Lauren Frayer

President Trump signs cybersecurity executive order

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order on cybersecurity, an order long awaited by the cybersecurity community. Drafts of the executive order have leaked since the first days of the Trump administration. The cybersecurity executive order contains suggestions that are, by and large, considered good ideas by experts, including holding agency heads accountable for cybersecurity.

A common criticism in the Senate is that the US lacks of a guiding strategy for cyber defense, beyond making ad hoc decisions. It's a complaint that dogged the Obama administration and was beginning to catch up to the Trump administration as well. The executive order begins the process of developing one, and within 90 days a bevy of agencies will produce options for development. Agencies will now follow the National Institute for Standards and Technology framework. The guidelines were developed to be adaptable to any organization and are currently popular in the private sector.

White House launches a commission to study voter fraud and suppression

President Donald Trump signed an executive order that sets up a commission to review his controversial allegations of widespread voter fraud, along with reports of voter suppression. The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity will be led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), who has aggressively pursued allegations of voter fraud in his state.

About a dozen other election officials representing both parties will fill out the commission, which will deliver a report to the president in 2018, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. Sanders said that the commission will review policies and practices that enhance or undermine confidence in the integrity of federal elections, including improper registrations, improper voting, fraudulent registrations, fraudulent voting and voting suppression. The commission will not just focus on the 2016 general election but also systemic issues over the years.

Remarks of Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, California Women's Conference

The Federal Communications Commission’s most recent report on media ownership, released May 10, revealed that women own just 8.6 percent of the 11,919 broadcast stations in this country. Across the board, deregulation and other actions since the Act was passed, have led to increased media consolidation and fewer opportunities. The result: women and minority media ownership remain at shockingly low levels. Despite the disheartening statistics I have already shared, many are still advocating to eliminate the few rules that remain in place that currently prevent the concentration of station ownership into the hands of a few large media conglomerates...and this effort is on a fast track of becoming a reality...

I believe there are concrete actions that the FCC can take to promote a more diverse media landscape. My office recently released an action plan known as #Solutions2020, where we outlined several steps designed to enhance digital inclusion and encourage more opportunities for women and underrepresented entrepreneurs.

Commissioner O'Rielly Remarks before the Media Institute Luncheon

Defending the First Amendment: I think you will find the current Commission to be a great partner in the effort to ensure a free press, primarily by not intervening in the area.

"Fake News” Definition & Use: But moving on to a more active controversy at the moment, it has been argued by some that urgent action must be taken to rid our media and society from the plague of “fake news.” However you want to define the “problem,” we need to be looking closer at certain highly suspect solutions being proposed and implemented.

Questionable Policing by Online Companies: Asking people to think critically about the effect of algorithm skewing is far afield from imposing government edicts and false remedies for broadband providers.

Free Market Remedy: So what is a proper solution? It should come as no surprise to anyone that, if fake news is indeed such a big problem, I would recommend a more free market approach to solving it.

President Trump Attacks TV Media, Say CNN's Lemon 'dumbest person in broadcasting'

President Donald Trump says he thinks CNN's Chris Cuomo looks like a "chained lunatic" on television. CNN's Don Lemon is "perhaps the dumbest person in broadcasting" and CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert is a "no-talent guy" who talks "filthy." Those were just some of the comments President Trump offered over dinner May 8 when asked about the media he consumes as President of the United States. But he did little to hide his frustration, explaining that he had been surprised that the journalistic criticism had gotten worse after the campaign.

He also said he had been working on tuning out news that is critical of him. "Washington Post, New York Times, they’re really, really dishonest," he said, before directly addressing the TIME reporters he had invited for dinner. "You people are quite dishonest in all fairness." He said he used to watch MSNBC's Joe Scarborough but no longer does. He also claimed to have helped CNN president Jeff Zucker, an old friend and business colleague, get his job at the network.

Buying spree brings more local TV stations to fewer big companies

The local television landscape in the US has undergone major changes in recent years, as a wave of consolidations and station purchases have made some broadcast media owners considerably larger. In 2004, the five largest companies in local TV – Sinclair, Nexstar, Gray, Tegna and Tribune – owned, operated or serviced 179 full-power stations. That number grew to 378 in 2014 and to 443 in 2016. If approved by regulators, Sinclair’s acquisition of Tribune would bring its total to 208, by far the largest among the media companies. As of 2016, these five companies owned an estimated 37% of all full-power local TV stations in the country, as identified in a Pew Research Center analysis of BIA Kelsey data.

