commission – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Scammer who made 96 million robocalls should pay $120M fine, FCC says

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Besjunior ) The Federal Communications Commission today said that a scammer named Adrian Abramovich “apparently made 96 million spoofed robocalls during a three-month period” in order to trick people into buying vacation packages. The FCC proposed a fine of $120 million, but it will give the alleged perpetrator a chance to respond to the allegations before issuing a final decision. The robocalls appeared to come from local numbers, and they told recipients to “press 1” to hear about exclusive vacation deals from well-known hotel chains and travel businesses such as Marriott, Expedia, Hilton, and TripAdvisor, the FCC said. “Consumers who did press the button were then transferred to foreign call centers where live operators attempted to sell vacation packages often involving timeshares,” the FCC said. “The call centers were not affiliated with the well-known travel and hospitality companies mentioned in the recorded message.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Scammer who made 96 million robocalls should pay $120M fine, FCC says

FCC stonewalls demands for evidence of cyberattack

The FCC swears that a denial of service attack hit its servers hours after Last Week Tonight ‘s John Oliver rallied support for net neutrality, but where’s the evidence? Well, don’t expect it any time soon. In an interview with ZDNet , the regulator’s David Bray says the FCC won’t release the logs that might show who was responsible for the incident. The logs contain private info like IP addresses, he says. Bray does note that there wasn’t a botnet involved, though — instead, the traffic came from commercial cloud services using the FCC’s public programming interface. But if it wasn’t a botnet, then who was involved? Some critics are concerned that the FCC isn’t exactly being forthright. The advocacy group Fight for the Future tells ZDNet that the FCC should disclose information “to the appropriate authorities and to journalists” to have them investigate the data while maintaining privacy. And if there’s an organization behind the attack, the group says, the FCC should divulge who it is. That it isn’t is worrying — does the Commission not know, or is it trying to hide the origins? Fight for the Future is concerned that the traffic is either from net neutrality supporters (and thus evidence that the FCC couldn’t/wouldn’t handle opposition to its net neutrality rollback ) or opponents trying to stifle criticism. And unfortunately, there’s circumstantial evidence that might support either theory. Anti-net neutrality bots recently flooded the FCC’s comments, and Chairman Ajit Pai even suggested that he might honor these obviously fake statements. It doesn’t help that the FCC has since gone into a “sunshine period” where it won’t take new public comments on decisions. And it’s no secret that telecoms are less than fond of net neutrality proponents, especially when they try to expose astroturfing campaigns . Simply put, both the current FCC and internet providers have a vested interest in downplaying net neutrality’s supporters while enshrining its critics. The FCC says it has since upgraded its website to better handle loads, so it isn’t completely unresponsive. Without more disclosures about what happened around the attack, though, it’s impossible to know just how honest it really is — and it’s not helping its case by being unresponsive to public outcries. Via: Gizmodo Source: ZDNet (1) , (2)

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FCC stonewalls demands for evidence of cyberattack

