Daily Digest 1/8/2018 (Low-Power Local Radio)

Roughly 22 million people submitted comments during the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality regulatory proceedings. Though there was widespread fraud in the process (many dead people filed anti-net-neutrality comments), the vast majority of them favored the rules that protected the free and open internet. Jan 4, the FCC released its final rule repealing these protections: A grand total of zero consumer comments were cited. “The public can plainly see that a soon-to-be-toothless FCC is handing the keys to the internet over to a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations,” said FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. “Despite the millions of comments, letters, and calls received, this Order cites, not even one consumer comment. That speaks volumes about the direction the FCC is heading. That speaks volumes about who is being hard at the FCC.”

The Federal Communications Commission has finally released the language of its controversial Restoring Internet Freedom order, which the Republican majority approved Dec 14 against visceral opposition from Democrats--edits to the item continued through this week. Here are some key passages of the final language of a decision that Internet services have celebrated, Democratic members of Congress are trying to overturn, and activists say spells the end of an open internet as we know it. That key language includes that case-by-case enforcement by other agencies of perceived non-neutral actions covers all of the 'net ecosystem--including the Googles and Facebooks and Twitters or the world--and that such an approach is preferable to "thou shalt not" mandates on ISPs alone because it does not nip "new innovative business arrangements" in the bud and allows the "ever-evolving internet ecosystem" to ever evolve. The order defines just what ISPs will have to disclose under enhanced rules that still manage to reduce the reporting requirements in the 2015 order.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai spent 2017 dismantling Obama-era rules on network neutrality. A handful of lawmakers in liberal-leaning US states plan to spend 2018 building them back up. Even supporters of state legislation on net neutrality think this may go too far. CA State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill that would only apply to behavior within the state, saying any other approach would be too vulnerable to legal challenge. “We're expecting that there will be litigation,” he said. State Sen Wiener said that the internet providers who backed Chairman Pai’s plan shouldn’t flinch at his bill. “They say that, as a matter of internal policy, they adhere to net neutrality.” The internet doesn’t lend itself cleanly to state lines. It could be difficult for Comcast or Verizon to accept money from services seeking preferential treatment in one state, then make sure that its network didn’t reflect those relationships in places where state lawmakers forbade them, said Geoffrey Manne, executive director of the International Center for Law & Economics, a research group.

Generally speaking, pollsters are ill advised to ignore cellphone users, if only because they’d be missing half of the country. But there’s another reason that pollsters need to include cell users: The demographics of those with and without access to landlines is stark. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic adults in the United States live in households that are wireless-only. More than half of black adults and Asian adults do, as well. But fewer than half of white Americans do. Including only landlines in polling — which, we will note, is not common practice at this point — means you’re much less likely to reach Hispanic voters. Or younger ones. There’s a trend undergirding this. Those under the federal poverty level are much more likely to live in wireless-only households than those earning at least twice that level. Income, age and race all correlate to another factor: homeownership. If you own a house, you’re much more likely to have a landline in that house, both because older Americans still have landlines/are more likely to own houses and because people who rent are less likely to have a landline installed.

Some Twitter users have called, repeatedly, for the social network to block President Donald Trump's account — but a new statement from Twitter essentially says that is not going to happen. Twitter has previously responded to complaints about President Trump's account by saying that certain users' tweets have a “newsworthiness” value that makes it important to stay online and inform the network's global conversation. Its Jan 5 statement expanded on that idea, though this latest explanation did not mention President Trump by name. “Elected world leaders play a critical role in that conversation because of their outsized impact on our society,” the post said.  “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets, would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

Technology companies with unprecedented power to sway consumers and move markets have done the unthinkable: They’ve made trust-busting sound like a good idea again. The concentration of wealth and influence among tech giants has been building for years—90 percent of new online-ad dollars went to either Google or Facebook in 2016; Amazon is by far the largest online retailer, the third-largest streaming media company, and largest cloud-computing provider. Silicon Valley titans coasted to the top of the economy with little government oversight on the backs of incredibly convenient products, a killer backstory, shrewd lobbying, and our personal data. They were allowed to grow unfettered in part because of a nearly-40-year-old interpretation of US antitrust law that views anticompetitive behavior primarily through the prism of the effect on consumers. In that light, the tech industry’s cheap products and free services fell somewhere between benign and benevolent. Advocates and students of antitrust point to several strategies that could curb tech company dominance. Here are some:

• Sweat the Small Stuff: To revive competition, enforcers should get tougher on mergers, particularly when big companies buy small ones. 
• Check Up on Past Promises: monitoring is particularly vital considering that consumer rights can be eroded in stages. 
• Corporation, Split Thyself: Companies could be spin off divisions with user bases and infrastructure to stand alone before regulators come knocking.
• Change the Law, or the Interpretation of the Law.

Americans are relying less on television for their news. Just 50% of US adults now get news regularly from television, down from 57% a year prior in early 2016. But that audience drain varies across the three television sectors: local, network and cable. Local TV has experienced the greatest decline but still garners the largest audience of the three, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. From 2016 to 2017, the portion of Americans who often rely on local TV for their news fell 9 percentage points, from 46% to 37%. By comparison, reliance on network TV news declined from 30% to 26%. Cable TV news use remained more stable, with 28% often getting news there last year, compared with 31% in 2016. Even after these declines, local TV still has a wider reach overall for news than network and cable. Some demographic groups turn to each of the three television venues more than others, however. Younger adults are less likely than older adults to often get news via all three TV platforms. For example, just 8% of those ages 18 to 29 often get news from network TV, compared with 49% of those 65 and older.

Low-power nonprofit FM stations are the still, small voices of media. They whisper out from basements and attics, and from miniscule studios and on-the-fly live broadcasts. They have traditionally been rural and often run by churches; many date to the early 2000s, when the first surge of federal licenses were issued. But in the last year, a diverse new wave of stations has arrived in urban America, cranking up in cities from Miami to the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and especially in the Northwest, where six community stations began to broadcast in Seattle. At least four more have started in Portland. Some are trying to become neighborhood bulletin boards, or voices of the counterculture or social justice. “Alternative” is the word that unites them.