Daily Digest 11/2/2017 (For the Rest of You Souls)

On October 17, President Donald Trump launched a vague, yet ominous Twitter-driven attack on NBC, rhetorically asking, “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License?  Bad for country!” The short answer to the President’s question is “never.”  A slightly longer answer is that there is no license to challenge and, even if there were, no broadcaster should worry that its license would ever be in jeopardy because of disagreement with its programming. [Andrew Jay Schwartzman]

[Commentary] As the country grapples with a  serious affront to American democracy, the agreement on the basic facts in the mainstream news media does not extend to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and other important parts of the conservative media. This is the case even as the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III bears down in his investigation of the alleged Russian efforts to sway the 2016 presidential election. As Mueller and his team home in on people connected to President Trump, including his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, the president and his allies in the conservative media sphere are pointing at the Democrats and Hillary Clinton. Adding to the problem is the recent behavior of the tech companies, which have not shown the same desire for accountability. [Jim Rutenberg]

On October 23, 2017, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai responded to multiple Members of Congress regarding First Amendment freedoms and the independence of the FCC. Numerous lawmakers, notably House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Michael Doyle (D-PA), and Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA), had written to Chairman Pai over the influence of a radio network funded by the Russian government being used on U.S. airwaves to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Lawmakers on Nov 1 released a trove of ads that Russian operatives bought on Facebook, providing the fullest picture yet of how foreign actors sought to promote Republican Donald Trump, denigrate Democrat Hillary Clinton and divide Americans over some of the nation’s most sensitive social issues. The ads that emerged, a sampling of the 3,000 that Russians bought during the 2016 presidential campaign and its aftermath, demonstrated in words and images a striking ability to mimic American political discourse at its most fractious. The targeting information also showed a shrewd understanding of how best to use Facebook to find and influence voters most likely to respond to the pitches. As a group, the ads made visceral appeals to voters upset about illegal immigration, the declining economic fortunes of coal miners, gun ownership, African American political activism, the rising prominence of Muslims in some U.S. communities and many other issues.

Senators who called tech giants to Capitol Hill on Nov 1 to answer for their roles in Russia’s election interference differed along party lines over the Kremlin’s role in swaying the race, with Republicans offering an implicit defense of the legitimacy of President Donald Trump’s victory. After months of publicly sidestepping the issue, several Republicans used a high-profile hearing with executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter to dismiss the impact of Russia’s use of the sites to spread misinformation and buy ads to try to tip the election in President Trump’s favor. “A lot of folks, including many in the media, have tried to reduce this entire conversation down to one premise: Foreign actors conducted a surgically executed covert operation to help elect a United States president,” said  Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC).

The House Antitrust Subcommittee took a whack at the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality rules Nov 1, specifically the role of antitrust law in governing broadband access provider conduct. That came as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is expected to circulate an order rolling back Title II classification of ISPs as early as later in Nov. It also came at about the same time that the FCC Democrats went to Capitol Hill to push back on that Pai proposal. Witnesses for the hearing included acting Federal Trade Commission Chair Maureen Ohlhausen, FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny, former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell and Michael Romano, SVP of NTCA: The Rural Broadband Association. FTC Chair Ohlhausen said that a decade ago the FTC cautioned against internet regulation, and that the current marketplace is even more competitive, strengthening that argument.

We are weeks away, from broadband providers being given the green light, to freely engage in paid prioritization, blocking, throttling, or unreasonable discrimination at interconnection points. We are weeks away from the probability, of an entirely new and even wider divide – of those that can afford to pay for priority access, and others that cannot. The Federal Communications Commission majority is fixated on those billion dollar-plus public companies, and what is best for their bottom lines, at the expense of micro-businesses, sole proprietors, and individuals that do not have the financial resources to pay a toll imposed by their broadband provider, who are now fearful of what rolling back the clock will mean for their bottom lines. We cannot remain silent while so many of our citizens are without access. We cannot hang our heads, while the need to close those digital canyons still exists. And we cannot get discouraged or weary.

Even though our net neutrality policies are now legally viable and wildly popular, the leadership at the Commission wants to revisit Internet openness. It has started a proceeding that tears at the foundation of net neutrality. It has proposed cutting the rules we have and instead offering our broadband providers the power to favor sites, content, and ideas; the power to discriminate with our traffic; and the power to become censors and gatekeepers for all that is online. If you want an example, look no further than what happened during the last 14 days with the #MeToo movement. By last week the #MeToo movement was everywhere. It reached 85 countries and resulted in postings, commentary, investigations—and real change. This is the civil rights promise of our new digital square. Rolling back net neutrality will curb that square.

