August 2016

Facebook said that it would start displaying advertisements to users who have an ad blocker installed on their desktop browsers.

Its decision comes amid rising concerns from the advertising industry that the proliferation of ad blocking software is hurting their business. Facebook said that it believes that it now gives users enough control over what ads they see to warrant circumnavigating the blocking software. “We’ve designed our ad formats, ad performance and controls to address the underlying reasons people have turned to ad blocking software,” said Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth. “When we asked people about why they used ad blocking software, the primary reason we heard was to stop annoying, disruptive ads,” he said. “As we offer people more powerful controls, we’ll also begin showing ads on Facebook desktop for people who currently use ad blocking software.” Bosworth also slammed ad blocking software that stops blocking ads from publishers or services that pay for the privilege, calling that “a practice that is at best confusing to people and that reduces the funding needed to support the journalism and other free services that we enjoy on the web.” The move aligns Facebook, at least in spirit, with the publishers over whom it has significant power as a primary channel for content distribution.

In 2009, Winthrop (MN) population 1,400, decided it needed an Internet upgrade.

Most local residents were served by companies like Mediacom, which Consumer Reports consistently ranked among the country’s worst Internet providers. Slow connection speeds made work difficult in local schools and businesses, but farmers outside of town, who increasingly rely on connectivity to do business, experienced the worst of it. Now, in this sparsely populated swath of Minnesota, a grassroots, member-owned cooperative spanning more than 700 square miles and four counties is poised to expand high-speed broadband access—without relying on federal funding. After seven years of development led by local leaders and volunteers, RS Fiber, now in its first phase of construction, is expected to deliver high-speed broadband Internet to more than 6,000 rural households by 2021. And unlike companies like Mediacom, the co-op is owned by local customers who have a say in rates and how it’s operated. Attracting investors to build a high-investment network in low-density communities wasn’t easy. To help raise seed funding, ten local governments issued bonds that covered half of the approximately $16 million required for the project’s first phase.

This model got local banks interested. As long as local demand meets projections, revenue from the broadband network will more than repay government loans, and taxpayers won’t owe a dime. “That’s the win-win,” said Chris Mitchell, director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, who has studied the project. “It’s a model in which local governments can take on the risk if they’re willing, and local banks can get a very reasonable return.”

On a Friday morning in January, an audience of congressional staffers and federal regulators were invited to Google's spacious DC office, conveniently located just a few blocks from Capitol Hill. The reason: to see Google and other companies demo a "prototype" for a new open interface on set-top boxes. The gathering took place two days after the Federal Communications Commission unveiled a proposal that could change how the majority of US households watch TV. Consumers would no longer be forced to rent clunky boxes from cable companies -- sometimes at a cost of more than $200 a year. Instead, the proposed rules would finally give households the option to access cable and satellite TV, as well as online streaming services like Netflix, through a single, cheaper device, potentially made by third parties like Apple, Amazon, and Google. The FCC proposal was guaranteed to enrage cable companies, long protective of their control over lucrative cable boxes. Yet, it was news of the conveniently timed product demo that made the battle lines clear to many inside the industry: Big Cable vs. Big Google.

[Commentary] The prospect of billions of dollars moving opaquely through the Internet and aimed at influencing our votes can sound ominous, especially as the Web is increasingly a tool that Americans use to communicate both personally and politically. In the broadest sense, allowing this flood of ad money feels contrary to our usual efforts to ensure that we know who is spending large sums to try to influence the makeup and actions of our government. But the world of campaign finance regulation has always been fuzzy and complex, especially as we try to balance the values of fairness and transparency with the equally fundamental principle of freedom of expression.

These new advertising tools, from e-mail and websites to Facebook and YouTube and more, clearly offer both opportunities and challenges in an already fraught landscape. The legal framework that defines when political spending should be disclosed — and perhaps even restricted — have centered on the subject of the message and the scope of the spending. Messages that advocate directly for or against federal candidates, and the use of significant amounts of money to present those messages, have been triggers for disclosure and sometimes limits. But these rules were developed in a communications environment where my spending on a 30-second TV or radio ad prevented you from using that same time; a big imbalance in spending could mean some messages were everywhere while others remained unheard. The Internet might be different. My use doesn’t obviously limit yours, and the cost of participating is a lot lower than the cost of broadcast ads.

[Bob Biersack is a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group tracking money in U.S. politics.]