April 2017

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon have a committee to advise the agency on promoting diversity in the communications industry, Chairman Ajit Pai announced April 24. “Every American should have the opportunity to participate in the communications marketplace, no matter their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation,” Chairman Pai said. “This Committee will be charged with providing recommendations to the FCC on empowering all Americans,” Pai added. “For example, the Committee could help the FCC promote diversity in the communications industry by assisting in the establishment of an incubator program and could identify ways to combat digital redlining," the concern that minority or poorer communities are covered by worse telecommunication infrastructure.

The agency will solicit suggestions from the public on who should sit on the panel, which will be called the Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment. The FCC has implemented similar initiatives in the past, but they appear to have fizzled out. The agency’s Advisory Committee for Diversity in the Digital Age, for instance, has not had a meeting since 2013.

[Commentary] Could it be that large tech companies — and Google in particular — have become natural monopolies by supplying an entire market’s demand for a service, at a price lower than what would be offered by two competing firms? And if so, is it time to regulate them like public utilities? Consider a historical analogy: the early days of telecommunications....

We are going to have to decide fairly soon whether Google, Facebook and Amazon are the kinds of natural monopolies that need to be regulated, or whether we allow the status quo to continue, pretending that unfettered monoliths don’t inflict damage on our privacy and democracy.

[Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab ]