with no cellular or landline broadband. It took about a week to get a partial cell signal back and over three weeks to get broadband. Some rural areas were out much longer.

Hurricane Milton caused broadband outages as well, more related to power outages than destroyed telecom network. A lot of places didn’t lose cell coverage, and most people were back in service within a few days.

The other big outages in 2024 were not network outages but service provider outages.

  • Microsoft Teams had a seven hour outage on January 26. The cause of the outage was never disclosed but seems to have been internal to Microsoft.
  • On March 5, Meta had an outage that blocked users from accessing Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads. The reason for the outage was a glitch in the login process.
  • Google lost service for an hour on May 1. The problem was a failure in the verification process that couldn’t identify users.
  • The biggest outage of the year happened on July 19 and affected 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices. The outage was worldwide. Flights were canceled, customers couldn’t access banks, surgeries were canceled, and there were widespread 911 outages. The cause of the problem was a section of code at CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that many large Windows customers were using to protect their devices. In retrospect, the outage was blamed on the lack of testing from CrowdStrike before implementing a software update.
  • Microsoft had an outage on November 25 that caused intermittent inability for users to use Outlook or reach the web. Microsoft admitted the source of the problem was a configuration change – another software update problem.
  • On December 11, OpenAI had an outage of it’s video service Sora. This was caused by a cascading error when a telemetry service overwhelmed the platform.

Interestingly, most of the service outages were the result of configuration changes, meaning software upgrades.

These big companies should learn a lesson from smaller telcos. I’ve had many clients who learned the hard way to never introduce new software onto customers without first testing the update. That means NEVER EVER, NEVER EVER, NEVER EVER (did I say that enough?). Many telcos have software test labs where they have a lab setup that mimics the network. They try updates in the test lab before ever subjecting their customers to an untested update. This is software update 101 stuff, but apparently, the smart guys at some of the biggest companies don’t think they need to take this extra precaution.

The Zero Click Web

I wonder how many of you have noticed a subtle change in the way that you navigate the web? We’re in the midst of a transition to the zero click Internet, meaning users no longer have to click on links to reach web sites to find content. Instead, big platforms are trying to supply the content people want to keep them from leaving the platform.

The example of this that most of you have encountered is Google search. When you now ask a question on Google, the first thing offered is a short answer to your question. Google has been scraping the web and responding with answers to some questions for a few years. But after Google introduced AI it now provides fairly robust response to questions.

I expect the average person is happy with most of Google answers, so they don’t click through to the web site where the answer was generated. If you are looking for a fact, the Google response is really useful. For instance, if you ask for the number of consecutive games played by Cal Ripken, Google tells you it is 2,632 games. If I don’t want any additional color for that answer, the Google response is perfect.

However, the Google response is not adequate if you ask a more complex question. I asked about the outlook for interest rates in 2025 and got the following response, “Fixed income markets anticipate that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in 2025, but not by much. Short-term interest rates are expected to end 2025 close to 4%.” I don’t know about you, but I am not going to trust Google to boil down opinions from different economist and bankers into a single opinion and a few sentences. When I asked that question, I was already prepared to read to multiple articles to get different opinions on the topic.

I find this to be a dangerous trend because many folks will take the Google response as the answer. If somebody is thinking of buying a house and using a variable-rate mortgage, they might want to know if some subset of economists are predicting a big boost in interest rates. Accepting Google’s short answer is easy, but it is not the answer. Google clearly seems to be quoting a single source, and it doesn’t even tell you who that is.

Google is not the only one doing this. Social media sites like Facebook and X started to discourage external links a few years ago so that people wouldn’t leave their platforms. When news is posted on social media it is often now a text blurb only with no link to the source.

There are several consequences of the zero click Internet. As I’ve pointed out, a lot of complex information is getting boiled down to short answers, and many folks are not digging any deeper. In a world full of disinformation, that’s a bad trend.

