AT&T plans to launch its own streaming service in 2019, drawing on content from DC Comics and Harry Potter that was acquired as part of the recent Time Warner deal. But telecommunication companies have a unique advantage: they control the content and the networks that content travels over, presenting a wonderful opportunity to hamstring competitors and unfairly advantage their own services. Heavy-handed tactics like throttling and usage caps would have been blocked by the 2015 network neutrality rules. But the rules were rolled back by Trump Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, and those networks could be a crucial advantage in the streaming wars. “The repeal of net neutrality — and more importantly, the abdication of the FCC’s duty to protect consumers and competition in the broadband market — ensure that AT&T will have carte blanche to discriminate in favor of the video content it owns,” says Benton Senior Fellow Gigi Sohn. “Whether it means freeing Time Warner and DirecTV content from restrictive data caps to the detriment of other streaming services, or charging cable and satellite rivals more for must see programming, AT&T will certainly take advantage of an absent FCC and weak antitrust enforcement,” Sohn says.

AT&T says its 5G network went live in parts of 12 cities Dec 18, making it the first wireless carrier to launch a mobile network based on the 5G standard. A small number of customers will be able to use the network starting on Dec 21, when AT&T will begin distributing its first 5G device: a mobile hot spot that can connect to the network’s much faster airwaves. But it’ll be a slow launch; you won’t be able to go out to a store and buy AT&T’s 5G hot spot for several more months. For now, AT&T is reaching out to businesses in the area and inviting them to try out the new tech, seemingly as a way to ease in the network and make sure it’s working well before bringing more and more people onto the service. The announcement suggests that future 5G devices will also require “5G compatible” data plans in order to connect to the faster network. That initial plan is more expensive than the LTE plan offered with a similar 4G hot spot ($50 for 10GB), but it also offers more data. And despite the hot spot launching this week, AT&T still isn’t offering real-world speed estimates. A spokesperson said the hot spot has peak theoretical speeds of 1.2 Gbps, but that “actual speeds will be lower.”

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) – led by Chairman L. Cedric Richmond (D-LA), and Congressional Black Caucus Diversity Task Force Co-Chairs, Reps Barbara Lee (D-CA) and GK Butterfield (D-NC) – issued the following joint statement in response to a new report prepared for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which reveals Russia targeted African American voters in attempts to suppress the vote in the 2016 election:

“During the 2016 presidential election cycle, hundreds of thousands of minority voters were disenfranchised before they even had a chance to walk into the voting booth. As today’s report produced for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence makes clear – this was a carefully orchestrated effort by Russian actors to exploit social media platforms in order to suppress turnout among black voters. This campaign of disinformation is extremely disconcerting because black voter turnout declined in 2016 – for the first time in 20 years. While this next Congress gives both Democrats and Republicans an opportunity to address election security, we call upon the President to take the security of our elections seriously and work with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the FBI to stop foreign election meddling efforts. The CBC would also like to hear directly from Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, and CEOs of other companies whose platforms were weaponized, about what they knew, and concrete steps they will implement to address future attempts at disinformation campaigns. We cannot allow the deceit and misinformation that characterized the 2016 elections to be repeated in the future.”

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules. Facebook's internal records provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

The exchange was intended to benefit everyone. Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users — control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight. The social network allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

New studies suggest that efforts to bring transparency to media — including attempts by journalists to publicly defend their work, media literacy campaigns, more transparent funding and improved fact-checking partnerships — have helped the media recover a bit of trust with the public after hitting an all-time low in 2016. While trust in the news media has recovered slightly since 2016, it still remains low compared to decades of prior research conducted by Gallup. This could be affected by the larger trends affecting confidence in many major US institutions, which began to decline in 2005, per Gallup. 

The Federal Communications Commission is required to review biennially its regulations “that apply to the operations or activities of any provider of telecommunications service” and“determine whether any such regulation is no longer necessary in the public interest as the result of meaningful economic competition between providers of such service.” The FCC must repeal or modify any regulation that it finds are no longer in the public interest. With this Public Notice, the relevant FCC Bureaus and Offices seek comment from the public as to what rules should be modified or repealed as part of the 2018 biennial review. Submissions should identify with as much specificity as possible the rule that the commenting party believes should be amended or repealed, and explain why and how the rule should be amended or repealed. We seek such comment for all rules that are outdated, archaic, or otherwise not in the public interest. To facilitate review, comments should be filed in the appropriate docket (or dockets for rules within the jurisdiction of more than one Bureau or Office).