A volunteer member of the advance team for President Donald Trump blocked a photojournalist's camera as he tried to take a photo of a protester during a campaign rally in Indiana. A photo taken by Associated Press photographer Evan Vuccishows the volunteer stretching out his hand over the lens of a news photographer's camera after a protester disrupted Trump's campaign event. President Trump paced on stage at the Ford Center as the protester was led out.

The conspiracy theory about Google’s search algorithms falls in line with others propagated by President Donald Trump (Obama’s birth certificate, the deep state, etc.) in that they are paranoid and largely fact-free, yet very hard to completely refute. Even when they are squarely refuted–as when Obama produced his birth certificate–they often live on. But since Google will never, ever, make public its search algorithm–nothing is more proprietary than that–speculation that it’s biased against conservatives will live on and on.

An antitrust case may be the one viable way that the White House or Congress could act against Google and other huge platforms like Facebook. And sure enough, by the afternoon of Aug 30, President Trump’s statements on the matter had begun to include the language of antitrust. “I won’t comment on the breaking up, of whether it’s that [Google] or Amazon or Facebook,” President Trump said. “As you know, many people think it is a very antitrust situation, the three of them. But I just, I won’t comment on that.” Interestingly, within hours of President Trump’s comments, one of the president’s main GOP loyalists (and apologists) in the Senate, Sen Orrin Hatch (R-UT), sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons asking that the agency look into Google’s search and digital advertising businesses. The government may do Google harm by exacting large fines for antitrust violations, but that scenario does not seem a direct and proportionate remedy to the perceived problem President Trump complained of. So the real motivation for the penalty would always be in question. Was it just, or merely political retribution? Also, in order for the FTC or the Department of Justice to act, they would have to have clear evidence that a law has been broken. Considering the way US law treats search services like Google’s, that’s a tall order. “The Telecommunications Act of 1996, as I recall, kept edge services (although they weren’t known by that at the time) from being regulated by the FCC,” said ex-FCC chairman Tom Wheeler. “That leaves the FTC, and they have no broad regulatory power.”

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, appointed to the post by President Donald Trump, wants to remove a majority of wireless providers that participate in the Lifeline program, in an attempt to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse.” If such a move were made, the “chaos would be magnificent,” said David Dorwart, the chairman of the National Lifeline Association (NaLA), a trade organization that represents Lifeline businesses. Roughly 10.7 million Americans receive text, voice and data under the program and 70 percent would have to look for a new service provider under the proposal, according to NaLA, if an affordable option is even available. The program cost about $1.3 billion dollars in 2017, and the funding comes from the Universal Service Fund, which is collected from subscribers by service providers. “They get their doctor calls, and they reach out to schools, and that won’t be available to them at the cost it is today,” said Dorwart said of Lifeline users. “It’s not only an accessibility issue, it’s an affordability issue.”

“It’s a direct attack on the poor,” said Jessica González, deputy director of Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that supports equal access to communications services. Before attending law school, González participated in the Lifeline program after she was let go as a teacher in the suburbs of Los Angeles. González pointed out that the least connected groups across the country are often minority and low-income groups. “There may not be discriminatory intent, but there certainly will be a discriminatory impact from the proposal. … It’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen out of the FCC.”

The California Senate voted on Aug 31 to approve the toughest state-level net neutrality bill in the US, one day after the California Assembly took the same action. The bill would prohibit Internet service providers from blocking or throttling lawful traffic and from requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers. The bill would also ban paid data cap exemptions (so-called "zero-rating"). It says that ISPs may not attempt to evade net neutrality protections by slowing down traffic at network interconnection points. The final vote was 27-12, with all 26 Democratic state senators and Republican State Senator Ling Ling Chang voting in favor. All 12 no votes came from Republican senators. In the Assembly, six Republicans joined 55 Democrats to pass the bill in a 61-18 vote. With both legislative houses having approved the bill, Governor Jerry Brown (D-CA) has until September 30 to sign it into law. Broadband industry lobby group USTelecom is urging Gov. Brown to veto the bill, saying net neutrality should not be enforced with a "state-by-state piecemeal approach."

It’s been a tough fight, with one near-fatal stumble, but California’s assembly just passed what are undoubtedly the strictest protections for net neutrality in the country–if not the world. After what supporters hope will be a perfunctory re-vote in the state Senate, the bill will go to Gov Jerry Brown (D-CA), who has 30 days to sign or veto it.

In June, the bill crashed and momentarily caught fire, under intense lobbying pressure from telecom companies, lead by AT&T. CA State Rep Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles), took a red pen to CA State Sen Scott Wiener's (D-San Francisco) senate bill, striking out nearly every provision of substance to leave a milquetoast list of platitudes. He also cut off debate, pushing the gutted bill through the committee–by unanimous, bipartisan vote–on June 28. State Sen Wiener withdrew support for his no-longer-recognizable bill, and all appeared to be lost. None of this was due to partisan battle. CA has an overwhelming majority of Democrats in the state house, as well as a Democratic governor. These were all battles among factions in the same party. That helps explain what happened next, when the full weight of the party (including from once and perhaps future Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) came down on State Rep Santiago. He also faced a heavy (sometimes nasty, ad-hominem) social media chastening from constituents. Industry opposition continued, including deceptive, alarmist robocalls. But after State Rep Santiago’s conversion, the path was largely cleared, culminating in an Assembly vote of 58-17 on August 30. Owing to some amendments, however, the revised bill will have to pass the State senate again before it goes to Governor Jerry Brown.

A project that is supposed to bring high-speed broadband connections to schools and libraries in Navajo and Gila counties (AZ) and eventually to homeowners and businesses could lose state and federal funding. The Navajo-Gila County Information Technology Education Consortium (NGCITEC) that represents 51 schools and libraries within Navajo and Gila counties that have a tremendous amount at stake because this is likely a one-time shot at grant funding that would bring the $60 million dollar project to the counties for free. The Consortium submitted state and federal applications for grant funding back in March and then responded to Program Integrity Assurance (PIA) inquiries in April and June — questions regarding their bid evaluation process and their selection of a bid whose cost was double every other vendor. The funding was denied on July 10, by state and federal sources. The back-and-forth between the two counties and the state and federal agencies has slowed the project to a crawl. A state administrator says they must submit a new application to the state’s E-rate program to have any hope of receiving $5.1 million in state funding, plus the funding match for a $61 million dollar broadband project intended to bring high-speed internet to schools and libraries. “The timeframe to fix their submission for FY 2017-18 has passed,” according to Milan Eaton, state E-rate director with the Arizona Department of Education. “Their funding was denied on July 10, and I strongly recommend they throw out the bad laundry and move forward because the state funding will go away in 2020.”  “This funding and additional $8 million from Arizona may never again be available to Arizona schools and libraries in our lifetime, or even in our grandchildren’s lifetime,” warns Eaton. But representatives of Navajo County dispute this. They say the application is still moving through the process.

Analytics and consulting firm GlobalData is recommending that telecommunication companies and webscale companies work together to develop communications services based on balloons and drones. Using atmospheric satellite balloons and drones in telecom could support emergency communications and could provide coverage in unserved areas, GlobalData said. Some US carriers, including AT&T, have used or are looking at using drones in telecom to act as cellsites during service outages when traditional cellsite infrastructure is damaged. Meanwhile, webscale companies such as Google and Facebook are experimenting with using balloons and drones in telecom. Researchers also argue that the cost of service can be as big a barrier as a lack of service when it comes to global coverage.