September 2018

Tim Wu Thinks It's Time to Break Up Facebook

Tim Wu thinks it’s time to break up Facebook. Wu has a new book coming out in November 2018 called The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. Breaking up Facebook (and other huge tech companies like Google and Amazon) could be simple under the current law, suggests Wu. But it could also lead to a major rethinking of how antitrust law should work in a world where the giant platform companies give their products away for free, and the ability for the government to restrict corporate power seems to be diminishing by the day.

What I Hope to Learn from the Tech Giants

Elected officials will have a chance to question those who run Silicon Valley tech giants. This public scrutiny comes at an important time, as Americans across the political spectrum debate the ever-increasing role of these massive companies in our economy and civic society. Here are a few things I hope to learn from these hearings:

Rhetoric Aside: What the Data Actually Say About Broadband Deployment

Looking at the Federal Communications Commission’s Form 477 data from 2015 and 2016, three empirical facts emerge:

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Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

Date

Thu, 10/04/2018 - 15:00 to 16:30

For the last 40 years, antitrust policy has been guided by the consumer welfare standard, which generally allows companies to pursue mergers and other market strategies absent harm to consumers or anticompetitive conduct. But some activists have advocated for actively pushing back against the formation of large firms, an approach championed in the early 20th century by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Today’s neo-Brandeisians worry about what they see as undue concentrations of economic and political power, and they hope to prop up small businesses.

Read more about Scaling Innovation: Why We Should Preserve the Consumer Welfare Standard in Antitrust Policy

Amazon's market value reaches $1 trillion, joining Apple (Bloomberg)

Submitted by Robbie McBeath on Tue, 09/04/2018 - 11:49

President Trump again calls for reexamining NBC’s TV license, despite the fact it doesn’t have one

President Donald Trump suggested that NBC's television license should be “look[ed] at” in a tweet that called the network “FAKE NEWS.” But the Federal Communications Commission does not issue TV licenses to TV networks and cannot legally revoke an individual TV station's license based on the content of its programming. President Trump's tweet took aim at NBC's handling of journalist Ronan Farrow's reporting on Harvey Weinstein.

Op-ed

Fake News

Alex Jones Said Bans Would Strengthen Him. He Was Wrong.

After Silicon Valley internet giants mostly barred Alex Jones from their services in Aug, traffic to his Infowars website and app soared on the blaze of publicity — and the notorious conspiracy theorist declared victory. “The more I’m persecuted, the stronger I get,” Jones said on his live internet broadcast three days later. “It backfired.” Yet a review of Infowars’s traffic several weeks after the bans shows that the tech companies drastically reduced Jones’s reach by cutting off his primary distribution channels: YouTube and Facebook.

Like Bigger Peers, Tronc's Virginia Newsrooms Set To Unionize (National Public Radio)

Submitted by Robbie McBeath on Tue, 09/04/2018 - 10:53

Chairman Pai Hails Guilty Plea Over Threats to His Family

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai thanked law enforcement for its work in securing a guilty plea from a man who threatened his family. Markara Man plead guilty Aug 31 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, saying he was angry over the rollback of net neutrality rules. Man, 33, of Norwalk (CA), allegedly sent three emails to Chairman Pai Dec.

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