After Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced an Oct 27 vote to reaffirm the 2017 repeal of net neutrality, Joshua Stager, senior counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute said: “This is an October surprise that nobody wanted except for AT&T and Comcast lobbyists. A federal court ruled that the FCC was 'unhinged from reality' when it repealed net neutrality in 2017, and yesterday's announcement shows that Chairman Pai's perspective remains unhinged. His jovial announcement suggests he learned nothing from the court and has no intention of fixing his mistakes. The American people need internet freedom, not jokes about Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. There's simply too much at stake during a pandemic that millions of people are suffering through without internet access. Instead of tackling this crisis, Pai appears to be dithering with yet another gift to the telecom industry. Moreover, the opaque process behind today's announcement suggests Pai learned nothing from the court or the mess he created. If the FCC won't clean up this mess, Congress should by immediately passing the Save the Net Act.”

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is investing $4.6 million to provide broadband service in unserved and underserved rural areas in Mississippi. Bay Springs Telephone Company, Inc. will use a $4.6 million grant to deploy a fiber-to-the-premises network to connect 5,139 people, 69 businesses, 77 farms, three fire stations, two post offices, two health care facilities and five educational facilities to high-speed broadband internet in Jasper, Jones, Newton, Lauderdale and Smith counties in Mississippi.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is now accepting applications for the department’s four key loan guarantee programs under the OneRD Guarantee Loan Initiative. USDA has officially eliminated duplicative processes and has launched a common loan guarantee application for the following programs:

• Water and Waste Disposal Loan Guarantee Program;
• Community Facilities Guaranteed Loan Program;
• Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan Program; and
• Rural Energy for America Guaranteed Loan Program.

Through this initiative, the department has standardized requirements for credit reviews, loan processing, loan servicing, and loss claims. These measures will make the application process simpler and faster for lenders. USDA also is providing automatic approval to participate in all four programs to lenders in good standing who are supervised or created by state or federal regulatory agencies. This expands the base of eligible lenders for the four guaranteed loan programs. USDA Rural Development provides loans and grants to help expand economic opportunities and create jobs in rural areas, and the assistance supports infrastructure improvements and high-speed internet access in rural areas.

The House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee released the findings of its more than 16-month long investigation into the state of competition in the digital economy, especially the challenges presented by the dominance of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook and their business practices. After outlining the challenges presented due to the market domination of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook, the report walks through a series of possible remedies to (1) restore competition in the digital economy, (2) strengthen the antitrust laws, and (3) reinvigorate antitrust enforcement. The slate of recommendations include:

• Structural separations to prohibit platforms from operating in lines of business that depend on or interoperate with the platform;
• Prohibiting platforms from engaging in self-preferencing;
• Requiring platforms to make its services compatible with competing networks to allow for interoperability and data portability;
• Mandating that platforms provide due process before taking action against market participants;
• Establishing a standard to proscribe strategic acquisitions that reduce competition;
• Improvements to the Clayton Act, the Sherman Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act, to bring these laws into line with the challenges of the digital economy;
• Eliminating anticompetitive forced arbitration clauses;
• Strengthening the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice;
• And promoting greater transparency and democratization of the antitrust agencies.

Conservatives claim that tech platforms disproportionately suppress and censor conservative views online. But the facts to support that case have been hard to find. Technology experts say there is no statistical evidence to support the argument that Facebook does not give conservative views a fair shake. When Republicans claim Facebook is "biased," they often collapse two distinct complaints into one. First, that the social network deliberately scrubs right-leaning content from its site. There is no proof to back this up. Secondly, Republicans suggest that conservative news and perspectives are being throttled by Facebook, that the social network is preventing the content from finding a large audience. That claim is not only unproven, but publicly available data on Facebook shows the exact opposite to be true: conservative news regularly ranks among some of the popular content on the site.

Now, there are some complex layers to this, but former Facebook employees and data experts say the conservative bias argument would be easier to talk about — and easier to debunk — if Facebook was more transparent. The social network keeps secret some of the most basic data points, like what news stories are the most viewed on Facebook on any given day, leaving data scientists, journalists and the general public in the dark about what people are actually seeing on their News Feeds.

This essay reveals the critical role that trafficking of enslaved Africans played in making our nation’s earliest media financially viable. The piece traces this history to the present day, when deregulation has resulted in very few Black owners of traditional media, and racist algorithms amplify the voices of white supremacists across online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The essay critiques corporate media’s ongoing lack of accountability or commitment to fundamental change while inviting readers to join Media 2070’s national conversation to help reconcile the history of media racism with the need to imagine and create the changes necessary to right these wrongs.