NVIDIA Expects to Use AI to Slash Video Conference Bandwidth

Researchers at Nvidia have demonstrated the ability to reduce video conference bandwidth by an order of magnitude. In one example, the required data rate fell from 97.28 bB/frame to a 0.1165 kB/frame – a reduction to 0.1 percent of required bandwidth.

FCC Will Clarify Section 230

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 was intended to promote free expression of ideas by limiting platform exposure to a range of laws that apply to other publishers.

In principle, the Act provided a safe haven for websites and platforms that wanted to provide a platform for controversial or political speech and a legal environment favorable to free expression. It has not apparently worked out that way, as there is growing concern that platforms are acting to suppress free speech. 

Section 230 says that "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.”  

In other words, platforms that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. Ironically, a law intended to promote freedom of speech now is viewed by many as enabling the suppression of free speech. 

“Members of all three branches of the federal government have expressed serious concerns about the prevailing interpretation of the immunity set forth in Section 230 of the Communications Act,” says Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. “There is bipartisan support in Congress to reform the law.”

The Federal Communications Commission’s general counsel says the FCC has the legal authority to interpret Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1996. “Consistent with this advice, I intend to move forward with a rule making to clarify its meaning,” says Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. 

“Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech,” says “But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters.” That 

The U.S. Department of Commerce has petitioned the Commission to “clarify ambiguities in section 230.” Earlier this week, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out that courts have relied upon “policy and purpose arguments to grant sweeping protections to Internet platforms’ that appear to go far beyond the actual text of the provision.“

Many believe that clarification process is likely to remove “overly broad” interpretation that in some cases shields social media companies from consumer protection laws.

It is perhaps an unfortunate development, to the extent that the antidote to limited free speech would preferably be  “more speech by more speakers,” as the corrective to market monopoly is “more competition.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Thinks Courts Have Interpreted Section 230 Too Broadly

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas writes in a court order denying a writ of certiorari that some legal immunities granted to internet platforms under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act have been interpreted too broadly, a signal that at least one justice of the Supreme Court would narrow the scope of section 230 in ways that create more legal liability for major internet app platforms. 

Section 230 grants internet platforms immunity from prosecution if a third party uploads defamatory or otherwise illegal content. “Nowhere does this provision protect a company that is itself the information content provider,” Justice Thomas writes. 

In other words, when acting as a publisher, or making editorial judgments, a platform is not absolutely shielded from legal action otherwise available when libelous content is published by any media outlet.

In some sense, the discussions about section 230 involve the issue of freedom of speech, not just platform protection from third party speech and content or antitrust issues. 

Some might argue there is a possible way that First Amendment protection could be gained by third party users of a platform. The “public function exception” turns a private concern into a government operation when performing an “essential government function.” 

That seems a stretch. 

Providing an online platform or a social media site or search engine results does not clearly meet that test.

But big digital platforms, especially Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter, are facing growing scrutiny about monopoly power and censorship. Consider the matter of political censorship, complaints which are growing louder. 

Traditionally, the right of free speech, as enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution, protects speakers from government censorship, but only government action. There is a long legal history that extended First Amendment protections to new electronic media.

The internet, though, and particularly the rise of social media platforms, seems to raise entirely new questions, such as whether free speech rights can, or ought to, be extended to protect citizens from censorship by private corporations. That is almost entirely new ground, and up to this point, the right of free speech does not exist on any social platform in the United States. 

But some believe the traditional right of free speech, protecting citizens from government censorship, should be expanded in an era where “certain powerful private entities—particularly social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and others—can limit, control, and censor speech as much or more than governmental entities,” argues David L. Hudson Jr., Justice Robert H. Jackson Legal Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The issue is whether it is possible to enlarge the space within which constitutional protections on free speech are expanded, yet also avoid damage to private property rights of platforms. And that is the issue. It is not clear that regulation can do so, whether the issue is a remedy for business monopoly or the promotion of free speech. 

You might think the simplest answer is to simply allow people to speak their minds, with the exceptions of harassment and intimidation, threats of violence or promotion of criminal acts. But therein lies the problem, given the aggressively uncivil behavior one now sees on social media.  

