Ina Fried

The confirmation hearings of Judge Brett Kavanaugh were a poignant, painful and raw moment for the country. They were also a defining moment for social media. People posted their tears, their stories, their outrage wherever they were — in schools and on buses, at work and at home. From 9am to 7pm ET there were 8.8 million hearing-related tweets. That's well more than the 4.5 million tweets about this year's State of the Union address, but still far less than the 75 million vote-related tweets on Election Day 2016.

Fight #1: The race to get 5G networks up and running, a three-way game among US, China, and South Korea. While the US may be technically first with 5G in a few places, China is spending significantly more and will likely be first with 5G en masse.

With new attacks by President Donald Trump, high-stakes testimony Sept 5 on Capitol Hill, and a midterm election vulnerable to online manipulation, tech’s giants are bracing themselves for two months after Labor Day that could decide whether and how much the government regulates them. The companies — led by Facebook and Google but with Twitter, Apple, and Amazon also in the mix — are caught in a partisan vise, between privacy-oriented critics on the left who fear further election interference and newer charges from the right of anti-conservative bias and censorship.

The good news is that, after years of having to pay per gigabyte, unlimited plans are now the norm at all of the major US wireless carriers. The bad news is that, somehow, those same companies have managed to create different categories of unlimited. At the low-end, some have data caps before speeds are throttled. At the high-end, many come with premium video services (the latest battleground).

AT&T: The biggest challenge with AT&T's unlimited plans is that the options and combinations keep changing.

When people think about the challenge that Facebook and Twitter pose to our democracy, they don't often think about James Madison and the Federalist Papers. But perhaps they should, argues constitutional scholar Jeff Rosen. Rosen pointed to Madison's writings in No. 55 of the Federalist Papers in arguing against direct democracy. "In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason.

For tech executives, the Trump administration's child separation policy provided a moment of clarity when the choice to speak out was relatively easy. But after Trump's executive order, companies were once again struggling to figure out how to respond.

The dissolution of net neutrality regulations and the AT&T/Time Warner decision could shape the internet for years to come. 

Commissioner Mignon Clyburn of the Federal Communications Commission says every route should be pursued to restore network neutrality rules, from the courts to Congress. But she didn't say which she thought would be most likely to succeed because she thinks "it's important for all of the sectors and these points and these avenues to be addressed," she said.

When it comes to the four major carriers, everyone says they are going to be first with 5G. It's always a race to be first with a new generation of technology (and to claim being first, which isn't always the same thing.) The stakes are extra high — both within the U.S. and on the global stage, with China, Korea, Japan and others all looking to be ahead of the game. Expect even more noise (and therefore more confusion) when the cellphone industry's big conference, Mobile World Congress, starts Feb. 26 in Barcelona, Spain.

While the tech industry as a whole started speaking out against President Donald Trump’s travel ban over the weekend, one segment has been noticeably silent: The big telecommunication firms.

There hasn’t been a peep from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile, and there could be a clear reason why. Each of those firms really wants big things from the Trump administration and doesn’t want to risk angering the new president. Sprint and T-Mobile are seen as highly likely to seek approval for some sort of merger, while AT&T is in the midst of trying to buy Time Warner. Verizon, which has already made several deals, is seen as a potential buyer of a cable company or other major player that would require regulatory approval. All four would also like to see the Federal Communications Commission pull back on overall regulation, including the most aggressive parts of net neutrality.