October 2017

POLICYMAKERS

SENATE CONFIRMS PAI TO ANOTHER TERM
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Harper Neidig]
The Senate voted 52-41 to confirm Ajit Pai to another term as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Pai was approved with support from 48 Republicans and four Democrats: Sens Joe Manchin (D-WV), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Gary Peters (D-MI) and Jon Tester (D-MT). Some Democratic Sens vocally opposed his confirmation, hammering him in a series of floor speeches over his efforts to roll back Obama-era regulations, in particular the network neutrality rules. “The FCC is tasked with the critical role of protecting consumers and promoting innovation in the telecommunications and technological fields that are becoming more and more integral to our day to day lives,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement ahead of the vote. “However, over his time at the FCC and particularly in his tenure as Chairman so far, Mr. Pai has established a clear record of favoring big corporations at the expense of consumers, innovators, and small businesses,” he said.
benton.org/headlines/senate-confirms-fcc-chairman-pai-another-term | Hill, The | ars technica | Broadcasting&Cable
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ELECTIONS

FACEBOOK RUSSIAN-LINKED ADS CAME IN MANY DISGUISES
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Mike Isaac, Scott Shane]
The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook in 2016 tried on quite an array of disguises. There was “Defend the 2nd,” a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page for gay rights activists, “LGBT United.” There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads. Federal investigators and officials at Facebook now believe these groups and their pages were part of a highly coordinated disinformation campaign linked to the Internet Research Agency, a secretive company in St. Petersburg, Russia, known for spreading Kremlin-linked propaganda and fake news across the web. Under intensifying pressure from Congress and growing public outcry, Facebook on Oct 2 turned over more than 3,000 of the Russia-linked advertisements from its site over to the Senate and House intelligence committees. The material is part of an attempt to learn the depth of what investigators now believe was a sprawling foreign effort spanning years to interfere with the 2016 United States presidential election.
benton.org/headlines/facebooks-russia-linked-ads-came-many-disguises | New York Times
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DOES ZUCKERBERG EVEN KNOW WHAT FACEBOOK IS?
[SOURCE: The New York Times, AUTHOR: Max Read]
Mark Zuckerberg had just returned from paternity leave, and he wanted to talk about Facebook, democracy, and elections and to define what he felt his creation owed the world in exchange for its hegemony. A few weeks earlier, in early September, the company’s chief security officer had admitted that Facebook had sold $100,000 worth of ads on its platform to Russian-government-linked trolls who intended to influence the American political process. Now, in a statement broadcast live on Facebook on September 21 and subsequently posted to his profile page, Zuckerberg pledged to increase the resources of Facebook’s security and election-integrity teams and to work “proactively to strengthen the democratic process.” There are real consequences to our inability to understand what Facebook is. Not even President-Pope-Viceroy Zuckerberg himself seemed prepared for the role Facebook has played in global politics this past year. In which case, how can we be assured that Facebook is really safeguarding democracy for us and that it’s not us who need to be safeguarding democracy against Facebook?
benton.org/headlines/does-even-mark-zuckerberg-know-what-facebook | New York Times, The
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COMMUNICATIONS & DEMOCRACY

TRUMP COMPANY HAD MORE CONTACT WITH RUSSIA DURING CAMPAIGN
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Tom Hamburger, Rosalind Helderman, Adam Entous]
Apparently, associates of President Donald Trump and his company have turned over documents to federal investigators that reveal two previously unreported contacts from Russia during the 2016 campaign. In one case, Trump’s personal attorney and a business associate exchanged emails weeks before the Republican National Convention about the lawyer possibly traveling to an economic conference in Russia that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladi¬mir Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence. In the other case, the same Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, received a proposal in late 2015 for a Moscow residential project from a company founded by a billionaire who once served in the upper house of the Russian parliament, these people said. The previously unreported inquiry marks the second proposal for a Trump-branded Moscow project that was delivered to the company during the presidential campaign and has since come to light. Cohen declined the invitation to the economic conference, citing the difficulty of attending so close to the GOP convention, according to people familiar with the matter. And Cohen rejected the Moscow building plan.
benton.org/headlines/trumps-company-had-more-contact-russia-during-campaign-according-documents | Washington Post
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NETWORK NEUTRALITY

LOBBYING AT THE FCC
[SOURCE: Center for Public Integrity, AUTHOR: Ryan Barwick]
The Trump administration is weighing one of the most significant rulings on how the internet will operate in the future — broadly affecting both the US economy and how Americans get crucial information — but the decision is already a foregone conclusion. Unlike three years ago, when Washington was abuzz over the Federal Communications Commission enshrining network neutrality into hard-set rules, this time around it’s crickets. And that has net-neutrality supporters worried. When former-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler last proposed rules, internet providers were livid. Armies of lawyers and lobbyists representing AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and others poured into FCC’s headquarters. They came armed with binders, briefs and PowerPoint presentations to confront and cajole FCC commissioners and staff. In all, FCC commissioners and staff held 79 meetings between the release of Wheeler’s proposal in May 2014 and the comment deadline in September 2014, more than a meeting every two days. Now, three years later, current FCC Chairman Pai, a free-market Republican and staunch critic of government regulations, has proposed to reverse Wheeler’s rules, aggressively pushing a return to classifying internet providers as an “information service,” a designation with far fewer regulations. The change, which the FCC is likely to vote on later this year, would both neuter the commission’s ability to rein in providers and open the possibility, again, of creating slow and fast lanes for internet traffic — determined in part by who is willing to pay. This time around, Republicans control the commission. And it’s a lot quieter at the FCC — perhaps because the internet titans see a friend in the chair who isn’t prone to considering other opinions. From May 18, when the FCC released Pai’s proposed rules, to the end of the public comment period on Aug. 30, commissioners and agency staff met only 16 times with companies and other organizations — about one meeting every six days, or one-fifth as many as when Wheeler issued his proposal in 2014. No one from AT&T set up a meeting. No Verizon. No Comcast. In fact, of the 16 meetings, the FCC met with only two, relatively small, internet providers: Antietam Cable Television Inc., a provider serving a rural county in Maryland, and Home Telephone Company Inc., which provides service north of Charleston, South Carolina. Most of the people sitting down with the FCC worked for advocacy groups such as the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which lobbies for inclusive and affordable communications, and the Voices for Internet Freedom Coalition, a group of minority organizations that support net neutrality.
benton.org/headlines/future-internet-grabs-theoretically | Center for Public Integrity
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NET NEUTRALITY DEBATE FAILS TO RECOGNIZE MIDDLE GROUND
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Doug Sicker]
[Commentary] Those against the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rollback of network neutrality regulations fear that allowing Internet service providers to control internet speed based on ability-to-pay will lead to an internet tilted in favor of companies with deeper pockets, not necessarily better services. But according to the rollback’s supporters, the current net neutrality regulations put in place by the Obama administration are an egregious overstepping of power on the part of the federal government, and serve to stunt growth and innovation in the industry. But both sides fail to realize there is a middle ground — one that benefits consumers, but still keeps control from being pushed too far in either direction. It does not have to be either the federal government in control or broadband providers. It does not have to be one to the exclusion of the other. In fact, one could argue that a very workable compromise would be to move back to a regulatory regime — whether through FCC efforts, a narrowly focused legislative solution, or some combination of the two — in essence representing the original rules in the first Open Internet Order (no blocking, no throttling, etc.), but not including the current Title II classification.
[Doug Sicker is the Department head of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon. He is also the previous chief technology officer at the Department of Commerce and the chief technology officer at the Federal Communications Commission.]
benton.org/headlines/net-neutrality-debate-fails-recognize-middle-ground | Hill, The
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THREE STEPS CONGRESS COULD TAKE ON NET NEUTRALITY
[SOURCE: The Conversation, AUTHOR: Timothy Brennan]
[Commentary] Without legislating specific net neutrality rules, Congress could take three important steps to clear away irrelevant legal impediments and make the debate more productive for regulators and the public alike.
1) Separate classification from regulation: Congress could enact legislation that removed the distinction between “telecommunication” and “information” services. The economic case for whether and how a firm should be regulated has nothing to do with what service it provides.
2) Restore a focus on the ‘public interest’: The Federal Communications Commission made a mistake by treating network neutrality as a competition problem rather than as a tool to protect speech.
3) Restore the role of antitrust in telecommunications: Focusing the FCC on the public interest would be easier if the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division or the Federal Trade Commission could guard against internet service providers engaging in monopolistic practices. At present, the antitrust agencies may not have that authority.
[Timothy Brennan is currently a professor public policy and economics at the University of Maryland. He was chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission during 2014.]
benton.org/headlines/three-steps-congress-could-take-help-resolve-net-neutrality-debate-without-legislating-fix | Conversation, The
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INTERNET/BROADBAND

DEFINING DIGITAL DOWN
[SOURCE: Brookings, AUTHOR: Tom Wheeler]
[Commentary] In 1994 Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY)decried what he felt was an ongoing redefinition of acceptable behavior designed to normalize what had previously been unacceptable. He described this phenomenon as “Defining Deviancy Down.” The Trump Federal Communications Commission is following a similar “defining down” policy when it comes to what is acceptable in the all-important networks that connect us. By quietly altering the measuring sticks, the Trump FCC is “Defining Digital Down” to reset the definition of acceptable behavior by the companies that control America’s networks. Instead of working to build the best possible future for Americans, the agency’s new definitions lower expectations, declare victory where there is none, and set the stage for anti-consumer consolidation. Instead of challenging American companies to, for instance, raise average internet connectivity speeds to levels above those of Kenya, the Trump FCC is seeking to redefine downward what constitutes high-speed broadband. Changing the measuring stick changes the outcome. Imagine how the results of last weekend’s football games could have changed if a first down was only nine yards. Quietly, and with little notice, the agency that is supposed to be protecting consumers is changing its definitions in a manner that favors the corporations they are supposed to oversee at the expense of the consumers they are supposed to protect.
[Wheeler is a Brookings Visiting Fellow and former chairman of the FCC]
benton.org/headlines/defining-digital-down | Brookings
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IN APPALACHIA, PUBLIC BROADBAND PROJECT HITS SNAG
[SOURCE: Associated Press, AUTHOR: Adam Beam]
Kentucky's plan to build one of the country's largest publicly owned broadband networks was touted as a cornerstone of the effort to save the Appalachian economy by bringing high-speed internet to some of the poorest counties in America. It was supposed to take a year to finish, but three years later only a fraction of the 3,000 mile network of fiber optic cables known as Kentucky Wired has been built. Construction has been plagued by delays, forcing the state to pay $7 million in penalties to its private-sector partners with the potential of "tens of millions" more. State officials had been counting on public schools and libraries to help pay some of the bills but that plan has fallen through, and project officials plan to ask state lawmakers for millions of dollars in taxpayer money to make up the difference. Now, some of the state's most influential lawmakers want to pull the plug, and have asked project leaders how much that would cost.
benton.org/headlines/appalachia-public-broadband-project-hits-snags | Associated Press
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SECURITY/PRIVACY

REDRESSING THE PRIVACY BALANCE FOR INTERNET CONSUMERS
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: Rick Boucher]
[Commentary] Today’s privacy rules are anything but clear. Internet content providers like Google, Facebook and Amazon are regulated for privacy by the Federal Trade Commission, the historic internet-privacy protection body. Internet-service providers that link consumers to the network, such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast, were also regulated for privacy by the FTC until 2015, when the Federal Communications Commission classified internet access as a telecommunications service, stripping the FTC of that authority. Privacy is too important to be left to the whims of regulatory agencies. Instead, Congress should consider taking an approach akin to the Browser Act (HR 2520), sponsored by Rep Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), that would unify privacy rules across the internet under the FTC, from operating systems to browsers to ISPs to edge content providers.
[Rick Boucher was a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from Virginia for 28 years and chaired the House Communications Subcommittee. He is honorary chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA) and head of the government strategies practice at law firm Sidley Austin]
benton.org/headlines/redressing-privacy-balance-internet-consumers | Multichannel News
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OWNERSHIP

DOJ OKAYS CENTURYLINK-LEVEL THREE MERGER
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The Justice Department has said it is OK with CenturyLink's proposed merger with Level 3, contingent on the spin-off of some dark fiber and metro network assets. CenturyLink said the conditions had been outlined in a consent decree to which it has agreed. The deal is still subject to approval by the Federal Communications Commission. CenturyLink must divest CenturyLink metro network assets in Albuquerque (NM), Boise (ID), and Tucson (AZ), but can still serve those customers if they choose the combined company over the buyer of the divested assets. The merged company will also divest 24 strands of dark fiber (not currently in use). “We are pleased that the Department of Justice has conditionally cleared CenturyLink’s acquisition of Level 3,” said CenturyLink SVP John F. Jones. “It is an important milestone in our overall approval process. We anticipate court approval of our agreed resolution with the Department of Justice as early as this week. We are focused on meeting our targeted transaction closing timeframe of mid-to-late October.” The merger, which was filed last December, is valued at $34 billion including debt.
benton.org/headlines/justice-dept-okays-centurylink-level-three-merger | Multichannel News
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JOURNALISM

