December 2017

One of the main fears that school officials have about curtailing “net neutrality” is that internet service companies will have new powers to throttle or block the flow of online content that serves as academic lifeblood for many districts. But gauging whether those worries are justified or overblown requires a lot of speculation about industry behavior, and how it would apply to schools. Chris Lewis, a vice president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge, said dire scenarios envisioned by some school officials are not unrealistic.

The Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer in New York City recently released a request for information (RFI) to gather input from industry experts on the city’s plan to provide universal broadband, connecting every resident and business in the city with affordable high-speed internet access. This RFI builds on other local initiatives — like LinkNYC, NYCx, and the Governors Island Connectivity Challenge — for developing models and creating strategies to successfully deploy broadband throughout the city.

In this first year in the Age Of Trump, favorable public opinion about the news media has gone up. According to a new report from Poynter, 49% of the public has at least a “fair amount” of trust and confidence in the U.S. media, which is an uptick from the year before.  Though this sounds good, when Poynter analyzed this data further, it showed some alarming trends. Specifically, this uptick in trust is very polarized, and represents a resurgence of media trust from people on the left, while those on the right continue to show little confidence in the press.