Tim Karr

Free Press responded to filings by Sinclair Broadcast Group, Tribune Media, 21st Century Fox and Fox Television Stations, calling on the Federal Communications Commission to reject Sinclair’s proposed takeover of Tribune. In a filing to the FCC, Free Press states that broadcasters continue to rely on thoroughly debunked public interest claims to bolster their weak arguments and misrepresent concerns raised by Free Press and other groups that have petitioned the agency to deny the merger.

[Commentary] AT&T executives think their plan to take over Time Warner is too big to fail. But the proposed merger’s astronomical cost may prove them wrong. For the deal to go through, AT&T and Time Warner need the approval of government regulators, especially those at the Department of Justice, who will vet it to see if it violates antitrust laws. But there’s another metric by which regulators should evaluate the merger: its impact on real people, especially low-income households and communities of color.

AT&T will need to regularly pay interest to service its massive debt. The telecommunications giant doesn’t print cash; it bills customers. In other words, to pay down its interest, AT&T will have to hike prices. Higher prices would put Internet access further out of reach of the more than 30 million adults in this country stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. According to US Census data, this gap is most pronounced in African-American and Hispanic communities. People already suffering from generations of systemic racism are disadvantaged further by lack of access to the educational and work opportunities that are at the fingertips of those with high-speed connections. For the enormous amount of money AT&T is shelling out to acquire Time Warner, it could run super-fast gigabit-fiber Internet services to every single home in America. There’s no doubt that this mega-merger doesn’t benefit ordinary Americans. People want reliable, cheap and fast connections to the open Internet. We also need a choice of providers, not a few bloated companies controlling access to both the Internet and the content that flows across it. The merger of AT&T and Time Warner is just too big and costly to accomplish that. For that reason, it must be blocked.

[Tim Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press]

[Commentary] Donald Trump wants to make the Internet great again. Problem is, the GOP nominee doesn’t know enough about the Internet to understand what, if anything, that means.

On Sept 21, Trump’s campaign came out against an Obama Administration plan to relinquish US control of one important aspect of the Internet: the supervision of domain names. The plan is to remove the US government control of that function and transfer it more fully to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, a global body. Trump’s sometime-nemesis Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) is threatening to hold the government-spending bill hostage unless Congress rejects President Barack Obama’s plan. Sen Cruz wrongly states that the ICANN transition would “empower countries like Russia, China and Iran to be able to censor speech on the Internet, your speech." On this Trump agrees. “The Republicans in Congress are admirably leading a fight to save the Internet this week, and need all the help the American people can give them to be successful,” a Trump campaign spokesman said in a statement. “Congress needs to act, or Internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost.”

But Trump and Sen Cruz are wrong. And it’s Trump who has repeatedly threatened to shut down the Internet to keep Americans safe from terrorists. He’s offered few specifics about how this might be achieved.

[Tim Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press]

[Commentary] Black Lives Matter may have harnessed the power of social media, but it has yet to control it. For many, Facebook has come to represent a public square — a place where we can assemble with others, share information and speak our minds. But it isn’t public. It’s a private platform where everyone’s rights to connect and communicate are subject to Facebook’s often arbitrary terms and conditions.

Facebook needs clear guidelines and processes that are transparent to users on how it determines whether to block someone’s stream or deactivate an account. It shouldn’t allow police to demand takedown requests to avoid scrutiny or cover up abuse. We need to know when and why Facebook and other social media platforms have granted these requests, with clear standards for the future. The fight for racial equity in the media is often a fight against media monopoly, especially when these companies are white-owned and operated. And Facebook is a face of monopoly in the age of social media. New gatekeepers like Facebook must make confronting racism a priority. Yes, Zuckerberg has been outspoken in his support for racial justice — even hanging a Black Lives Matter sign outside company headquarters. But we must urge him to ensure that his company’s actions match his words. Providing clarity and accountability on Facebook’s policy for suspending accounts and blocking images of police encounters is a start.

[Tim Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press]

[Commentary] In 2016, for the first time, Internet policy is prominent in both major-party platforms. While there are distinct disagreements and differences in approach to tech policy, there are also areas of common ground — revealing potential openings for bipartisan action.

Access: When it comes to getting everyone connected there are some signs of accord. But neither party goes far enough to address the real obstacles to bridging the digital divide. The GOP seeks to “facilitate access to spectrum by paving the way for high-speed, next-generation broadband deployment and competition on the Internet and for internet services.” The Democrats want to deploy “next-generation wireless service that will… bring faster Internet connections to underserved areas.” The Republican platform encourages “public-private partnerships to provide predictable support for connecting rural areas so that every American can fully participate in the global economy.” The Democrats want government to take it one step further by working to “finish the job of connecting every household in America to high-speed broadband, increase Internet adoption, and help hook up anchor institutions so they can offer free Wi-Fi to the public.” While both platforms emphasize rural connections, they ignore the adoption gap in urban areas, as my colleague S. Derek Turner, research director at Free Press, explains. “The emphasis on rural is understandable, but the truth is we’ve made strides in rural areas,” Turner said, noting that there are both public and private initiatives to build out. “Rural areas have near-universal coverage; what they lack is multiple options at higher speeds. We’ve continued to ignore the competition problem, which impacts lower-income people and people of color the most.”

[Tim Karr advocates for universal access to open networks at Free Press and Free Press Action Fund]

[Commentary] We have entered a new era -- one where our rights to connect and communicate are under constant siege by governments and corporations. It is the information counter-revolution.

The once democratic online world is giving way to a model where governments and powerful communications companies call the shots. In this new reality, Internet users have turned into data profiles and bargaining chips. A whole new surveillance industry has cropped up to provide governments with the tools to filter online content, break privacy-protecting encryption codes and aggregate and sort data on Internet users.

[Karr is Senior Director of Strategy, Free Press]