COVERING TRUMP IN A POLARIZED MEDIA ENVIRONMENT
[SOURCE: Pew Research Center, AUTHOR: Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried, Galen Stocking, Katerina Eva Matsa, Elizabeth Grieco]
In an era when Americans’ choices about whom to turn to and trust for news are often divided along political lines, a new Pew Research Center study of media coverage of the early days of the Trump administration finds those preferences can be significant. Seven-in-ten stories from outlets with a left-leaning audience and 62% from those with a more mixed audience included at least two of nine types of sources evaluated, such as a member of the administration, a member of Congress, or an outside expert. That was true, however, of less than half the stories (44%) from outlets with a right-leaning audience. In particular, outlets whose audience leans right of center were less likely to include Trump and his administration, outside experts or interest groups as sources. They were also about half as likely to include voices from both Democratic and Republican members of Congress (7% of stories vs. 14% for outlets with a left-leaning audience and 15% for outlets with a more mixed audience). Compared with the three prior presidencies, coverage of Trump’s early days in office moved further away from a focus on the policy agenda (31% of stories, compared with 50% for Obama, 65% for Bush and 58% for Clinton) and toward character and leadership. And the evaluations of President Trump were far more negative and less positive than those of his predecessors.
benton.org/headlines/covering-president-trump-polarized-media-environment | Pew Research Center | Vox | The Hill | B&C
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TELECOM

SPACEX BECOME BIGGEST TELECOM PROVIDER?
[SOURCE: Medium, AUTHOR: Gavin Sheridan]
[Commentary] By launching 11,943 satellites SpaceX will do to telecoms what WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger did to SMS and in doing so capture a $1tn+ business — and there’s fringe benefits for Tesla. What SpaceX are actually seeking is to replace every broadband and communications provider on the planet, by cutting out the middle man of land-based networks that stand between you and the internet. In doing so they will be essentially competing with every communications provider in the world — a business valued at over a trillion dollars. Forget about poor communities in Africa for a second: this is a pitch to replace physical fibre/cable connections in modern industrialised economies But a few questions arise from this including the big one: mobile phones. Will the plan be to have mobile phones work directly with satellites overhead? Is that even possible? Or will there be a hybrid approach — provide broadband to physically static locations and work from there?
[Gavin Sheridan is the Founder and CEO of Vizlegal.]
benton.org/headlines/will-spacex-become-worlds-biggest-telecoms-provider-probably | Medium
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EDUCATION

ERATE REPORT
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: ]
The Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau presents this report on voice services in the schools and libraries universal service support mechanism (more commonly known as the E-rate program), as directed by the FCC in its 2014 E-rate Order. During the phasedown of voice services which began in funding year 2015, fewer applicants have applied for voice services, though most of the applicants who no longer apply for voice services continue to seek E-rate support for other services. Further, the majority of the applicants who did not receive E-rate support for any service other than voice services in funding year 2014 now receive E-rate support for services other than voice.
benton.org/headlines/modernizing-e-rate-program-schools-and-libraries-0 | Federal Communications Commission
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DIVERSITY

SILICON VALLEY EMPLOYMENT
[SOURCE: The Guardian, AUTHOR: Sam Levin]
Black and Latino representation has declined in Silicon Valley, and although Asians are the most likely to be hired, they are the least likely to be promoted, according to a new study exposing persistent racial prejudice in the tech industry. The research from not-for-profit organization Ascend Foundation, which examined official employment data from 2007 to 2015, suggests that people of color are widely marginalized and denied career opportunities in tech – and that the millennial generation is unlikely to crack the glass ceiling for minorities. “There have been no changes for Asians or any other minority over time – men or women,” said Buck Gee, the study’s co-author and an executive adviser to Ascend, a US-based research group that advocates for Asian representation in businesses. For some groups, he added, “It’s actually worse.” While women and people of color are employed at tech companies in larger numbers than they used to be, their upward mobility at those companies has stagnated. From 2007 to 2015, white men consistently composed a higher share of executive roles than professional roles at tech companies, the study found. It’s the reverse for Asians, Hispanics and blacks, especially if they’re women.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/03/silicon-valley-divers...
People of color — especially women — aren’t being promoted in tech as fast as they should be (Vox)
benton.org/headlines/black-and-latino-representation-silicon-valley-has-declined-study-shows | Guardian, The | Vox
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October 2017

European Union courts to hear case that could hobble Facebook

Google critic Barry Lynn takes on tech giants

Google and Facebook Failed Us

History tells us that more regulation means less free speech and increased market power

Startup in Residence Program to Expand to Washington, D.C.

For Children, The New Bedtime Story Is a Podcast

Why Tech Leadership Has a Bigger Race than Gender Problem

As Federal Data Disappears, New Tool Gives Power to Cities

Did Trump’s White House staff break the law by using private email? I asked 7 legal experts.

October 3, 2017 (Tom Petty and our Broken Hearts)