This also means that fewer people are reading articles and blogs, and that means a gradual diminishment of digital publishing. As AI is used to write short blurbs, even big publishers like magazines and newspapers will wane in influence, because people will be reading short summaries of articles but not the actual articles.

Perhaps the biggest change from the zero click Internet will be the death of the traditional web advertising model that measures success through clicks. When folks aren’t clicking through to web sites, advertising will have to be done and compensated in a different way. I have to imagine the current Google AI has already caused major havoc with SEO consultants who help companies attract more web traffic. Over time, domain names will become less important as people get the summary version and don’t visit websites.

Google Moonshot Delivering Wireless Backhaul

You may recall a number of years ago when Google experimented with delivering broadband from balloons in an effort labeled Project Loon. The project was eventually dropped, but a remnant of the project has now resurfaced as Taara – broadband delivered terrestrially by lasers.

Project Loon functioned by beaming broadband from dirigible to receivers on the ground, and Taara sprung out of the idea of using those same lasers for terrestrial broadband. Taara claims to be able to beam as much as 20 gigabits for 20 kilometers (12 miles). While that is impressive, the important claim is that the hardware is affordable and easy to install and align.

The Taara effort came out of the effort by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to form a division to work on moonshots – ideas that are futuristic sounding, but that could someday make the world a radically better place. This resulted in the creation of X, the parent of Taara, which is the laboratory in charge of the moonshot ideas.

Taara sees this technology as a way to increase broadband access in areas with little or no broadband access. This is also envisioned as a technology that can provide better backhaul to cell towers and ISP hub sites. The most promising use of the technology is to bring a high-speed connection to the many small villages around the world that aren’t connected to broadband.

The X website includes several case studies of the technology. In the Congo, the radios were used to beam broadband across the Congo River to make a connection between Brazzaville and Kinshasa. This was a 4.8 kilometer radio hop that is far less expensive than building a fiber route by road of almost 400 kilometers. Within the first 20 days after the connection, the backhaul connection through Taara carried almost 700 terabytes of data.

https://x.company/blog/posts/taara-beaming-broadband-across-congo/

Taara has already been deployed in thirteen countries, and Taara is working with major players to quickly expand the use of the technology. This includes deals with the Econet Group and its subsidiary Liquid Telecom in Africa, the ISP Bluetown in India, and Digicel in the Pacific Islands. Taara is also now working with Bharti Airtel, one of the largest telecom providers in India to ramp up distribution. India has hundreds of thousands of small villages that could be candidates for the technology.

In Africa, the roll-out of the technology started in Kenya, working with Liquid Telecom and the Econet Group. The radios are perceived as the best way to build backhaul in places where it is challenging or dangerous to build fiber networks, such as across rivers, across national parks, or in post-conflict zones.

https://x.company/blog/posts/bringing-light-speed-internet-to-sub-saharan-africa/

There are still 2 billion people on the planet who are not connected to the Internet, and in most cases, one of the primary impediments to expanding Internet services is the lack of affordable and reliable backhaul. The Taara lasers seem like a solution to bring broadband to a huge number of places that have lacked connectivity.

GM Wants to Curate Your Car Experience

General Motors recently announced that it is going to stop supporting Apple CarPlay and Android Auto in some of its vehicles. These are smartphone mirroring apps that let a driver use their cellphone to connect to music, get driving directions, listen to eBooks, etc. GM announced that it plans to block the smartphone connection capability and will instead run a Google infotainment suite that includes Google Maps, Google Assistant, Spotify, and other apps that will be built into the dashboard display.

The company is not alone, and other companies like Mercedes and VW don’t like smartphone mirroring. GM says that it is doing this to take back control over customers and the in-car experience. I had to pause at that statement because I can’t think of a time when carmakers had that kind of control.

An article in Light Reading quoted an analyst saying that this means that the bandwidth used by the average car would grow from a few hundred megabytes per month to 4-8 gigabytes per month. That seems like a gigantic increase in bandwidth to me to take over the functions that were already going through a cellphone. Does this mean that the average driver really uses 4-8 gigabytes per month on the cellphone while driving? That can’t be true, and there is more at play here.

