Daily Digest 10/14/2019 (A model for bridging digital divide?)

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society
Table of Contents

Broadband

Libraries and Schools Join Hands to Connect New Mexico Pueblos  |  Read below  |  Jonathan Sallet  |  Analysis  |  Benton Institute for Broadband & Society
60% of Farmers Say They Don't Have Good Enough Internet to Run Their Business  |  Read below  |  Katie Dehlinger  |  Progressive Farmer
Sohn: FCC Authority is Key to Compromise Net Neutrality Bill  |  Read below  |  John Eggerton  |  Broadcasting&Cable
Q&A with Free Press' Craig Aaron: ‘The Public Is Clearly on the Side of Net Neutrality’  |  Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Conflict Preemption of State Net Neutrality Efforts After Mozilla  |  Read below  |  Daniel Lyons  |  Op-Ed  |  Free State Foundation
Anacortes, Washington, is building a public broadband network. Is it a model for bridging digital divide?  |  Read below  |  Monica Nickelsburg  |  GeekWire
Rural students, teachers part of about 1 million Ohioans with limited broadband access  |  Farm and Dairy

Wireless

T-Mobile-Sprint merger deal approaches next hurdles  |  Read below  |  Margaret Harding McGill  |  Axios
Mississippi AG switcheroo on T-Mobile/Sprint is unique, says Blair Levin  |  Read below  |  Monica Alleven  |  Fierce
New America Urges Court to Reject T-Mobile/Sprint Merger  |  New America
Public Knowledge Argues That Proposed Sprint/T-Mobile Merger Conditions Do Not Protect Consumers  |  Public Knowledge
Wireless Satisfaction Study: The Large Business Customer is Happier Than the Small Business Customer  |  telecompetitor
5G backhaul requires more symmetry than previous wireless generations  |  Fierce

Ownership

FTC Policy: Commissioner Phillips Downplays Potential Use of Sherman Act Section 2 to Block Mergers  |  Read below  |  Capitol Forum
Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell: An obsolete law stops broadcasters from making their services available to everyone  |  Wall Street Journal

Security/Privacy/Public Safety

Huawei helped bring Internet to small-town America. Now its equipment has to go.  |  Read below  |  Jeanne Whalen  |  Washington Post
Smart TVs are data-collecting machines, Princeton study shows  |  Vox
Technology Sabotaged Public Safety (Without us even noticing)  |  Atlantic, The
An ordinary person in a large city in a stable, democratically governed country lives in permanent and total surveillance  |  Quartz
What you do on the Internet is worth a lot. Exactly how much, nobody knows.  |  Washington Post
David Pogue: 10 Tips to Avoid Leaving Tracks Around the Internet  |  New York Times

Platforms

Sen Elizabeth Warren escalates Facebook ad feud  |  Read below  |  Brian Fung  |  CNN, New York Times, Axios
Op-ed: Honest Ads Act Is False Advertising  |  Wall Street Journal
Publishers pour money into paid, online marketing for their subscription products  |  Digiday
President Trump Launches Channel on Amazon’s Twitch Streaming Platform  |  Wall Street Journal

Journalism

President Trump Lashes Out at Fox News Poll as Attorney General Barr Meets With Murdoch  |  New York Times
Fox News Is Trump’s Chief TV Booster. So Why Is He Griping About It?  |  Read below  |  Michael Grynbaum, Maggie Haberman  |  New York Times
Shep Smith, Fox News Anchor, Abruptly Departs From Network  |  New York Times
Macabre Video of Fake Trump Shooting Media and Critics Is Shown at His Resort  |  New York Times
White House Correspondents Group ‘Horrified’ by Violent Video of Trump vs Media  |  Wrap, The
Moving beyond ‘Zuck sucks’  |  Read below  |  Anthony Nadler, Hamsini Sridharan, Doron Taussig  |  Op-Ed  |  Columbia Journalism Review
How A.G. Sulzberger Is Leading the New York Times Into the Future  |  Time
From live blogs to time capsules: How CNN is trying to put its breaking news into context  |  Nieman Lab

Health

Chat Diagnosis: Doctors turn to thumbs for diagnosis and treatment by text  |  Associated Press

Climate

Google made large contributions to climate change deniers  |  Guardian, The

Company News

AT&T raises prices 7% by making its customers pay AT&T’s property taxes  |  Ars Technica

Policymakers

FTC Chairman Joe Simons Announces the Planned Departure of Bureau of Competition Director Bruce Hoffman  |  Federal Trade Commission
Today's Top Stories