What one speaker sees as the free expression of ideas will be seen as aggression and threat from another. Some 30 years ago this was not really a problem. People were simply more polite. But it is hard to mandate polite behavior. 

Many solutions seem to require “more regulation of platforms” which tends to mean “less freedom” for platforms, if arguably in pursuit of “more freedom” for speakers. And that raises an old issue: “who” has the right of free speech and its benefits, the speaker or the reader or listener. 

The U.S. Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, provided that “Congress shall make no law” prohibiting the free exercise of speech or the press. Note the language, which protects people as speakers and the “press” as a speaker from government restriction. 

Later broadcast media regulations sometimes shifted the focus a bit to the rights of listeners or viewers, rather than speakers. Generally speaking, however, the protected right is held by “speakers,” not “audiences.” 

Perhaps the seminal case was Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (395 U.S. 367, 393 (1969), which allowed some content regulation of broadcasting for reasons of promoting the public interest. The point is that speaker rights were somewhat subordinated to the rights of viewers and listeners (the public interest). 

Complicating matters further is the issue of “who” the speaker is, in the context of a social media site or business: the platform or the users of the platform. Up to this point, it is the rights of the platform as “the speaker” which have been upheld, even if a platform supposedly is a neutral matchmaker between users who might, arguably, be considered the actual “speakers.”

The approach prioritizing the rights of audiences (listeners, readers, hearers) is exemplified by Alexander Meiklejohn’s book Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government, in which he says “what is essential is not that everyone shall speak, but that everything worth saying shall be said.”

All that assumes a singular public interest could even be identified. 

“Speakers in the United States have few or no legal rights when platforms take down their posts,” according to Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. 

Some use the analogy of must carry rules once imposed on TV broadcasters. To date, lawsuits likening platforms to “public forums” have failed. 

Also, there are different issues related to content: removal of items that violate terms of service, and the way that ranking systems operate. The former deals with removed content; the latter deals with search ranking algorithms. 

The former issue is similar to the ways stories are constructed by news media, for example. Are opposing views treated fairly and with neutral adjectives? Is the amount of space given to opposing views roughly equal? 

The latter is similar to the choice of stories to run, and not the way content is treated once a “publish” decision is made. Which stories are deemed newsworthy, and which are not?

So far, U.S. courts have held that private platforms do not have a legal obligation to carry user speech. Still, some argue that dominant platforms are de facto gatekeepers, and should be regulated as “essential providers” of political speech, or even utilities, with a common carriage obligation. 

But those claims of speaker rights also bump up against the First Amendment rights of the platforms as speakers. Ranking and removal of content is an exercise of editorial judgment, in other words. 

Largely unexamined--so far--are various methods of giving more control to platform users, says Keller. It is not easy, but some advocate more end user content control settings. The problem is that people disagree about what constitutes “hateful speech.”

Some may  want platforms to carry all legal speech. Others might simply prefer more curation, allowing civil dialogue. 

“One possible approach would let platforms act against highly offensive or dangerous content

but require them to tolerate more civil or broadly socially acceptable speech,” argues Keller. 

Again, the problem is disagreement about how to identify such offensive or dangerous content, and not simply because the censoring algorithm or reviewer simply disagrees with the expression of those views. The same sort of problems arise with efforts to apply “fairness doctrines” that essentially preserve the rights of the listener, rather than the speaker. And all such rules limit free speech rights of speakers and platforms. 

Another approach distinguishes between “hosted” content (allowing anyone to speak) and “recommended” content that appears in news feeds, for example. The former is more akin to a town square, the latter more akin to the “curated” news feeds or search results. 

Yet others might prefer some form of unbundling the ranking and sorting algorithms, allowing third parties to create their own curated feeds. None of these would be simple. None would be free of some limitations on free speech. And most could negatively affect the monetization models that make the platform services possible. 

And yet we might be moving in such directions in any case. The recent issue of political protests by professional athletes raises the issue of whether constitutional free speech rights actually have standing even in the case of private firms. 

Traditional legal doctrine has been that private actors are not constrained by the Constitution generally, under the “state action” doctrine, which holds that  “the First Amendment governs only governmental limitations on speech (Nyabwa v. Facebook, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13981, Civil Action No. 2:17-CV-24, *2 (S.D. Tex.) (Jan. 26, 2018).”