This raises a lot of questions for me. Does this finally mean that AT&T will reach its dream of requiring car owners to subscribe to a cellular subscription? That’s something the company has been angling for since the first conversations about smart cars and 5G. It seems likely that the cost of this service will be embedded in the cost of the car for the first year, but will all car owners be required to subscribe to this service when the paid year lapses? You might not have a choice if you can’t use your cell phone. Perhaps the car makers will pay this for a longer period if gaining control of the customer experience can generate additional monetary benefits higher than the cost of the cellular subscription.

Car companies have been trying to force subscriptions on car owners for years with the OnStar service. But most people drop that service at the end of the free period after buying a new car. I may be wrong, but I can’t see most car owners willing to buy a new monthly data subscription. There is no doubt that a 4–8 gigabyte cellular subscription is not going to come cheap.

Carmakers wouldn’t be considering this unless it will make them money. I can think of several ways this could financially benefit them. They might get a share of any revenues paid to AT&T for a subscription. I have to imagine Google will pay them for getting access to a car’s data – having a car connected to a cellular plan will let car makers gather detailed analytics on how the car is being driven, and I imagine that creates a revenue opportunity for selling driver data to insurance companies and others. A car is not going to use 8 gigabytes of data monthly by connecting only to GPS and listening to music. That much data has to mean transferring a lot of base analytics about the car and the driver. I can’t imagine paying for a subscription that would let GM and Google spy on me.

This also raises questions about tying my car to a cellular carrier. The new FCC maps for the big cellular companies are a joke. There are huge areas of the country that have little or no cellular coverage. I live in Appalachia, and I don’t have to drive far to find areas with no cell coverage. One town we visit is Boone, NC, and over half of the drive between here and there has zero cell coverage. How will car companies deal with irate customers that require a service that doesn’t function where they live? My wife listens to an eBook from her phone on that drive – I know how upset she would be if that no longer works because she can’t connect her cellphone to the car speakers.

I’m not sure why carmakers think folks want or will accept this. I might be the exception, but I would never buy a car that forced this on me unless I had the option to disable it. I don’t want to be curated and monitored by my carmaker. Their relationship with me ends the day I pay for the car. My wife avidly dislikes Android and wouldn’t buy a car that forced her to connect to Google and Android instead of her preferred IOs. If GM or any other company mandates this, we’d take them off our list of cars to consider.

Can the FCC Regulate Social Media?

There has been a lot of talk lately from the White House and Congress about having the FCC regulate online platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. From a regulatory perspective, it’s an interesting question if current law allows for the regulation of these companies. It would be ironic if the FCC somehow tried to regulate Facebook after they went through series of legal gyrations to remove themselves from regulating ISPs for the delivery and sale of broadband – something that is more clearly in their regulatory wheelhouse.

All of the arguments for regulating the web companies centers around Section 230 of the FCC rules. Congress had the nascent Internet companies in mind when the wrote Section 230. The view of Congress was that the newly formed Internet needed to be protected from regulation and interference in order to grow. Congress was right about this at the time and the Internet is possibly the single biggest driver of our current economy. Congress specifically spelled out how web companies should be viewed from a regulatory perspective.

There are two sections of the statute that are most relevant to the question of regulating web companies. The first is Section 230(c)(1), which states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This section of the law is unambiguous and states that an online platform can’t be held liable for content posted by users. This would hold true regardless of whether a platform allows users free access to say anything or if the platform heavily moderates what can be said. When Congress wrote Section 230 this was the most important part of the statute, because they realized that new web companies would never get off the ground or thrive if they have to constantly respond to lawsuits filed by parties that didn’t like the content posted on their platform.

Web platforms are protected by first amendment rights as publishers if they provide their own content, in exactly the same manner as a newspaper or magazine – but publishers can be sued for violating laws like defamation. But most of the big web platforms don’t create content – they just provide a place for users to publish content. As such, the language cited above completely shields Facebook and Twitter from liability, and also seemingly from regulation.