Broadband/Internet

Libraries and Schools Join Hands to Connect New Mexico Pueblos

Jonathan Sallet  |  Analysis  |  Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

On October 30, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society will be releasing Broadband for America's Future: A Vision for the 2020s. The release is a major step in a multi-year effort to update America’s approach to broadband access for the coming decade. Over the last year or so, we've been speaking with people around the country about how communities are addressing their broadband needs. We know that community anchor institutions — schools, libraries, healthcare providers and others — play a key role in bringing service to broadband deserts. Our friends at the American Library Association (ALA) alerted us to how the Middle Rio Grande project is connecting pueblos in New Mexico. As the release of our report nears, we think it is important to share some of the innovative solutions that we've heard. A forthcoming case study by the ALA examines how tribal libraries and schools in north-central New Mexico came together to address their own broadband connectivity challenges. As Kimball Sekaquaptewa, now chief technology director at Santa Fe Indian School, said, “If the incumbent providers weren’t willing to build out in our area, we were willing to own and operate our own internet infrastructure.”

[Jonathan Sallet is a Benton Senior Fellow]

60% of Farmers Say They Don't Have Good Enough Internet to Run Their Business

Katie Dehlinger  |  Progressive Farmer

Sixty percent of farmers say they don't have enough internet connectivity to run their businesses, and that has influenced critical business decisions and overall profitability, according to a recent study funding by the United Soybean Board. Whether it's a reliable enough signal in the office to file tax paperwork, the ability to upload yield maps from the tractor to the cloud or turn off the irrigation pivot when it starts to rain, 59% of farmers that participated in the study said they want to incorporate more data into their operations, but many lack the connectivity to do it. Of the 2,000 row-crop, livestock and specialty-crop farmers that participated in the survey, 37% wanted to increase their use of data to make better decisions, while 19% want to use it to improve their efficiency and 10% cited cost savings. Among the study's other major findings:

  • 78% of farmers don't have a choice in internet service providers.
  • 40% of farmers have a fixed internet connection, while others rely on satellite connections.
  • More than 90% access the internet on their smartphones, which they say is the most reliable.

Sohn: FCC Authority is Key to Compromise Net Neutrality Bill

John Eggerton  |  Broadcasting&Cable

Gigi Sohn, former adviser to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler, supports legislation to clarify the FCC's authority over broadband, but that unless that bill returns oversight of the market to the FCC, that is not likely to happen. She said the fight over such legislation will hinge on whether the FCC is going to oversee the market. Under the current deregulatory framework approved by the Republican-controlled FCC and upheld by a federal court, oversight is primarily by the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, which Sohn said won't cut it. She argued that the court said the FCC had "barely" made the argument that the FTC and antitrust law can protect consumers--and the court was only ruling on whether a decision based on that argument was arbitrary and capricious, not whether it was the right one. Sohn said she does not believe the antitrust laws or the FTC are adequate and that is why there needs to be an expert agency.

[Sohn is the Benton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate]

Conflict Preemption of State Net Neutrality Efforts After Mozilla

Daniel Lyons  |  Op-Ed  |  Free State Foundation

The D.C. Circuit issued its long-awaited decision in Mozilla v. Federal Communications Commission.  The court affirmed the Federal Communications Commission’s Restoring Internet Freedom (RIF) Order, identifying some flaws in the agency’s reasoning but finding the agency could likely correct those errors on remand without vacatur. Though largely expected given the Supreme Court’s precedent in Brand X, the decision is nonetheless a sweeping victory for the FCC and judicial validation of Chairman Ajit Pai’s light-touch regulatory framework for the broadband industry. While chastened by the ruling, some net neutrality advocates have identified a potential silver lining. The court vacated the portion of the RIF Order that expressly preempted state and local broadband regulations. The court found that the order failed to ground the express preemption provision in a lawful source of statutory authority. Advocates have latched onto this holding as permission for legislatures to reimpose at the state level the restrictions that the FCC repealed at the federal level. But these advocates are likely to be disappointed, as this reads too much into the court’s decision. Any state effort to regulate broadband providers is still subject to conflict preemption on a case-by-case basis. As the court explained, “[i]f the Commission can explain how a state practice actually undermines the 2018 Order, then it can invoke conflict preemption.” The court recognized that the Order created a “light-touch” regulatory regime that relies on transparency and disclosure requirements against a backdrop of consumer protection and antitrust law to protect consumers, an approach that the court found reasonable. State laws that disrupt this carefully balanced federal policy are likely to be preempted—not by the RIF Order itself, but by the Supremacy Clause. In other words, it is unlikely that the courts will allow the Internet—which, by definition, cannot possibly be segregated into interstate and intrastate components—to be governed by state legislators or other local officials in Sacramento, California, or Montpelier, Vermont.

