Reporting

Makan Delrahim, who's expected to be confirmed this week as head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, believes some so-called vertical mergers (such as the proposed AT&T-Time Warner deal) could pose anticompetitive concerns. He also said he will "vigorously enforce antitrust laws with respect to online platforms." "Just because a transaction or particular types of transactions have been approved in the past does not mean that they could not raise competitive concerns in the future," he said in written responses to questions submitted by Senators after Delrahim's short confirmation hearing.

Several advocacy groups have asked the United States Court of Appeals in Washington to stay the Federal Communications Commission’s April 20 decision to relax the national TV ownership cap by restoring the UHF discount in calculating station group coverage.

The effect of the FCC action is to lift the allowable coverage from 39% of TV homes to 78% assuming that all groups in a market are served by UHF stations. The immediate effect of the stay would be to derail Sinclair's proposed $3.9 billion purchase of Tribune Media that would balloon Sinclair's coverage from just below 39% to 72%. The motion for emergency stay pending a full review of the FCC action was filed by the Institute for Public Representations at Georgetown University Law Center on behalf of Free Press, Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, Prometheus Radio Project, Media Mobilizing Project, Media Alliance, National Hispanic Media Coalition, and Common Cause. The court has given the FCC until June 1 to respond to the motion.

President Donald Trump returned home on Saturday to confront a growing political and legal threat, as his top aides tried to contain the fallout from reports that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a focus of investigations into possible collusion between Russia and the president’s campaign and transition teams. The White House canceled a presidential trip to Iowa and was putting together a damage-control plan to expand the president’s legal team, reorganize his communications staff and wall off a scandal that has jeopardized his agenda and now threatens to engulf his family.

Behind the scenes, Trump’s advisers were working to create a crisis-control communications operation within the White House to separate the Russia investigations and related scandals from the administration’s day-to-day themes and the work of governing. The goal is to give President Trump more outlets for communicating his message in an unvarnished way, while curbing opportunities for aides to be confronted publicly with damaging developments or unflattering story lines. Under the evolving scenario, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, would take a diminished public role, with daily on-camera briefings replaced by more limited interactions with journalists, while President Trump would seize more opportunities to communicate directly with his core supporters through campaign rallies, social media appearances such as Facebook Live videos, and interviews with friendly news organizations.

Louisville has launched a new public workspace — one that combines free loaner laptops and fiber Internet connection with modern design aesthetics, the sort more closely associated with trendy coffee shops than government facilities. And it’s done so in an economically challenged neighborhood where people often lack access to tech.

A central aim of this space is to help foster entrepreneurial partnerships and economic growth in a section of the city facing significant obstacles. The workspace, dubbed the PNC Gigabit Experience Center, is located in the Louisville Central Community Centers' (LCCC) Old Walnut Street development, which is in the Russell neighborhood on the city’s west side. The neighborhood didn’t even have a place where residents could grab a coffee and hop onto Wi-Fi, whether it be to discuss potential business collaborations, apply for jobs or simply browse the Web. The PNC Gigabyte Experience Center seeks to rectify this dearth by providing higher connection speeds and loaner tech, in a space that feels both vibrant and productive. The PNC Gigabit Experience Center is part of Louisville’s recently announced digital inclusion strategy, the city's plan to remove technological barriers so that all citizens have the digital access, skills and hardware to get jobs, degrees and other services.

AT&T-supported legislation in Illinois that would eliminate a requirement for the telco to offer landline voice service, or "plain old telephone service," has been met with opposition from the Citizens Utility Board (CUB) and the AARP, igniting new debate on legacy services. Senate Bill 1381, which was passed 56-2 May 24, would abolish the state requirement that incumbent carrier AT&T offer traditional phone service. CUB said that the bill would set in motion a process that would eventually allow the company to send "cease to offer" notices to its 1.2 million business and residential landline customers in Illinois. Additionally, the legislation would increase phone rates for current customers by allowing AT&T to eliminate the low-cost "Consumer's Choice" local calling plans.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft and a host of tech companies asked Congress to reform a government surveillance program that allows the National Security Agency to collect emails and other digital communications of foreigners outside the United States.

The requests came in the form of a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), who is overseeing the debate in the House of Representatives to reauthorize a program, known as Section 702, which will expire at the end of the year without action by Capitol Hill. In their note, the tech companies asked lawmakers for a number of changes to the law particularly to ensure that Americans’ data isn’t swept up in the fray. Meanwhile, they endorsed the need for new transparency measures, including the ability to share with their customers more information about the government surveillance requests they receive. Signing the note are companies like Airbnb, Amazon, Cisco, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Lyft, Microsoft and Uber. Absent, however, is Apple.

FreedomPop is hoping to cash in on the Federal Communications Commission’s overhaul of the Lifeline program, which subsidizes telecommunications services for low-income consumers.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai directed the agency to eliminate the federal approval process for Lifeline service providers, effectively returning those processes to the state level. Critics say the move will require would-be service providers to undergo a lengthy and perhaps prohibitively burdensome course to extend offerings to Lifeline participants. But FreedomPop, an MVNO that provides wireless services in North America and Europe, is licensing its platform as a way for companies to bring offerings to market through Lifeline more simply and affordably. The company announced a deal with one Lifeline service provider, PWG Solutions, and said it will launch with a few more companies in the coming months.

“It’s pretty much impossible to get certified across 30 states, so you’ve got these (potential service providers) who are just stagnant,” FreedomPop CEO Stephen Stokols said. “Rather than just trying to come in and outdo them, we’re literally just going to empower them, basically extend our technology to these guys so they can modernize.” FreedomPop uses a freemium model to entice users, then upsells them into bigger packages or other value-added services such as additional local numbers for users in foreign lands or a “safety mode” that prevents overage charges. It sells handsets as well as SIM cards enabling customers to activate their own phones.

Nearly six in 10 (58%) of mobile users in a nationwide mobile data plan survey would switch mobile services providers if they had more choice and control regarding how they used their data. That includes those with unlimited mobile data plans, according to the survey conducted by digital commerce technology provider Matrixx Software. Yet more revealing, more than half said they would switch data plans at least once a month if they could choose the plan they believe best meets their needs. Some said they would do so as often as once a day.

[Commentary] Montana GOP congressional candidate Greg Gianforte said of a Guardian reporter, “The last guy did the same damn thing.” From the looks of things, “the same damn thing” appears to boil down to asking questions of the candidate. Polite and relevant questions: Are they what had made Gianforte so “sick and tired”? Are polite and relevant questions what he was bemoaning when he talked about “the same damn thing”? Speaking of the news media as the people’s enemy and singling out reporters in menacing fashion at public events are both aspects of Trump’s trickle-down authoritarianism. He has done both. For decades, Republican candidates talked and talked and talked about the ravages of the so-called liberal media. Historians may look back at recent events — the manhandling of reporter Michelle Fields by a Trump campaign aide last year; the Jacobs confrontation — as the beginning of an action phase.

For those concerned about press freedom, the first months of the Trump administration have been troubling. Journalists have been yelled at, pepper-sprayed, pinned by security, and even arrested on the job. Now, one reporter has accused a Republican candidate of assault. Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said the recent episodes were not enough to make any sweeping statements about the way journalists are being treated since President Trump took office. “But what’s certainly unprecedented in modern American history is the rhetoric: the way that Trump talks about the media, the constant verbal attacks and the framing of journalists as enemies and purveyors of fake news,” he said. Simon said the committee was gathering data to identify trends and patterns. He said the assault case was particularly alarming.