1. Monthly archive
  2. April 2017

April 2017

AT&T Targeted Over Alleged Broadband Redlining in Cleveland

AT&T is being targeted with a lawsuit following accusations of broadband digital redlining. Attorney Daryl D. Parks (he represented the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown) of Florida law firm Parks & Crump and attorney Walter Madison from Akron (OH) are representing families in Cleveland (OH) who allege they have been "severely impacted" by a lack of connectivity and want a meeting with AT&T top brass to talk about it. They are threatening a lawsuit and Parks has written AT&T President Randall Stephenson asking for a meeting April 28 at the AT&T shareholders' meeting in Dallas (TX).

Parks said in the letter that the redlining was an invidious practice "copiously" documented by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance report that had irreparably injured his clients. AT&T is trying to get its Time Warner merger through the Department of Justice, an approval that could be complicated by such a suit. In fact, among the threshold Parks talks about in his letter is whether AT&T's behavior is "relevant to its FCC character qualifications or its DOJ competitive qualifications to complete its merger with Time Warner?"

After outcry by ethics watchdogs, the US State department pulled a story advertising Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort

Former White House ethics officials are accusing the State Department of violating ethics rules prohibiting “the use of public office for private gain” by publishing an article that promotes Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s private members-only club in Florida. The article, which tells the history of Mar-a-Lago and dubs it the “winter White House,” appeared on US embassy websites in the UK and Japan, among others. “This is a clear ethics violation—it should never have happened,” said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under president George W. Bush and current vice president of ethics watchdog CREW, which is suing President Trump over alleged violations of the constitution. “This is the use of public office for private gain. You can’t be promoting Mar-a-Lago on state department websites—it’s a business; you pay to join it.”

Update: Hours after Painter and Eisen’s complaints, the State department took down the articles that had allegedly violated ethics rules. A State department official said, “The intention of the article was to inform the public about where the President has been hosting world leaders. We regret any misperception and have removed the post.”

Pai to Congress: Set-Top Docket to Remain Open

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has told Congress he does not plan to close the set-top box docket, but signaled that was because it could still have some deregulatory legs. That came in a letter released April 21 in the FCC's periodic batch of chairman responses to congressional inquiries. Republican members of the House Commerce Committee had asked Chairman Pai to close the docket after FCC chairman Tom Wheeler was unable to get three Democratic votes for his "unlock the box," then "unlock the app" proposals.

Chairman Pai did not support Wheeler's approach and reiterated that in the letter. "I share your goal of promoting a clear, consumer-focused, fair, and competitive regulatory path for video programming delivery," he wrote. "Because I do not believe that the set-top box Order circulated by my immediate predecessor furthered this goal, I have removed it from circulation. As such, it is no longer pending before the Commission, and I do not intend to resurrect it." He said he agreed with closing dockets no longer under active consideration, but that it would be premature to put the set-top item in that category because in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which never got voted, there were unrelated issues teed up, including and in particular, on whether the FCC should eliminate the CableCARD reporting requirement.

Jimmy Wales goes after fake news with Wikitribune – a crowdfunded site for reporters

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is set to launch a community-driven online news service in response to the widespread distribution of deliberately misleading information masquerading as news. The project, Wikitribune, will be a hybrid model in which paid journalists will work with a broad network of contributors.

“We want to bring some of that fact-based, fact-checking mentality that we know from Wikipedia to news,” Wales says. Wikitribune will be financed through a crowdfunding campaign, launching April 24, that will determine the size of the initial team. Wales describes the core editorial mission of the platform as “facts matter” and intends that the site will be able to support “original reporting and investigative journalism”. “What’s fundamentally interesting is to get money to journalists to go out and research news stories,” Wales says. “One of the things that community guidance can do is to help figure out what do we not know? What are the things we need to know? Then you’ve got a lot of minds thinking about and discussing that this is the piece of the puzzle that needs more research.”

Google is updating its search to demote fake news

Google is demoting misleading and offensive content in its search by updating algorithms and offering users new ways to report bad results. The change follows increased attention to flaws in top search results, including the promotion of fake news — and deliberately misleading or false information formatted to look like news — during the 2016 presidential election.

Google said it has updated its algorithms to better prioritize “authoritative” content. Content may be deemed authoritative based on signals such as affiliation of a site with a university or verified news source, how often other sites link to the site in question and the quality of the sites that link. “We’ve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content, so that issues similar to the Holocaust denial results that we saw back in December are less likely to appear,” writes Ben Gomes, Google’s executive in charge of search, in a blog post published today. Additionally, users can now flag autocomplete features and highlighted results that are offensive, false or otherwise problematic. “We plan to use this feedback to help improve our algorithms,” writes Gomes.

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