Op-Ed

[Commentary] For all of the good intentions of the Federal Communications Commission, state utility regulators, and Lifeline advocates, numerous academic studies have demonstrated that the program is ineffective. The program has also been the victim of considerable fraud. What can be done? One solution may lie in the technology that made bitcoin possible: blockchain. Here’s how this might work for Lifeline.

[Commentary] In February of 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders issued the Kerner Report—which detailed an extensive and daunting list of inequalities and inequities that led to civil unrest in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Newark. Among its findings, the commission highlighted how the lack of adequate representation among the people assigning, reporting, and editing media coverage might drive “the underlying problems of race relations.” 

[Commentary] The Lifeline program is one of the Federal Communications Commission’s most important, most noble ventures. It is also one of the most problematic, suffering repeated criticism from the Government Accountability Office and others for waste, fraud, and abuse. In an effort to reform the program, the FCC has suggested limiting Lifeline participation to facilities-based telecommunications providers.

[Commentary] The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a pivotal antitrust case involving American Express (“AmEx”). The decision could have a profound impact on the way platform-based companies such as Google and AmEx will be treated under the law. Some of the Court's questioning was truly impressive, showing knowledge of both economics and the inner workings of credit card markets. Other questions? Not so much. Before pointing out the uneconomic utterances, let’s quickly review the case. Credit card companies make money two ways.

[Commentary] While the academic jury is still out on whether a person getting their news from social media makes them any more or less partisan than those who sought out right-wing talk radio or lefty political journals a generation ago, there exists another filter bubble that, while it’s received relatively little public attention, affects the majority of people reading this article: The average producer of online content is far more internet-savvy than the average consumer of online content.  While it’s always been expected that journalists and intellectuals be more knowledgeable about th

[Commentary] Voqal has long funded media content and distribution, spending millions of dollars annually. It seemed prudent for us also to support ways to measure the effects of that funding. Though we believed that our grants were having a significant impact, it’s a big step forward for us and for our grantees to be able to measure results.

[Commentary] Senate Democrats are proposing to undo the FCC’s wrongheaded rule through a process set up by the Congressional Review Act. [O]ne more vote [is needed] to ensure the internet remains free and accessible to all. That vote must come from the ranks of the Republicans, who so far have sided with internet service providers, the only group that is clamoring to remove the important consumer protections enshrined in net neutrality.

[Commentary] No matter how you look at them, Russia’s Facebook ads were almost certainly less consequential than the Trump campaign’s mastery of two critical parts of the Facebook advertising infrastructure: The ads auction, and a benign-sounding but actually Orwellian product called Custom Audiences (and its diabolical little brother, Lookalike Audiences).

A recent Mobile Beacon report analyzing mobile broadband usage by non-profit organizations, including schools, finds that schools utilizing Mobile Beacon’s 4G LTE internet service indicate that the ability to supplement and/or extend existing school networks is the greatest benefit of the service. While schools reported that the two main drivers for acquiring Mobile Beacon’s mobile broadband services are the desire for mobile connectivity (41%) and to save money on internet access (28%), they reported that the main benefits of using the services were 1) the ability to supplement/extend an e

[Commentary]  One of the internet’s most important qualities is that it slashes transaction costs to a bare minimum. What has followed is a remarkable development: It is becoming cost-effective, even profitable, to serve the world’s poorest two billion people—whether they are online or not. Entrepreneurs are devising new services to provide neighborhood-scale renewable energy and clean water, gas cooking-stoves, microloans for consumer goods and insurance against natural disasters.