Op-Ed

[Commentary] State-sponsored propaganda like the recently unmasked @TEN_GOP Twitter account is of very real concern for our democracy. But we should not allow the debate over Russian interference to crowd out concerns about homegrown misinformation, which was vastly more prevalent during and after the 2016 election. The problem isn’t that we’re only willing to listen to sources that share our political viewpoint; it’s that we’re too vulnerable as human beings to misinformation of all sorts. Given the limitations of human knowledge and judgment, it is not clear how to best protect people from believing false claims.

Brendan Nyhan is a professor of government at Dartmouth College.

Yusaku Horiuchi is a professor of government at Dartmouth College.

[Commentary] The European Union’s law “laying down measures concerning open internet access” came into force in 2016. After a year with the law on the books, telecom regulators across Europe have submitted compliance reports to the supervisory Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) and the European Commission. While no bad internet service providers (ISPs) or violations have emerged, a regulatory bureaucracy is growing because of the law. 

[Commentary] No matter how valuable the Lifeline program is in theory, it’s wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. It allows the telecommunications carriers who profit from the program to verify eligibility for their participants — and too many are turning a blind eye. Lifeline was poorly structured and badly executed from the start. The goal of providing low-income Americans help regaining their economic footing with phone and broadband service is worthwhile and admirable — but that doesn’t mean that any plan doing that is worthy of unequivocal support.

Sidestepping the problems in this terribly run program is a disservice to all participants as well as those footing the bill, and will endanger the program’s existence if we allow it to continue. I’ll remain engaged on this issue and committed to serious changes. In the meantime, I encourage my party, as well as my friends from across the aisle, to join me in pushing for oversight and accountability regardless of its political convenience.

[Commentary] Congress is considering sensible reforms to ensure that Fourth Amendment warrant requirements apply to incidental and “about” collection. We believe that Section 702 authorities are important to our national security. But the unanimous opinion of the Review Group stands since 2013: Judges should approve Fourth Amendment search warrants before searching the communications of Americans.

[Peter Swire is the Elizabeth and Tommy Holder Chair of Law and Ethics at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business, and served as one of five members of President Obama's Review Group on Intelligence and Communication Technology. Dick Clarke is CEO of Good Harbor]

[Commentary] The European Union’s law “laying down measures concerning open internet access” came into force in 2016. After a year with the law on the books, telecom regulators across Europe have submitted compliance reports to the supervisory Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) and the European Commission. While no bad internet service providers (ISPs) or violations have emerged, a regulatory bureaucracy is growing because of the law.

[Roslyn Layton was a member of the Trump FCC transition team, and is a visiting researcher at Aalborg University Center for Communication, Media, and Information Technologies and a vice president at Strand Consult, both in Denmark.]

[Commentary] There is one aspect of criminal justice reform that the current administration has tragically ignored: the broken market for inmate calling services.

Inmate calling is a horribly malfunctioning system that not only adversely impacts inmates and their families, but our society as a whole. Providers of inmate calling services compete and win business not based on being the lowest-cost bidder, as is customary for most requests for proposals to governmental agencies. Rather, they win contracts based on which of them is willing to pay the most in kickbacks (they call them “commissions”) to those correctional facilities. The result is not the lowest cost service for inmates and their families, but instead, rates for phone calls that have been as high as $14 per minute.

The FCC should end the practice of picking and choosing, ignoring and punting, while an unarguably dysfunctional market regime preys on the most vulnerable. The FCC can and should adopt targeted rules to address the costs of interstate calls. States and localities can and should reform their practices to cap rates and eliminate kickbacks. And Congress can and should enact a legislative solution that provides a firm legal foundation for further inmate calling reforms. Private litigation could also attack these practices, and some lawsuits have already been filed. But policymakers should also work to help new services and technologies enter the marketplace, to increase competition and lower prices. There is no good policy reason why an inmate’s family should have to use the most antiquated and expensive systems to communicate with loved ones when viable alternatives exist. The time to act is now.

[Commentary] If we cannot get net neutrality right, we can forget about the transformative democratic potential of the net. Network neutrality is the necessary, but not the sufficient, foundation of an open internet. And anything less than a truly open internet would be a tragic denial of the awesome potential of digital technology to transform our lives.

We should be in a golden age of media. We might have gotten to such a golden age had we not allowed the consolidators to kill independent media, not encouraged Wall Street expectations to smother Main Street needs, not permitted commercialization to supersede real news and information, and not let our US government default on its public interest responsibilities. I believe more and more people in your country and mine, regardless of party persuasions, are becoming concerned about this. You and I in both our great nations must harness this concern and turn it into policy. No one is going to do this for us. We can have that golden age, we need that golden age, and we will get there not separately, but together. It will be a tough climb, but a climb worth making. Let’s put on our mountain-climbing boots and get on with it.

[Former-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps joined Common Cause to lead its Media and Democracy Reform Initiative.]

[Commentary] Anchor institutions like schools, libraries and health care providers play an important role in bringing connectivity to their local communities. But advances in telemedicine and education will not be fully realized if rural consumers do not have adequate broadband service at home. School aged children will struggle if they cannot do their homework. Individuals with medical conditions that require active monitoring – diabetes, congestive heart failure and more – need broadband at home to transmit critical medical data in real time to medical professionals.

That is why local government officials and anchor institutions should be paying attention to the implementation of the Connect America Fund, now and in the years ahead. The FCC is working to hold an auction in 2018 to award nearly $2 billion in funding over the next decade from Phase II of the Connect America Fund to service providers to extend fixed broadband to unserved residential and small business locations, and a separate auction to award $4.53 billion in funding over a decade from Phase II of the Mobility Fund to mobile wireless providers to extend LTE service to rural America. Any entity willing to provide the requisite level of service set by the FCC and meet other requirements can bid in those auctions for the subsidy.

Local leaders should ask: is it possible to utilize funding in a more coordinated way from E-rate, the Rural Healthcare program, and the Connect America Fund to build a business case to serve the entire community? What efficiencies might be gained from building an integrated broadband network for the entire community? Are the service providers that currently participate in any of these FCC’s universal service programs planning to bid in these upcoming Connect America Fund auctions? Who else might bid?

[Carol Mattey is the principal of Mattey Consulting LLC, which provides strategic and public policy advisory services to broadband providers, governmental agencies, non-profit organizations, and other entities active in the telecommunications arena]

[Commentary] Internet’s unique ability to personalize and to create virtual communities of interest accelerated the decline of newspapers and television business models and altered the flow of information in ways that we are still uncovering. “Media” now means digital and cable, cool mediums that require hot performance. Trust in all media, including traditional media, is at an all-time low, and we’re just now beginning to grapple with the threat to democracy posed by this erosion of trust.

At Knight Foundation, we have long supported efforts to strengthen trust in news. Given the heightened challenge we face, Knight is ramping up our funding of these efforts, and we recently formed a new panel, the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy, to explore the broader challenges facing journalism and its role in civic life.

[Alberto Ibargüen is the CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation]

[Commentary] Wikipedia, one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web, is in existential crisis. This has nothing to do with money. A couple of years ago, the site launched a panicky fundraising campaign, but ironically thanks to Donald Trump, Wikipedia has never been as wealthy or well-organized. American liberals, worried that Trump’s rise threatened the country’s foundational Enlightenment ideals, kicked in a significant flow of funds that has stabilized the nonprofit’s balance sheet.

That happy news masks a more concerning problem—a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website. It is another troubling sign of a general trend around the world: The very idea of knowledge itself is in danger.

[Hossein Derakhshan is an Iranian-Canadian media analyst who was imprisoned in Iran from 2008 to 2014.]