The state action doctrine holds that only the government or those acting on its behalf are subject to constitutional scrutiny. Non-governmental conduct therefore lies beyond the Constitutional protections.

On the other hand, the exercise of free speech has recently seemed to be invoked as a right by major league sports figures whose kneeling during the playing of the national anthem is said to be an exercise of free speech rights not traditionally protected by the First Amendment. 

“The time has come to recognize that the reach of the First Amendment be expanded,” says Hudson.  

The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this reality last year in Packingham v. North Carolina (2017): 

“While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace—the ‘vast democratic forums of the Internet’ in general, and social media in particular,” the U.S. Supreme Court has said in the case of Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S.Ct. 1730, 1735 (2017).

The argument is that social media networking sites have become the modern-day equivalent of traditional public forums like public parks and public streets. 

“Public communications by users of social network websites deserve First Amendment protection because they simultaneously invoke three of the interests protected by the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association,” said Benjamin F. Jackson in a 2014 law review article (Benjamin F. Jackson, Censorship and Freedom of Expression in the Age of Facebook, 44 N.M. L. Rev. 121, 134 (2014)). 

“Federal courts can and should extend First Amendment protections to communications on social network websites due to the importance these websites have assumed as forums for speech and public discourse,” he argued. 

As with debates over network neutrality, where there arguably is a difference between permissible network management and other practices some argue are violations of the basic principle of free access to lawful internet apps and services. 

For example, social network websites may censor communications in order to prevent convicted criminals from preying on victims, accusers, or witnesses or prevent certain users from harassing or intimidating other users without violating free speech principles. 

Censorship of pornographic or violent materials likewise could help create and maintain an environment acceptable to users of as many ages and sensibilities. 

Also, censorship might be necessary to prevent harm to the website due to hacking and phishing attacks and comply with copyright and trademark laws.

The Supreme Court’s reasoning in Reno v. ACLU ( 521 U.S. 844 (1997) supports treating communications on social network websites as constitutionally protected speech. 

To be sure, application of First Amendment principles to private actors would raise the issue of impairment of their property rights. To use the telecommunications analogy, that would be similar to common carrier regulation of prices and terms of service. 

There is legal precedent. Under the public function exception, “the exercise by a private entity of powers traditionally exclusively reserved to the State” constitutes state action (Jackson v. Metro. Edison Co., 419 U.S. 345, 352 (1974). That has not generally been a winning argument in the courts.

But it might be argued that social networks resemble the public spaces the Supreme Court has chosen to protect in both its public function exception (Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946) and public forum doctrines.

The Supreme Court has held that the private property rights of a company did not “justify the State’s permitting a corporation to govern a community of citizens so as to restrict their fundamental liberties.”

The public forum doctrine was pioneered by Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization (307 U.S. 496 (1939) and Schneider v. Irvington (308 U.S. 147 (1939). Under the public forum doctrine, restrictions on speech in public spaces that have traditionally served as a venue for free expression and debate are subject to special constitutional scrutiny.

There also is an entwinement exception, though that also would face high scrutiny. Under the entwinement concept, a  non-governmental actor might be deemed a state actor if the firm has acted together with or has obtained significant aid from state officials, beyond mere licensing,  regulation or financial aid. 

Courts have thus far rejected claims that social network websites or their parent companies  show “entwinement.” Gilmore v. City of Montgomery, 417 U.S. 556, 569 (1974); 

Some believe the “Essential Facilities Doctrine” might apply. That doctrine states that if a monopoly power is found to own a facility that is essential to other competitors succeeding in the marketplace, the monopoly must provide reasonable use of that facility. The concept has been used with respect to railroads, bridges, even operating systems and communications facilities. 

It is not clear whether it can be applied to platforms, as it has been a tool for antitrust analysis and intellectual property rights, not First Amendment freedom. 

On the other hand, the essential facilities has been applied in the case of operating system platforms, which some might liken to the role played by social media or search engines. On the other hand, the U.S. Supreme Court has not definitively upheld the doctrine as constitutional.  