AT&T is reportedly abandoning its attempt to stop a Louisville (KY) ordinance that helped draw Google Fiber into the city. In February 2016, AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky to stop an ordinance that gives Google Fiber and other ISPs faster access to utility poles. A US District Court judge dismissed AT&T's lawsuit in August of 2017, when he determined that AT&T's claims that the ordinance is invalid are false. There was still the question of whether AT&T would appeal the ruling, but WDRB News and Louisville Business First both quoted AT&T spokespeople as saying that the company has decided not to appeal.

US broadband providers invested approximately $76.0 billion in network infrastructure in 2016 down from approximately $77.9 billion in 2015 and $78.4 billion in 2014. From 1996 through 2016, the broadband industry has made capital investments totaling $1.6 trillion. The start of the decline, the first since the recession ended in 2009, coincided with Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 decision to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The data raise flags that warrant further investigation into whether Title II reclassification contributed to the decline in broadband capital investment.

The digital age continues to spark creative developments in education. Wireless gadgets are now commonplace in the typical American classroom. But while technology is helping thousands of students reach new heights in their education, many others are falling behind. Dubbed "the homework gap" by researchers, students without the use of reliable internet access at home find it harder to complete and submit homework assignments, further expanding the inequality already seen in low-income communities. While some US schools provide their students with laptops or iPads, almost 5 million American households with school-aged children lack broadband in the home. Low-income homes with children are four times more likely to lack broadband as middle or high income families.  With the gap widening, some school districts have taken it upon themselves to change this dynamic by introducing an innovative solution.

In 2010, when Google paid $700 million to acquire airline-data company ITA Software, the Department of Justice scrutinized the deal for antitrust issues. The deal was ultimately approved, but one condition of the approval required Google to allow others to access the data for five years. Now, seven years later, Google is cutting off access to ITA data for some companies that rely on it. This week Google announced it would cancel QPX Express, an airline-data service it has offered to small businesses and startups since 2014. The news immediately prompted criticism from entrepreneurs and antitrust watchdogs, who see it as further proof of Google parent company Alphabet’s outsized power. 

The House Communications Subcommittee held a hearing checking in on the progress made in the deployment of FirstNet, the first nationwide, interoperable broadband public safety network. Chairman Blackburn kicked things off by highlighting the importance of FirstNet to help first responders and make communities safer, “A lot of work at this committee went into reviewing the recommendations from the 9/11 commission on how to better prepare our first responders in times of crisis. Interoperability has long been a challenge for our state and local authorities, and in the wake of the recent natural disasters they have faced, its importance is as clear as ever.”

Google Docs threw some users for a loop when the service suddenly locked them out of their documents for violating Google’s terms of service. The weird part? The documents were innocuous. The alerts were caused by a glitch, but they served as a stark reminder that not much is truly private in the cloud. A Google spokesman said that a “code push” caused a small percentage of Google Docs to be incorrectly flagged as abusive, which caused them to be automatically blocked.

The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition along with 35 health care providers and telehealth networks from across the country sent a letter to Congressional leaders today asking them to support an increase in funding for the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Health Care (RHC) program. “This is a life and death issue for Rural America,” said John Windhausen, Executive Director of the SHLB Coalition. “Rural communities that encounter a severe shortage of doctors, aging populations, and a greater distance to medical experts are in dire need of easily accessible telemedicine services. The RHC program has the power to elevate the health of these communities, but only if the program is revamped to promote rural broadband." The RHC program is the only Universal Service Fund program that has not been reformed, and it is long overdue. The current $400 million per year cap was set by the FCC twenty years ago.

[Commentary] The ramifications of Russian exploitation of social media exceed its potential electoral impact. It even exceeds the involvement of the Russians. The broader ramifications are how social media algorithms divide us, how those divisions can be exploited, and whether there are solutions. By fracturing society into small groups, the internet has become the antithesis of the community necessary for democratic processes to succeed. This is bigger than the current discussion of political advertising rules for the internet. The questionable ads and postings are the result of the problem, not the cause of it. That problem is how the software algorithms that determine what you see on social media prioritize revenue over veracity. Today, public interest groups of all political stripes monitor the mainstream media. With a public interest API they could also built public interest algorithms to accomplish the same for social media. To date, algorithms have been problem-creators. It’s time for social media open APIs to enable problem-solving through public interest algorithms. [Tom Wheeler]

The Trump administration has quietly dropped an Obama-era proposal requiring all new vehicles to have communication technology that allows them to wirelessly “talk” to each another. The rule, unveiled last December, calls for all new light-duty cars and trucks to eventually be equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology, a safety system that enables cars to send wireless signals to each other, anticipate each other’s moves and thus avoid crashes. Officials have said the technology could prevent tens of thousands of crashes each year. But, apparently, that the rule has been moved from the White House Office of Management and Budget’s list of regulations “actively under consideration” to rules on its “long-term agenda.”