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn’s Remarks at Public Forum on Access and Affordability

Why is it that some of the largest communications providers in this country consistently rank among the lowest in consumer satisfaction? Could it possibly have anything to do with a lack of robust competition? Did you know that when it comes to broadband access at home, just 20 percent of Americans have a choice of two providers or more? Without real competition, are companies really incentivized to improve customer service, service quality, or pricing? And did you know that fewer than 40 percent of families regularly stay in touch with their incarcerated loved ones and one-third of families go bankrupt because of unjust and unreasonable phone rates? And while we are making progress when it comes to providing faster broadband service, including gigabit speeds in some communities, if it costs $80 or more a month for service, is broadband truly within reach?

Much of our focus has been on what is lacking in rural communities, but there are problems right here in LA and over in the Cleveland, Ohio area. I mention Cleveland because a recent study concluded that a major broadband provider had “systematically discriminated against lower-income neighborhoods, in its deployment of home Internet and video technologies, over the past decade.” So what that finding makes increasingly clear, is that the broadband availability and affordability gaps are not just in our rural towns and non-urban communities. Those gaps are wide, wherever there is an absence of rich people.

How One Little Cable Company Exposed Telecom’s Achilles’ Heel

[Commentary] The details of the network neutrality rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in February 2015 were not important to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum, or CenturyLink. What was important was the idea that any part of the government might have enforceable oversight over their data transmission services or charges. That’s what they can’t stand; that’s what they would do anything to avoid. And that’s what they are working to undo: the FCC’s classification of them as “common carriers” under “Title II” of the Telecommunications Act. That classification gave the FCC the legal authority to say something to the carriers about treating internet traffic fairly. No classification, no “net neutrality” rule. The trouble for the carriers is that the classification carries with it the risk that their businesses will be treated, someday, as the utility services they are. Net neutrality: not risky. Classification: risky. If people begin noticing that there’s no competition, that Americans are paying too much for too little, and that the entire country is suffering as a result, that’s a big problem for Big Cable.

The future of net neutrality might rest on this obscure court case

There's a huge court case you need to hear about. It might not be on your radar yet because, frankly, some of it gets pretty technical. But the outcome is likely to have enormous repercussions for online privacy, net neutrality and the economy. For months, policymakers have been struggling with the implications of this case, FTC v. AT&T, in part because it overturned about a century's worth of established legal practice and also, analysts say, because it appeared to open a wide loophole that businesses might use to evade most federal oversight. On May 9, the federal appeals court responsible for the ruling announced that it has agreed to rehear the case, potentially opening the door to a different result. Here's everything you need to know.

Can ISPs simply opt out of net neutrality?

[Commentary] The DC Circuit denied a petition to rehear en banc its 2016 decision upholding the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order. The Supreme Court is not likely to hear the case, but while the Justices may not be listening, the telecom policy community should be. The concurrence and dissents engaged in a lengthy and scholarly discussion about broader constitutional and administrative law doctrines raised by the order.

In the process, the concurrence signaled that the DC Circuit may understand the order to apply far more narrowly than anyone expected. The DC Circuit appears to view the Open Internet Order primarily as a hyper-transparency rule: If the company claims to offer an unedited internet experience, then it is required to deliver on that promise. The DC Circuit suggests that a walled garden is fine as long as the provider “mak[es it] sufficiently clear to potential customers that it provides a filtered services involving the ISP’s exercise of ‘editorial intervention.’”

Tech’s Frightful Five: They’ve Got Us

[Commentary] This is the most glaring and underappreciated fact of internet-age capitalism: We are, all of us, in inescapable thrall to one of the handful of American technology companies that now dominate much of the global economy. I speak, of course, of my old friends the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The five are among the most valuable companies on the planet, collectively worth trillions. (Apple reached $800 billion in market capitalization this week, the first of any public company to do so, and the others may not be far behind.) And despite the picture of Silicon Valley as a roiling sea of disruption, these five have gotten only stronger and richer over time.

Their growth has prompted calls for greater regulation and antitrust intervention. There’s rising worry, too, over their softer, noneconomic influence over culture and information — for instance, fears over how Facebook might affect democracies — as well as the implicit threat they pose to the jurisdictions of world governments. These are all worthy topics for discussion, but they are also fairly cold and abstract. So a better way to appreciate the power of these five might be to take the very small view instead of the very large — to examine the role each of them plays in your own day-to-day activities, and the particular grip each holds on your psyche.

We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

As the head of the Federal Communications Commission observed in a 1961 speech to broadcast executives, the industry’s revenue, more than $1 billion a year, was rising 9 percent annually, even in a recession. The problem, the FCC chairman told the group, was the way the business was making money: not by serving the public interest above all but by airing a lot of dumb shows and “cajoling and offending” commercials. “When television is bad, nothing is worse,” he said. That speech would become known for the pejorative that the FCC chairman, Newton Minow, used to describe TV: he called it “a vast wasteland.” It’s a great line, but there are other reasons to revisit the speech now, about 10 years after the emergence of another communications service—Facebook—that has become ubiquitous in American homes, a staggering financial success, and a transmitter of a lot of pernicious schlock. What’s striking today is why Minow said the vast-wasteland problem mattered—and what he wanted to do about it. As for why it mattered, Minow told the TV executives: “Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.” On that point in particular, Mark Zuckerberg apparently would agree.

