Moody’s Investors Service raised its rating on the cable television sector to “positive” from “negative,” fueled mainly by expected growth in broadband. Moody’s expects cash flow in the sector to rise more than 5% over the next 12-to-18 months, based on the continued rise in broadband customers due to the pandemic. Moody’s noted that cable broadband subscribers grew by about 2.5% (3.5 million customers) in Q2, and market penetration rose to 50% in the period, compared to 48% in the prior year. This despite video and voice customer declines in the 4-6% range annually. Moody’s estimated that broadband is replacing video at a 1.9 times clip, rising to 2.2 times in Q2 for the first time in five quarters, a sign of future strength. Moody’s expects broadband subscribers to rise by at least 4% over the next 12-to-18 months, driven  by demand for greater capacity and speed. Video customer losses are expected to rise beyond 5% over the same period.

The end-user rarely has to worry or even think about a lot of what domain name systems companies do to keep things humming along. Working primarily in the background, infrastructure companies provide a critical yet completely overlooked service, unless something out of the ordinary, like abuse of the domain name system, or general downtime, happens.

During the pandemic, the Internet’s infrastructure has not only endured, but thrived. The opportunity and ability to scale and support increased work has been fundamental to the increased load the Internet has to bear, and yet most end-users take this fantastic technical undertaking as a given. While it is important to make sure that the world is being protected from malicious attacks and evil actors, it’s just as important to acknowledge the tremendous work being put into making the internet not just safer, but faster, stronger and more accessible.

The policy issues raised by the debate over Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 may be complex, but the Federal Communications Commission’s legal authority is straightforward. Simply put, the FCC has the authority to interpret all provisions of the Communications Act, including amendments such as Section 230. This authority flows from the plain meaning of Section 201(b) of the Communications Act of 1934, which confers on the FCC the power to issue rules necessary to carry out the provisions of the Act. By expressly directing that Section 230 be placed into the Communications Act, Congress made clear that the FCC’s rulemaking authority extended to the provisions of that section. Two seminal US Supreme Court cases authored by the late Justice Antonin Scalia—AT&T Corp. v. Iowa Utilities Bd., 525 U.S. 366 (1999) and City of Arlington v. FCC, 569 U.S. 290 (2013)—confirm this conclusion. Based on this authority, the FCC can feel confident proceeding with a rulemaking to clarify the scope of the Section 230 immunity shield. Ultimately, the five commissioners of the FCC must decide whether this legal framework should be adopted in any future rulemaking. But in my own judgment, the FCC’s legal authority to interpret Section 230 is straightforward: Congress gave the FCC power to interpret all provisions of the Communications Act of 1934—including amendments—and Section 230 is an amendment to the Communications Act. The FCC therefore may proceed with a rulemaking to clarify the scope of the Section 230(c) immunity shield.

A growing number of legal experts and economists have started questioning whether traditional antitrust is up to the task of addressing the competitive concerns raised by today’s digital behemoths. Further help, they said, is needed. Antitrust cases typically proceed at the stately pace of the courts, with trials and appeals that can drag on for years. Those delays, the legal experts and economists said, would give Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple a free hand to become even more entrenched in the markets they dominate. A more rapid-response approach is required, they said. One solution: a specialist regulator that would focus on the major tech companies. It would establish and enforce a set of basic rules of conduct, which would include not allowing the companies to favor their own services, exclude competitors or acquire emerging rivals and require them to permit competitors access to their platforms and data on reasonable terms.