While there are five potential elements of the Essential Facilities test, control of the essential facility by the monopolist or the competitors’ inability to practically or reasonably duplicate the essential facility is about all that is necessary for a court to require monopolies provide access to competitors. 

That might be easy to see in the case of railroads, public communications networks or bridges. It will be much harder to convince courts that the doctrine protects user free speech rights on platforms. 

How Much Work from Home is Permanent? What is Productivity Impact?

Virtually everyone seems to believe that work patterns will be more varied, once the Covid-19 pandemic has passed. What is somewhat unclear is how much the patterns will change, on a permanent basis. Complicating matters, it is not clear how remote work affects productivity. 

Some 15 percent of executives surveyed by McKinsey believe at least one-tenth of their employees could work remotely two or more days a week going forward, almost double the eight percent of respondents who expressed that intention before COVID-19. 

That includes 20 percent of executives surveyed in the United Kingdom and Germany. But only only four percent of respondents in China thought that would be the case. Only seven percent of respondents believed at least one-tenth of their employees could work three or more days a week remotely, McKinsey reports. 

Also, potential for remote work is highly concentrated in a handful of sectors, such as information and technology, finance, insurance and management, McKinsey notes. Some 34 percent of respondents from the information and technology sector said they expect to have at least 10 percent of their employees working remotely for at least two days a week after COVID-19, compared with 22 percent of executives from that sector surveyed before the pandemic, for example. 

There is some debate about whether remote work is less productive or not. Nor is it easy to figure out what and how to measure. Output is the logical metric, but output is a fuzzy concept for most information workers. That leaves us with input measures, which may or may not be relevant to output. 

Still, the long-term trend towards more flexible work patterns is likely to get a tangible and mostly sustainable boost from pandemic work-from-home experiences. That said, there are substantial differences between casual work from home, telecommuting and routine work from home, either full-time or part-time. 

Subjective employee impressions about their own productivity when working from home have to be taken cautiously. People might believe they are “more productive” when working from home, but that does not mean they actually are, even if we can agree on how to measure office worker or knowledge worker productivity. 

So far, results seem inconclusive. Aternity reports that "workers are getting less productive the longer the remote work shift continues." 

GitLab reports that many workers feel more productive working from home. "Employees find themselves to be overall more productive (52 per cent) and efficient (48 per cent)," GitLab says.

Work on 6G Might Actually be Starting Later than for 4G and 5G

With 5G just launching commercially, it might seem odd that we already are hearing talk about 6G. But there is an argument to be made that, historically, the 6G process might actually have been started far later than did either 4G or 5G. 

Consider that the first 4G framework was set by the International Telecommunication Union in 1998. What became Long Term Evolution was proposed in 2004. and that early commercial deployment began about 2010. 

So 4G early conceptual work to commercialization took about 12 years, complicated by the distraction of two major alternatives, WiMax and LTE. 

For 5G, early conceptual work began about 2008. The standard was largely solidified by 2017. South Korea launched commercial 5G in 2019. The point is that the time from early conceptual work to commercial deployment took about 13 years. 

Samsung believes 6G could be available commercially as early as 2028, with widespread availability by 2020. So early commercialization could happen in about seven years, with deployment at scale in about nine years.

Many of us would expect to see early 6G deployment by about 2030. If so, then work on 6G actually is starting later than was the case for either 4G or 5G. 

So two outcomes might be suggested. On one hand, 6G might arrive later than we presently expect. On the other hand, if 6G arrives about when we expect (2030), then the development process from conceptual work to standards completion and commercial deployment will happen faster than was the case for 4G and 5G.

As one example, the NextG Alliance, formed by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) aims to “advance North American global leadership over the 5G evolutionary path and 6G early development” and will hold its first meeting in November 2020.

The NextG Alliance says it hopes to:

• Create a Next G development roadmap

• Develop a set of national priorities that will influence government applied research funding and promote incentivized government actions.

• Align development with commercialization outcomes.

Skeptics might argue it is way too early to talk about 6G. But the history of 4G and 5G suggests we might be starting later in the 6G process. If early conceptual work is just starting now, then the full development process--compared to 4G and 5G--would be compressed by three to four years.

In some ways the 6G development timeline might be easier. There were two different versions of 4G proposed and adopted commercially. That arguably slowed the development process.