Taking the Fight for Digital Rights to Our Libraries

Increasingly, the library is the place where people trust—and use—not just the librarian at the help desk, but also the search engine, online catalogs, digital archives, and electronic databases. So when patrons come into the library to find out about a sexually transmitted disease, for example, they will likely find themselves interacting with the online library—a messy mixture of library-specific digital tools and broader Internet resources that create all sorts of privacy risks for patrons.

Here’s how the library encounters privacy risks. Increasingly, the library contracts with a number of third parties to run various services, for example, OverDrive for e-book services, Bibliocommons for interactive catalogs, and ProQuest for electronic and magazine databases. Companies like these have the power to set their terms of service. That includes protecting the details of what patrons do when they use such tools or not. Not too long ago, library professionals caught Adobe Digital Editions transmitting patrons’ e-reading information in an unencrypted manner. Designed to seamlessly integrate with a library’s website, most services don’t make it obvious to a patron that a private company makes choices about her user data.

The Co-op’s Broadband Plan for Success

In the battle to deploy broadband, cooperatives (co-ops) can be a decisive force to cover the rural flanks in states with aggressive broadband adoption goals such as California, New York, and Minnesota. In the more rural states, or ones without stated commitments to broadband, co-ops may have to carry the lion’s share of responsibility if their rural communities are to have a hope for broadband. This report helps you make the business case for your local co-ops building broadband networks. It doesn’t give you all the answers but it does point you in the right directions with some questions you need to answer.

A Global Broadband Plan for Refugees

With global displacement at record levels, policymakers and humanitarian organizations increasingly recognize the role communications technology can play in facilitating protection solutions for refugees, both in transit and at destination. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has documented how mobile and Internet connectivity, specifically, enable refugees to remain safe, access health and educational services, build livelihoods, and keep in touch with families and communities. Yet significant gaps in broadband access, adoption, and usage mean that refugees are often less connected than host populations, many of which face their own connectivity challenges. Refugees living in rural areas, for example, are twice as likely as the global rural population to have no network coverage at all. And more than one-third of all refugees live in an area without the 3G network coverage needed to browse the Internet, use most apps, and conduct video calls.

This policy brief draws on its authors’ diverse experiences—working to assure refugee protection, developing the U.S. broadband plan, and analyzing the economics of broadband networks—to propose a framework for the creation of a global broadband plan for refugees. Through careful scoping of localized challenges and alignment of refugee connectivity efforts with host-country broadband strategies and market forces, such a plan holds the promise of improving the connectivity of the world’s more than 21 million refugees and the communities that host them.

Charges Against FCC Heat Up

Fight for the Future says the Federal Communications Commission is hiding something in regard to the cyberattacks that brought the agency's website down. “The public wants to know what the FCC is hiding,” said Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer. “They’ve been lying to us for weeks about net neutrality. It’s very difficult to accept their claims about [distributed denial of service] attacks when they have provided zero evidence to support them.” Groups like Fight For the Future and Color of Change, as well as Sens Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), called on the FCC to release proof of the attacks.

Sprint sues FCC for 'capricious' deregulation of business data services

Sprint and another Windstream filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission for the agency's recent decision on business data services.

The companies are seeking relief "on the grounds that the [FCC’s] Report and Order is arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion," according to a filing in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Richard Levy, a law professor at the University of Kansas, said the court would not determine whether the FCC adopted the correct policy, but whether it is consistent with statute. "Those kinds of filings go the agency's way, more often than not," he said. "Occasionally, they will be able to demonstrate some sort of flaw in what the agency did." As the petitioners, Sprint and Windstream requested that the court reverse, annul or set aside the FCC's Report and Order, and provide additional relief as determined proper. If a flaw is found, Levy said, the agency still may be able to readopt the policy with a better explanation to support it or to revise the policy. Usually, the court will not completely reverse it. In Sprint's case, he added, "The best case is to have it reversed. Sometimes it's worth it even if the only impact is to delay a regulation for a couple of years."

Groups Petition FCC to Delay Reinstating Obsolete Loophole That Would Usher in a New Era of Media Consolidation

Free Press and a coalition of media-rights groups petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to stay its ruling reinstating an obsolete television-ownership rule. The rule in question, called the “UHF discount,” allows broadcasters to exceed the national ownership cap by discounting the actual population coverage of their UHF broadcast stations for purposes of calculating their stations’ reach.

The FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai voted in April to put this rule back on the books to pave the way for runaway broadcast-industry consolidation, like the Sinclair-Tribune merger that was announced earlier this week. These conglomerates hope to exploit the discount to leap over the 39 percent national audience-reach cap Congress put in place. In their petition to the agency, Common Cause, Free Press, Media Alliance, Media Mobilizing Project, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Prometheus Radio Project and the United Church of Christ Office of Communication, Inc. explain that this is a dangerous outcome stemming from a bad agency decision. The UHF discount is a technically obsolete loophole that allows the FCC to underestimate the true reach of broadcast companies. It’s technically obsolete because while UHF stations once had weaker signals, today stations broadcasting on these channels actually have better signals thanks to the Digital TV transition that occurred a decade ago. As the groups’ filing makes clear, “Reinstatement of the UHF discount opens the door for rapid and massive consolidation despite a congressional directive that there should be a limit on the scope of national ownership.”

Internet Regulation

[Commentary] Internet providers have long offered an open internet experience. Along with web companies like Facebook and Google, internet service providers support open internet rules preventing blocking, throttling or unfair discrimination of online traffic. There is little objection to these common-sense consumer protections, but widespread resistance to the fiction that the government needs to impose outdated public utility regulation to assure openness. What we object to is regulating dynamic internet networks in the same way we regulate failing infrastructure like electricity, water, roads and bridges. Public utility regulation has failed America, and it’s foolish to apply it to the internet, the one infrastructure bright spot that has fueled America’s global competitiveness. The Federal Communications Commission is right to work toward restoring light-touch regulation before the information superhighway becomes marked with potholes.

[Powell, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is president and chief executive of NCTA, the Internet and Television Association]

Verizon Wins Bidding War for Straight Path Communications

Verizon Communications will buy Straight Path Communications for about $3.1 billion, after beating rival AT&T in an unusually intense bidding war for the wireless-spectrum holder.

News outlets shut out of Trump meeting with Russians

On the morning of May 10 as controversy swirled over the president abruptly firing his FBI chief amid an investigation of possible ties between Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia, the president met in the Oval Office with none other than Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But the meeting was closed press, meaning the rotating pool of photographers, reporters and camera operators who follow the president weren't allowed in. Yet photos of the three laughing and smiling were soon published by the Russian state news agency TASS. The Russian foreign ministry also tweeted photos of the meeting.

Asked by the print pooler why members of the Russian media were allowed into the meeting but no U.S. press was permitted, a White House official said, "Our official photographer and their official photographer were present, that's it," meaning TASS was considered the Russians' "official photographer."

A hidden message in memo justifying Comey’s firing

Anyone seeking further confirmation that Donald Trump’s presidency is primarily a media story need look no further than the surprise firing of FBI Director James Comey. According to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Comey was essentially let go for talking to the press. That’s almost surely not the real reason he was fired, but in this case, the media is both a smokescreen and a clue.

Comey’s ouster falls perfectly in line with the administration’s broader positions on media control, leaks, and leakers. It also offers more evidence, in case anyone needed it, of Trump’s overweening desire to control the news cycle.

‘Respect print and grow digital’: Survey of over 400 local journalists reveals optimism

[Commentary] "What's it like to work at a local newspaper?” That’s the question we asked journalists across the United States at the end of 2016, as part of a new study supported by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

The conclusions, derived from an online survey of 420 journalists at small-market newspapers (with a circulation of under 50,000), reveal a cohort that is actively embracing digital technologies and wants to know more about their potential. As a group, they’re also more optimistic about their future than might be expected and keen to challenge the “doom and gloom” narrative about the local news industry.

[Christopher Ali is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Damian Radcliffe is the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism at the University of Oregon.]

Cable News Networks Pressed for More Diverse Political Talkers

A coalition of groups, including GLAAD, CAIR and Common Cause, has written to the heads of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC calling for more diversity in the guests booked for morning political talk shows. "At a time when our communities continue to be the victims of hate crimes, the media must do better in representing the broad spectrum of America," wrote the members of the Coalition Against Hate. CAIR, for example, said: "Networks must work harder to include Muslim representation and avoid providing platforms to those who would condition Americans to fear and hate their Muslim neighbors." All the groups pointed to a Media Matters analysis of cable news coverage in January and March that concluded that white men were the overwhelming percentage of guests on those top cable news nets, while black, Latino, Middle Eastern, Asian-American, and LGBTQ guests are woefully underrepresented. "At a time when these communities are disproportionately impacted by the political climate—including as targets of a growing wave of hate crimes—it is imperative that your networks do better to reflect the full diversity of our country."