EU Commission: Apple must repay its $14.5b Irish tax break

The European Commission has ruled that Apple was given up to €13 billion ($14.5 billion) in an illegal sweetheart tax deal with the Irish government. The amount of money involved here dwarfs the EU antitrust penalties handed out to Google, Microsoft and others, but this is effectively a backdated tax bill, rather than a fine. Officials opened the investigation into Apple’s tax affairs back in 2013 and soon found that the agreement that it had signed with Ireland was illegal . The Commission says that because the deal gave Apple a “significant advantage” over its competition, the iPhone maker must now be prepared to pay back “illegal state aid” over the ten-year period before it began investigating its tax practices. Officials say that amount totals around €13 billion (from between 2003 and 2014) and that interest must also be accounted for. That could mean an additional €1-2 billion could be bolted onto that figure. “Member States cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules. The Commission’s investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years, ” says Commissioner Margrethe Vestager. “In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 per cent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 per cent in 2014.” The story began way back in 1991 when Apple signed a deal with the Irish government that enabled it to use a very specific type of tax loophole. This loophole was called a ” double Irish ” and, very simply, allowed Apple to split profits, paying almost nothing in the process. It’s quite a successful system, and in 2014, Apple was able to stash two-thirds of its global income in this tax haven. It’s not just Europe that feels that Apple’s corporate tax affairs are too shady, with Senator Carl Levin criticizing the company back in 2013. He wrote a lengthy report ( .PDF ) saying that Apple had negotiated an effective tax rate of less than two percent in Ireland. In the US, by comparison, it would have been expected to at least pay 15 percent. But sweetheart deals are in violation with the principles of the free market, which the European Union has sought to uphold. Countries are barred from offering secret handouts to give local players an unfair advantage over the competition. This is classified as “state aid, ” and is illegal in the eyes of the commission. The US won’t agree with the ruling, given that it feels that any tax Apple owes should go to the treasury. Tim Cook himself has said that he feels that where you ” create value is the place where you are taxed .” The implication being that the only place Apple should be on the hook for tax is in the US, even though much of that value is created in Foxconn’s Chinese factories. But, then again, it’s not as if the US currently benefits from Apple’s largesse, either. The company has been very open about the fact that it has roughly $230 billion stashed in overseas bank accounts that it refuses to repatriate. Cook justifies this by saying that the cost of returning money to the US is too high — shaking out to a tax rate of almost 40 percent, or $92 billion. An investigation over at Forbes revealed that Apple recently hired a Washington lobby firm to push for a corporate tax holiday, even though such a program has been proven not to work. Apple and the Irish government are likely to appeal the ruling. Daniel Cooper contributed to this report. Source: Europa

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EU Commission: Apple must repay its $14.5b Irish tax break

FCC hopes to speed up 5G rollouts by cutting red tape

The FCC really, really wants to get the ball rolling on 5G mobile networks, and it’s willing to make an end run around some of the usual bureaucracy to make that happen. The Commission’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau has struck a deal that will skip historic preservation reviews for small 5G cell sites across the US. So long as the sites aren’t going to “adversely impact” historic locations, they’ll get up and running that much faster. The FCC will also “welcome input” on how to improve things further. This doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be using a 5G smartphone any time soon. The telecom industry has yet to even settle on a 5G standard, let alone build the equipment you’ll need to get online. The FCC also isn’t giving carte blanche to carriers, as it still wants “responsible” deployments. However, this raises hopes that the next wave of high-speed cellular data won’t take quite so long to arrive as LTE did — you could see meaningful coverage relatively quickly. Source: FCC

FCC lays out its big 5G push

Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler made an impassioned plea for the US to take the lead in developing a wireless 5G standard. “To seize the opportunities before us, we need the next generation of wireless connectivity – a fifth generation, or 5G, ” he said. What’s more he laid forth a plan to do it. On Thursday, Wheeler will seek to “open up” a swath of high-band spectrum for 5G applications; he’s calling it the Spectrum Frontiers proceeding. The FCC plans to use 200 MHz-wide chunks of high-band spectrum because, unlike lower frequencies, it can offer the gigabit per second throughput and sub-millisecond latency that 5G applications demand. 5G will usher in an Internet of Everything, Wheeler told the Press Club. “If something can be connected, it will be connected in a 5G world.” Wheeler cited various remote operation scenarios, such as surgeons using VR to operate on patients hundreds of miles away, to illustrate the need for ultrafast wireless connectivity. He expects the commission’s research to be completed and the proposal ready for a vote by July 14th. Should it be adopted, America would become the first nation on Earth to actively reserve frequency for 5G development. 5G networks will require a number of infrastructure updates, specifically a large number of small cell sites. To account for this, the FCC will streamline its environmental and historic preservation rules, which will allow local governments more flexibility in where they situate these devices. The commission will also reportedly take a collaborative approach to addressing the networks cybersecurity and will reach out to “all stakeholders”. Wheeler stated that he expects the private sector to lead this development and produce the necessary technical standards on its own. Verizon and AT&T have both already announced that they’ll begin testing 5G next year. And if what we saw at Mobile World Congress is any indication, they won’t be the last. “Turning innovators loose is far preferable to expecting committees and regulators to define the future.” Wheeler said. “We won’t wait for the standards to be first developed in the sometimes arduous standards-setting process or in a government-led activity.” That said, the end result of the coming 5G revolution is still very much up in the air. “I’ve listed some examples of what 5G makes possible, ” Wheeler told the crowd. “But if anyone tells you they know the details of what 5G will deliver, walk the other way.”

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FCC lays out its big 5G push