Technology companies are facing growing international obstacles affecting how their most valuable asset — data — flows across borders. New trade agreements and laws are affecting how companies share and store their troves of data around the world. For decades, trade talks centered around tangible goods such as oil, agriculture and cars.
House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) took aim against FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who joined Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D-NY) to bash fake comments and call for a delay to the Federal Communications Commission vote to repeal net neutrality rules. “There is no reason” for delay, said Chairman Greg Walden. “That is a false issue, and I am deeply disappointed in the role that Commissioner Rosenworcel has decided to play in this matter.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is making the rounds to rally supporters behind his plan to roll back the neutrality rules. His efforts include a huddle with House Republicans set for Thursday and a visit to the Senate Republican.
[Commentary] Some have tried to whip Americans into a frenzy by making outlandish claims. Feeding the hysteria are silly accusations that my Restoring Interernet Freedom plan will “end the internet as we know it” or threaten American democracy itself. These claims obscure a pretty mundane truth: This plan would simply restore the successful, light-touch regulatory framework that governed the internet from 1996 to 2015.
In crafting rules for the Restoring Internet Freedom proceeding, the Federal Communications Commission consulted the following sources, all of which are cited in the publicly released draft order:
[Commentary] It's hard to know what is sadder — that the Tribune’s Editorial Board believes that cat videos are the best thing about the internet or that it picks the interests of fat-cat internet service providers over its readers. Net neutrality is not “a new concept promulgated by the Obama administration,” but a consumer protection concern that dates back at least as far as the George W. Bush administration when then-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell outlined four “internet freedoms”:
American democracy is fragile, and unless care is taken it could follow the path of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. That was the somewhat jaw-dropping bottom line of Barack Obama in a Q&A session before the Economic Club of Chicago, the Chicagoan who used to be president dropped a bit of red meat to a hometown crowd that likely is a lot closer to him than the man whose name never was mentioned: President Donald Trump. The US has survived tough times before and will again, he noted, particularly mentioning the days of communist fighter Joseph McCarthy and former President Richard Nixon.
[Commentary] Did Obama really invent net neutrality? Even in a country with famously short attention spans, at least some people might have noticed that net neutrality has been around longer than that. So where did net neutrality come from? How did it get started? What’s now called the “net neutrality debate” is really a restatement of a classic question: How should a network’s owner treat the traffic that it carries? What rights, if any, should a network’s users have versus its owners?
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