Anacortes, Washington, is building a public broadband network. Is it a model for bridging digital divide?

Monica Nickelsburg  |  GeekWire

Anacortes (WA) will join a growing cohort of cities, dissatisfied enough with the private sector, that have decided to offer internet service as a public utility. Officials in Anacortes have spent the past few years researching how to become an internet provider, creating a plan, and building the infrastructure necessary. This month, the city plans to pilot service in three areas. If all goes well, they will expand the service area with the goal of providing internet to the entire community by 2023. The service will cost residential customers $39 per month for 100 megabit-per-second service and $69 for gigabit speeds. Businesses will pay $89 or $149 per month for those speeds. Anacortes is the first American city to use a technique for installing fiber optic cable using existing water lines. Officials chose that method because it’s less expensive and faster to run the cables.

Wireless

T-Mobile-Sprint merger deal approaches next hurdles

Margaret Harding McGill  |  Axios

Opponents of the T-Mobile-Sprint merger are piling on the deal in the hopes of convincing a judge the Justice Department’s settlement isn’t good enough. The DOJ’s agreement with the wireless companies has to receive final sign-off from Judge Timothy Kelly of the DC District Court, and critics want to make it a tough decision. Historically, the federal court review of a merger settlement has been an uneventful affair. But US District Court Judge Richard Leon — who stymied the DOJ's attempt to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger — also raised concerns this year about the DOJ’s consent decree in the CVS-Aetna merger and held a hearing before ultimately allowing it. Merger opponents are hoping the DOJ’s settlement will get similar scrutiny.

Mississippi AG switcheroo on T-Mobile/Sprint is unique, says Blair Levin

Monica Alleven  |  Fierce

The decision by Mississippi's Attorney General to switch sides to support the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger immediately triggered questions about whether other states would follow suit. But MS is unique in its decision—and there’s little reason to suggest a slew of other states will follow in its footsteps. "Mississippi presents something of a unique case…as a preliminary matter, we note that Mississippi got an even worse deal than Florida and arguably worse than what the FCC negotiated for the nation as a whole,” said New Street Research policy analyst Blair Levin. “Florida got marginally better 5G coverage requirements than the FCC on a variety of metrics…Our point is that this deal, on its face, is not likely to cause any jealously in the hearts of policy makers in California, New York or the other more populous and wealthier states that remain in the litigation.”

Ownership

FTC Policy: Commissioner Phillips Downplays Potential Use of Sherman Act Section 2 to Block Mergers

  |  Capitol Forum

Commissioner Noah Phillips downplayed the Federal Trade Commission’s potential use of Section 2 of the Sherman Act to block anticompetitive mergers, highlighting its limitations compared with Clayton Act Section 7, the statute under which US antitrust enforcers typically challenge deals. For Section 2 to be effective in challenging a merger, the agency must show the acquiring company is overwhelmingly dominant.  “You need to have a monopolist,” Commissioner Phillips said. A Sherman Act Section 2 offense requires a showing that a firm possesses monopoly power in the relevant market and has engaged in exclusionary conduct to maintain its dominance. But the first prong of a Section 2 case—showing that a defendant is a monopolist in a well-defined antitrust market—is often a significant barrier for plaintiffs. Clayton Act Section 7, by contrast, doesn’t require such a showing and instead requires plaintiffs to show only that a merger may substantially lessen competition.

Security

Huawei helped bring Internet to small-town America. Now its equipment has to go.

Jeanne Whalen  |  Washington Post

About a dozen small rural carriers have purchased gear over the years from Huawei or ZTE, Chinese companies that have raised security concerns, according to their trade group, the Rural Wireless Association. The carriers often bought the equipment with US government subsidies intended to help bring Internet service to sparsely populated areas that larger telecom companies deemed unprofitable. Replacing the gear would cost roughly $1 billion, the association says, and Pine Telephone Company in Oklahoma and other small companies are calling for federal funding to help. “If not, rural America takes a hit," said Pine general manager Jerry Whisenhunt, adding that it would take Pine years and tens of millions of dollars to strip its Huawei equipment off more than 140 cell towers. Pine spent $32 million to buy a new system from Huawei, borrowing about half the money from the Rural Utilities Service, or RUS, an arm of the Agriculture Department that helps finance infrastructure projects. RUS, which also provided grant funds to Pine, signed off on Pine’s contract with Huawei, Whisenhunt said. RUS at the time generally required funding recipients to buy American gear but provided waivers “based on cost or unavailability,” the USDA said. 