Another thing that must be considered is the current state of FCC regulation. The courts have given the FCC wide latitude in interpreting its regulatory role. In the latest court ruling that upheld the FCC’s deregulation of broadband and the repeal of net neutrality, the court said that the FCC had the authority to deregulate broadband since the agency could point to Congressional laws that supported that position. However, the court noted that the FCC could just as easily have adopted almost the opposite position, as had been done by the Tom Wheeler FCC, since there was also Congressional language that supports regulating broadband. The court said that an agency like the FCC is only required to find language in Congressional rules that support whatever position they take. Over the years there have been enough conflicting rules from Congress to give the FCC a lot of flexibility in interpreting Congressional intent.

It’s clear that the FCC still has to regulate carriers, which is why landline telephone service is still regulated. In killing Title II regulation, the FCC went through legal gymnastics to declare that broadband is an ‘information service’ and not a carrier service.

Companies like Facebook and Google are clearly also information services. This current FCC would be faced with a huge dilemma if they tried to somehow regulate companies like Facebook or Twitter. To do so would mean declaring that the agency has the authority to regulate information service providers – a claim that would be impossible to make without also reasserting jurisdiction over ISPs and broadband.

The bottom line is that the FCC could assert some limited form of jurisdiction over the web companies. However, the degree to which they could regulate them would be seriously restricted by the language in Section 230(c)(1). And any attempt to regulate the web companies would give major heartburn to FCC lawyers. It would force them to make a 180-degree turn from everything they’ve said and done about regulating broadband since Ajit Pai became Chairman.

The odds are pretty good that this concept will blow over because the FCC is likely to quietly resist any push to regulate web companies if that means they would have to reassert jurisdiction over information service providers. Of course, Congress could resolve this at any time by writing new bills that would explicitly regulate Google without regulating AT&T. But as long as we have a split Congress, that’s never going to happen.

New European Copyright Laws

I’ve always kept an eye on European Union regulations because anything that affects big web companies or ISPs in Europe always ends up bleeding over into the US. Recently the EU has been contemplating new rules about online copyrights, and in September the European Parliament took the first step by approving two new sets of copyright rules.

Article 11 is being referred to as a link tax. This legislation would require that anybody that carries headlines or snippets of longer articles online must pay a fee to the creator of the original content. Proponents of Article 11 argue that big companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are taking financial advantage of content publishers by listing headlines of news articles with no compensation for the content creators. They argue that these snippets are one of the primary reasons that people use social media and they browse articles suggested by their friends. Opponents of the new law argue that it will be extremely complicated for a web service to track the millions of headlines listed by users and that they will react to this rule by only allowing headline snippets from large publishers. This would effectively shut small or new content creators from gaining access to the big platforms – articles would be from only a handful of content sources rather than from tens of thousands of them.

Such a law would certainly squash small content originators like this blog. Many readers find my daily blog articles via short headlines that are posted on Twitter and Linked-In every time I release a blog or when one of my readers reposts a blog. It’s extremely unlikely that the big web platforms would create a relationship with somebody as small as me and I’d lose my primary way to distribute content on the web. I guess, perhaps, that the WordPress platform where I publish could make arrangements with the big web services – otherwise their value as a publishing platform would be greatly diminished.

This would also affect me as a user. I mostly follow other people in the telecom and the rural broadband space by browsing through my feed on Twitter and LinkedIn to see what those folks are finding to be of interest. I skip over the majority of headlines and snippets, but I stop and read news articles I find of interest. The beauty of these platforms is that I automatically select the type of content I get to browse by deciding who I want to follow on the platforms. If the people I follow on Twitter can’t post small and obscure articles, then I would have no further interest in being on Twitter.

The second law, Article 13 is being referred to as the upload filter law. Article 13 would make a web platform liable for any copyright infringements for content posted by users. This restriction would theoretically not apply to content posted by users as long as they are acting non-commercially.