5G did not suffer from that problem, but did introduce some new concerns about capital investment cost, as the addition of millimeter wave spectrum for the first time raised new issues about the number of required cell locations and the cost of "X" haul traffic from radio heads back to the core network.

6G likely will not have the confusion of two competing proposed standards or as much concern about X haul or small cells, as much of that infrastructure will have been put into place to support 5G. If so, then a more-compressed development cycle is feasible.

As 5G built on 4G, so 6G is likely to build on 5G, both in terms of infrastructure and other architectural choices. The inclusion of millimeter wave spectrum should ease issues associated with a possible move to terahertz frequencies. 

New antenna technologies to support millimeter wave signals, advanced duplex technologies (TDD), dense fiber X haul, spectrum sharing and use of artificial intelligence all should apply to 6G as well. 

When Advice to Move Up the Stack is Mistaken

Business strategy for larger tier-one service providers arguably differs from what is possible and prudent for smaller providers and specialists in the connectivity business. Arguably, in a business that increasingly is saturated and growing slowly (perhaps less than one percent per year, globally), revenue growth has to come from something other than legacy and traditional communications services.

source: GSMA 

As this chart suggests, tier-one service providers are betting on growth outside their legacy communications core, and many have made substantial progress. 

It has not been easy. Historically, it has been difficult for tier-one telecom providers to grow revenue in products and services outside core connectivity. 

That entails higher risk than traditionally might exist, but arguably is necessary as the traditional growth engines sputter. It always is difficult for any firm or industry to move away from its perceived core competency, but it arguably is easier for a firm or industry higher in the stack to move downwards than it is for any provider in the value chain to move upwards.

In other words, it should be “easier” for Google, Alibaba, Facebook, Microsoft or Apple to move “down the stack” than it is for China Telecom, NTT or AT&T to move up the stack. 

That said, it can be argued that some firms have been more successful than others, and perhaps the adage that “having too much money” is dangerous for any startup or big established provider is apt. It might be the case that Comcast and T-Mobile have been more successful with their acquisition strategies than others because they were relatively capital starved.

Some might argue those sorts of firms also benefit because they are less bureaucratic, and therefore more likely to make decisions less encumbered by internal political concerns, and to make those decisions faster. 

Specialist providers and smaller firms rarely have the human or financial capital to do much other than concentrate on core connectivity services, so the advice to “move up the stack”  towards applications is unwise. 

Similar advice to “move into adjacent areas of the value chain” likewise is unwise, and for the same reasons: small firms do not have the human or financial capital to do so, and could not achieve scale even if those other issues were not constraints. 

The point is that the oft heard advice to move up the stack or across the ecosystem is mostly applicable only to large tier-one firms. Smaller firms and small firms generally have to choice but to find a niche and stick to connectivity services.

Split Computing After Edge Computing?

These days, all networks are becoming computing networks. Also, computing and communications historically have been partial substitutes for each other. Architects can substitute local computing for remote, in other words. Mainframes, onboard, client-server, cloud and edge computing use different mixes of communications and computation resources. 

Edge computing, most agree, is among the hottest of computing ideas at the moment, and reduces use of communications capital by putting computing resources closer to edge devices. 

But technologists at Samsung believe more distribution of computing chores is possible. They use a new term “split computing” to describe some future state where computing chores are handled partly on a device and partly at some off-device site.

In some cases a sensor might compute partially using a phone. In other cases a device might augment its own internal computing with use of a cloud resource. And in other cases a device or sensor might invoke resources from an edge computing resource. 

source: Samsung

Conventional distributed computing is based on a client-server model, in which the implementation of each client and server is specific to a given developer, Samsung notes. 

To support devices and apps using split computing, an open source split computing platform or standard would be helpful, Samsung says.

With split computing, mobile devices can effectively achieve higher performance even as they extend their battery life, as devices offload heavy computation tasks to computation resources available in the network.

You might agree that the split computing concept is in line with emerging computing and communications fabrics that increasingly operate by using any available resource. Up to this point, that has been seen most vividly in device or app use of Wi-Fi. 

In the future we may see more instances of devices using any authorized and available frequency, network, tower or computing resource.