1. Monthly archive
  2. April 2017

April 2017

A scholar asks, ‘Can democracy survive the Internet?’

Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford University, is among the many — academics, political practitioners, journalists, law enforcement officials and others — who are attempting to understand better the consequences of conducting campaigns and governance here and around the world in the Internet age.

He has written about this in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Democracy in an article with a title that sums up his concerns: “Can Democracy Survive the Internet?” The provocative title isn’t simply the result of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, though that is obviously a front-and-center issue. “I think it’s the shiny object that everyone understandably pays attention to right now, but the problem is bigger than that,” Persily said. The campaign of 2016 highlighted the degree to which elections are carried out on terrain far different from when television and traditional print organizations were the dominant media.

Estimating willingness-to-pay for broadband attributes among low-income consumers: Results from two FCC Lifeline pilot projects

Recent studies have confirmed that broadband adoption (as opposed to simply having access to broadband infrastructure) is positively linked with economic growth. In light of this, federal policy efforts have switched from focusing mainly on the provision of infrastructure to more explicit adoption-oriented efforts. One of those efforts was the Federal Communications Commission's Low-income Broadband Lifeline Pilot Projects, which ran from 2013 to 2014. The program worked with 14 private telecommunications firms to subsidize household broadband adoption for low-income households by providing discounted monthly and equipment costs. Low-income households are an important component of the broadband adoption puzzle: between 2003 and 2013, the adoption gap between low-income and high-income households actually increased by 5% points. This paper focuses on two specific FCC Broadband Lifeline Pilot projects that allowed consumers to make choices among different options, such as data allowance, speed, and wireless vs. wired connections. Conditional logit models are used to develop estimates of consumer's willingness-to-pay for specific broadband attributes. The results indicate that low-income consumers have a preference for smartphone connections (versus aircards) – and that this effect is even more pronounced for those households earning less than $20,000; that low-income consumers have a preference for wired connections (versus wireless); and that there is evidence that low-income consumers are willing to pay for an extra GB of data each month – but not for the speed of their connection.

Telecom giants spent $11m on first-quarter lobbying

Major internet service providers spent more than $11 million on lobbying amid fights over privacy rules and a coming showdown over net neutrality. Three of the largest telecom companies — AT&T, Verizon and Comcast — collectively spent a total of $11.2 million during the first three months of the year, according to disclosure forms filed to Congress on Thursday.

Of the three telecom giants, AT&T spent the most during the period, dishing out $4.6 million on lobbying. Its first-quarter spending was the sixth highest among all entities that filed disclosures. Comcast and Verizon spent $3.7 million and $2.9 million respectively. The sum total isn’t especially high for the companies for a three-month period, as they spent slightly more during the first quarter of 2016. The companies all lobbied on a wide variety of issues, and the filings do not break down how much was spent on each topic.

The US government’s ‘witch hunt’ to root out a Trump critic has now sparked an investigation

The federal government’s effort to root out an anonymous critic of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies has sparked an investigation into whether officials abused their authority by demanding that Twitter reveal the identity of one of its users, according to a letter released April 21. The Twitter account was part of an explosion of anonymous online criticism of Trump that began shortly after his inauguration in January and appeared to emanate from within many federal agencies. The Department of Homeland Security’s effort to identify the user behind one of these accounts — @ALT_uscis, which uses the acronym for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — prompted a summons to Twitter demanding that the company reveal the identity of the user, who was thought to be a federal employee.

The March 14 summons provoked a lawsuit from Twitter and sharp criticism from privacy advocates. Amid this backlash, federal officials rescinded the summons, and the company dropped its suit, appearing to resolve the case. But DHS Inspector General John Roth decided to investigate possible abuse of authority in this case, as well as “potential broader misuse of summons authority” within the department, he wrote in a letter to Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), who had called the effort to unmask the Twitter user a “witch hunt.”

Sen Markey Gets Some Massachusetts Tech Support for Internet Fight

Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) said Massachusetts tech leaders, including Microsoft, were pledging to join his fight to protect network neutrality. Sen Markey's definition of that is to prevent Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai from reversing his predecessor's reclassification of Internet service providers as Title II common carriers under the Open Internet order.

Sen Markey's office said April 21 he had met with the following, who had joined his defense of net neutrality: Mark Kidd, senior VP of Iron Mountain; Jody Rose, executive director of New England Venture Capital Association; Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot; Mohamad Ali, CEO of Carbonite; Steve Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor; Enrique Colbert, general counsel of Wayfair; Cathy Wissink, director of technology and civic engagement, Microsoft New England.

Lessons Learned from the Trump Campaign

[Commentary] There is unlikely to be another presidential campaign like the one that made Donald Trump our 45th president last year. But there are lasting lessons for local broadcasters to be derived from it: 1) their lock on the presidential spend may not be as strong as they might think; and 2) as sellers they have to get as smart about Big Data and targeted advertising as the buyers.

© 1994-2026 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.