No one is entirely sure how the big web platforms would react to this law. At one extreme a platform like Facebook or Reddit might block all postings of content, such as video or pictures, for which the user can’t show ownership. This would mean the end of memes and kitten videos and much of the content posted by most Facebook users.

At the other extreme, this might mean that the average person could post such links since they have no commercial benefit from posting a cute cat video. But the law could stop commercial users from posting content that is not their own – a movie reviewer might not be able to include pictures or snippets from a film in a review. I might not be able to post a link to a Washington Post article as CCG Consulting but perhaps I could post it as an individual. While I don’t make a penny from this blog, I might be stopped by web platforms from including links to news articles in my blog.

In January the approval process was halted when 11 countries including Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands said they wouldn’t support the final language in these articles. EU law has an interesting difference from US law in that for many EU ordinances each country gets to decide, within reason, how they will implement the law.

The genesis of these laws comes from the observation that the big web companies are making huge money from the content created by others and not fairly compensating content creators. We are seeing a huge crisis for content creators – they used to be compensated through web advertising ‘hits’, but these revenues are disappearing quickly. The EU is trying to rebalance the financial equation and make sure that content creators are fairly compensated – which is the entire purpose of copyright laws.

The legislators are finding out how hard it will be to make this work in the online world. Web platforms will always try to work around laws to minimize payments. The lawyers of the web platforms are going to be cautious and advise the platforms to minimize massive class action suits.

But there has to be a balance. Content creators deserve to be paid for creating content. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. are popular to a large degree because users of the platforms upload content that they didn’t create – the value of the platform is that users get to share things of interest with their friends.

We haven’t heard the end of these efforts and the parties are still looking for language that the various EU members can accept. If these laws eventually pass they will raise the same questions here because the policies adopted by the big web platforms will probably change to match the European laws.

Our National Telecom Priorities

I recently wrote a blog that talked about the FCC’s formal goals for the next few years. I noted in that blog that some of the FCC’s actions currently seem to conflict with their stated goals. Today I present my take on what I see as the actual current priorities in our industry.

5G, 5G, 5G. The FCC and other policy makers have swallowed the 5G hype hook, line and sinker. I have no doubt that 5G will be an important part of our future telecom landscape, but the hype seems way out of proportion to the reality we are likely to see. Nothing highlights this better than a Qualcomm-sponsored article that claims that 5G technology will be as important as the introduction of electricity.

The FCC is sweeping away regulations that might interfere with 5G and already killed local say over the location of small cell electronics and towers. The FCC is well on the way towards allocating massive amounts of spectrum for 5G and ignoring other spectrum needs. The White House even held a 5G summit where politicians were repeating the talking points of the 5G carriers.

This all seems premature since engineers all say that the major benefits of mature 5G will come years from now. There will be some early 5G technology introduced into the market over the next few years, but this will not include the characteristics that make 5G an important technology. From a policy perspective, 5G seems to have won the war without having had to fight any of the battles. I’ve never seen this industry (and the politicians) go so gaga over a new technology that we aren’t even going to see for a while. The marketers at the cellular companies have clearly hit a hype home run.

The Rural Digital Divide Gets Lip Service. Talking about solving the rural digital divide is a high priority. The FCC rarely makes a presentation without mentioning how important this is to them. However, the FCC and others in Washington DC are doing almost nothing to solve the problem. The FCC even went so far as to list the rural digital divide as the first priority on their own list of goals but has done little to address the problem.

There is universal acknowledgement that the private sector is not going to invest in rural broadband without some funding help from government. Yet all of the state and federal grant programs added together are throwing millions of dollars at a problem that needs many billions of dollars to solve.

Meanwhile, the rural digital divide is widening as urban areas are seeing significantly faster broadband speeds while rural America is stuck with little or no broadband.

