Kate Cox

President Donald Trump has vetoed funding for the US military because the massive defense spending bill did not include a provision to repeal Section 230 which grants Internet service providers, including online platforms, broad immunity from being held legally liable for content third-party users share and grants those same services legal immunity from the decisions they make around content moderation. The National Defense Authorization Act would have authorized $740 billion in defense spending for the upcoming government fisc

Microsoft adopted a whole slew of "fairness principles" for its Windows app store.

The rule that prevented a studio from buying up a major theater chain is now gone—opening up the possibility that your local cinema could go whole hog and become a true Disneyplex before you know it. A federal judge agreed to the Department of Justice's petition to vacate the Paramount Consent Decrees, a landmark 1948 ruling that forbade vertical integration in the film sector and ended the Hollywood studio system. In isolation, the decision could raise some concerns.

In a Dec 20 court filing,  the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission argued that T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint is in the best interest of the US, and any nationwide injunction holding up the merger would block "substantial, long-term, and procompetitive benefits for American consumers." The argument, in large part, boils down to: trust us, we're the experts. "Both the Antitrust Division and the FCC have significant experience and expertise in analyzing these types of transactions and do so from a nationwide perspective," the agencies write.

[Commentary]
Claim: "Network neutrality has hurt investment and the broadband industry." Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai keeps making this claim, so we’ll keep debunking it.
Claim: “We support net neutrality, but just want to get rid of Title II.” A federal court ruled in early 2014 that the legal underpinning for the FCC’s rules was no good, and strongly implied the best way to square that circle would be common carrier classification. Without it the FCC did not have the legal authority to make ISPs adhere to rules about blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization of content.
Claim: "You can’t use old law because the internet is new technology." This is where we get to outright, bald-faced hypocrisy, instead of disingenuous misdirection.
Claim: “We should leave this to Congress.” In the hyper-partisan, hyper-polarized, frankly completely bonkers political world of 2017, getting Congress to act on anything is an uphill battle, to put it mildly. Getting them to do it in a bipartisan way is like herding unicorns.

A group of Internet industry executives and politicians came together to look back on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and to do a little crystal-ball gazing about the future of broadband regulation in the United States.

Former Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Michael Copps was among the presenters, and he had sharp words for the audience about the “insanity” of the current wave of merger mania in the telecom field and the looming threats of losing net neutrality regulation. Unlike many of the other presenters at the conference, Copps, was anything but retrospective when he stood to speak.

“I’m not here to celebrate,” he began, “I’m here to advocate.” And the landscape he laid out is indeed not one to cheer for. He led off by agreeing with the several executive speakers that true competition is the way of the future, and the best way to serve consumers.

“But we haven’t given competition the chance it needs,” he continued, before referring to how poorly US broadband compares on the global stage. “We have fallen so far short that we should be ashamed of ourselves. We should be leading, and we’re not. We need to get serious about broadband, we need to get serious about competition, we need to get serious about our country.”

Broadband competition is indeed scarce in the United States, and the looming wave of “merger mania” is unlikely at best to improve the situation for anyone.