Whisenhunt says he trusts the government’s view that Huawei is a security risk but also believes the restrictions on doing business with Huawei could prove catastrophic for his business and the community. “I believe the United States has the best spies, the best spooks,” Whisenhunt said from a windowless control room at Pine’s 1960s-era headquarters, where racks of Huawei computers direct the region’s phone calls and Internet searches. “If they say it, I’ve got to believe it. But if I rip this out, all these people here are not going to have Internet.”

Platforms

Sen Elizabeth Warren escalates Facebook ad feud

Brian Fung  |  CNN, New York Times, Axios

A days-long feud between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Facebook intensified over the weekend as she openly accused the company of "taking money to promote lies." Facebook fired back via another social media platform, Twitter, where the company compared itself to broadcast television stations that ran a Trump ad and are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. The "FCC doesn't want broadcast companies censoring candidates' speech," Facebook said. "We agree it's better to let voters -- not companies -- decide." In response, Sen Warren said the company's decision to compare itself to heavily regulated broadcasters raised even more questions about how it should be managed. "You're making my point here. It's up to you whether you take money to promote lies." Warren's campaign also ran an ad on Facebook that contained a deliberate lie to draw further attention to the issue.

For a platform that targets content to users based on their interests and according to detailed data, reworking rules for Facebook could be immensely complex and perhaps inadvisable, said Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor to the Benton Foundation Institute for Broadband & Society. "You can't apply that effectively, probably, to cable -- but certainly not to internet platforms," he said. "It's just impossible." Facebook's reference to broadcasters also highlights a double standard. Schwartzman added that Facebook wants the benefit of the doubt afforded to regulated broadcasters, but "without the responsibility of being a regulated broadcaster."

Journalism

Fox News Is Trump’s Chief TV Booster. So Why Is He Griping About It?

Michael Grynbaum, Maggie Haberman  |  New York Times

“Fox News is Trump’s Walter Cronkite,” said Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as Mr. Trump’s White House communications director — and has recently become a vocal critic. “Once he loses the majority of them, it’s over. He knows it, which is why he is bashing and intimidating them.”

Fox News commands a significant audience of Trump supporters. A Pew study found that 40 percent of Trump voters in 2016 cited the network as their “main source” of news about the campaign. Among all voters, 19 percent cited Fox News as their primary news source, the highest of any network. The channel has been the No. 1-rated cable news network over all since 2002.  But Fox News executives see some tactical advantages to Trump’s jibes. For one, the rebukes offer a useful rejoinder to critics who deride Fox News as “state TV.” The network has also sought to highlight skeptical Trump coverage to advertisers who may be leery of provocative right-wing punditry. On-air personalities have both faced ad boycotts for offensive on-air comments.

Moving beyond ‘Zuck sucks’

Anthony Nadler, Hamsini Sridharan, Doron Taussig  |  Op-Ed  |  Columbia Journalism Review

Tech journalism has made impressive strides in recent years. Journalists covering Silicon Valley have increasingly embraced the role of “watchdog” rather than “mascot.” This critical turn in tech journalism has ushered in reporting on the broken promises, negligence, and other shortcomings of Big Tech companies and their most prominent executives. But this may not be enough to spur the public engagement necessary to affect real change. For that, we need a public not only skeptical of Big Tech, but capable of navigating policy debates and ready to conceive of a technological world different from the one we live in. Journalists are in a position to provide a helpful nudge here. To do so, they will need to help readers understand not only Big Tech’s problems but also potential solutions to those problems. There are, thankfully, some signs of a recent uptick in such reporting. If the past few years of tech reporting showcase mounting rage directed at Big Tech, the past few months may indicate an incipient momentum toward a vision for change. Journalists are starting to take seriously the prospect of transforming the tech industry—aided in part, no doubt, by high-profile federal investigations, calls to “break up Big Tech” from presidential candidates, and the growing stridency of tech workers at Google, Kickstarter, Amazon, and elsewhere who are organizing and making demands for more ethical business practices and working conditions. 

This search for solutions should be a major story arc of its own. To make the most of this moment, we think tech journalists can find inspiration in the “solutions journalism” movement.

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Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.


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Kevin Taglang

Kevin Taglang
Executive Editor, Communications-related Headlines
Benton Institute
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