The Big ISPs Want to be Google. Every one of the big ISPs has made investments to try to catch-up with Google. The big ISPs want to monetize their vast troves of customer data. Big ISPs are envious of the advertising money made by Google and Facebook and want to grab a piece of those dollars. The FCC has aided the big companies by weakening consumer privacy protections.

But for whatever reason, the big ISPs haven’t yet figured this out. They have the most intimate and detailed access to customer data but have scarcely found any ways to understand it, yet alone monetize it.

Take My Residential Customers, Please. The big telcos have made it clear that they are not particularly interested in the residential market. CenturyLink made it clear this year that they will no longer invest in residential networks. Verizon has already sold vast tracts of rural networks. AT&T is constantly petitioning the FCC to let them tear down rural copper. Verizon is talking about expanding wireless local loops using 5G, but we’ll have to wait to see how serious they are about it.

Big ISPs Continue to Try to Squash Competition. The big ISPs miss no opportunity to squash competition, no matter how small. They all still rail against municipal competition, although all such competition added together is barely a blip on the national radar. They still pay for hit pieces – articles and papers that blast municipal fiber networks – even ones like Chattanooga EPB that is a paragon of competitiveness. They have been working hard to kick CLECs off of their dying copper networks, even thought the CLECs have been investing in newer DSL that can deliver decent broadband over the copper.

Modernizing CPNI Rules

I think we badly need new CPNI rules for the industry. CPNI stands for ‘Customer Proprietary Network Information’ and are rules to govern the use of data that telcos and ISPs gather on their customers. CPNI rules are regulated by the FCC and I think it’s fully within their current mandate to update the rules to fit the modern world.

While CPNI is related to privacy issues it’s not exactly the same. CPNI rules involve how ISPs use the customer data that they must gather in order to make the network operate. Originally CPNI rules involved telephone call details – who we called, who called us, etc. Telcos have been prohibited by CPNI rules from using this kind of data without the express consent of a consumer (or else in response to a valid subpoena from law enforcement).

Today the telcos and ISPs gather a lot more information about us than just telephone calling information. For instance, a cellular company not only knows all of your call details, but they know where you are whenever you call, text or make a data connection from your cellphone. Every ISP knows every web search you make since they are the ones routing those requests to the Internet. If you buy newer ISP products like home automation they know all sorts of details that they can gather from monitoring motion detectors and other devices that are part of their service.

Such CPNI data is valuable because it can be used by the ISP to assemble a profile of each customer, particularly when CPNI data is matched with data gathered from other sources. Every large ISP has purchased a business arm that is aimed to help them monetize customer data. The ISPs are all envious of the huge advertising revenues generated by Facebook and Google and want to climb into the advertising game.

The FCC was given the authority to limit how carriers use customer proprietary data, granted by Section 222(b) of the Telecommunications Act of 1934. Those statutes specifically prohibit carriers from using CPNI data for marketing purposes. Over the years the FCC developed more specific CPNI rules that governed telcos. However, the FCC has not updated the specific CPNI rules to cover the wide range of data that ISPs gather on us today. Telcos still ask customers for permission to use their telephone records, but they are not required to get customer permission to track web sites we visit or our location when using a cellphone.

The FCC could invoke CPNI protections for companies that they regulate. It gets dicier for the FCC to expand CPNI rules past traditional carriers. All sorts of web companies also gather information on users. Google makes most of their money through their search engine. They not only charge companies to get higher ranking for Google searches, but they monetize customer data by building profiles of each user that they can market to advertisers. These profiles are supposedly very specific – they can direct advertisers to users who have searched for any specific topic, be it people searching for information about diabetes or those looking to buy a new truck.

There are many who argue that companies like Google should be brought under the same umbrella of rules as ISPs. The ISPs rightfully claim that companies like Google have a major market advantage. But the ISPs clearly prefer the regulatory world where no company is subject to CPNI rules.

There other web applications that are harder to justify as being related to CPNI. For example, a social network like Facebook gathers huge amounts of private data about its users – but those users voluntarily build profiles and share that data freely.

There are more complicated cases such as Amazon, which has been accused of using customer shopping data to develop its own product lines to directly compete with vendors selling on the Amazon platform. The company clearly uses customer data for their own marketing purposes – but Amazon is clearly not a carrier and it would be a huge stretch to pull them under the CPNI rules.

It’s likely that platforms like Facebook or Amazon would have to be regulated with new privacy rules rather than with CPNI rules. That requires an act of Congress, and it’s likely that any new privacy rules would apply to a whole large range of companies that use the web – the approach taken by the European Union.

Regulating Digital Platforms

It seems like one of the big digital platforms is in the news almost daily – and not in a positive way. Yet there has been almost no talk in the US of trying to regulate digital platforms like Facebook and Google. Europe has taken some tiny steps, but regulation there are still in the infancy state. In this country the only existing regulations that apply to the big digital platforms are antitrust laws, some weak privacy rules, and general corporate regulation from the Federal Trade Commission that protect against general consumer fraud.

Any time there has been the slightest suggestion of regulating these companies we instantly hear the cry that the Internet must be free and unfettered. This argument harkens back to the early days of the Internet when the Internet was a budding industry and seems irrelevant now that these are some of the biggest corporations in the world that hold huge power in our daily lives.

For example, small businesses can thrive or die due to a change in an algorithm on the Google search engine. Search results are so important to businesses that the billion-dollar SEO industry has grown to help companies manipulate their search results. We’ve recently witnessed the damage that can be done by nefarious parties on platforms like Facebook to influence voting or to shape public opinion around almost any issue.

Our existing weak regulations are of little use in trying to control the behavior of these big companies. For example, in Europe there have been numerous penalties levied against Google for monopoly practices, but the fines haven’t been very effective in controlling Google’s behavior. In this country our primary anti-trust tool is to break up monopolies – an extreme remedy that doesn’t make much sense for the Google search engine or Facebook.

Regulating digital platforms would not be easy because one of the key concepts of regulation is understanding a business well enough to craft sensible rules that can throttle abuses. We generally regulate monopolies and the regulatory rules are intended to protect the public from the worst consequences of monopoly use. It’s not hard to make a case that both Facebook and Google are near-monopolies – but it’s not easy to figure out what we would do to regulate them in any sensible way.

For example, the primary regulations we have for electric companies is to control profits of the monopolies to keep rates affordable. In the airline industry we regulate issues of safety to force the airlines to do the needed maintenance on planes. It’s hard to imagine how to regulate something like a search engine in the same manner when a slight change in a search engine algorithm can have big economic consequences across a wide range of industries. It doesn’t seem possible to somehow regulate the fairness of a web search.

Regulating social media platforms would be even harder. The FCC has occasionally in the past been required by Congress to try to regulate morality issues – such as monitoring bad language or nudity on the public airwaves. Most of the attempts by the FCC to follow these congressional mandates were ineffective and often embarrassing for the agency. Social platforms like Facebook are already struggling to define ways to remove bad actors from their platform and it’s hard to think that government intervention in that process can do much more than to inject politics into an already volatile situation.

One of the problems with trying to regulate digital platforms is defining who they are. The FCC today has separate rules that can be used to regulate telecommunications carriers and media companies. How do you define a digital platform? Facebook, LinkedIn and Snapchat are all social media – they share some characteristics but also have wide differences. Just defining what needs to be regulated is difficult, if not impossible. For example, all of the social media platforms gain much of their value from user-generated content. Would that mean that a site like WordPress that houses this blog is a social media company?

Any regulations would have to start in Congress because there is no other way for a federal agency to be given the authority to regulate the digital platforms. It’s not hard to imagine that any effort out of Congress would concentrate on the wrong issues, much like the rules that made the FCC the monitor of bad language. I know as a user of the digital platforms that I would like to see some regulation in the areas of privacy and use of user data – but beyond that, regulating these companies is a huge challenge.