Daily Digest 1/9/2018 (30)

Democratic Sens who are trying to force a vote on reinstating network neutrality rules have hit a key milestone. A Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would reverse the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality repeal needed 30 co-sponsors in order to get a Senate vote. Sen Claire McCaskill (D-MO) announced that she has signed on to be the 30th co-sponsor. Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) announced the CRA resolution shortly after the FCC's repeal vote in Dec. All 30 supporters are members of the Democratic caucus. "[W]e now have the 30 votes we need to force a vote on my CRA to reverse the repeal of #NetNeutrality," Sen Markey wrote. Sen Markey's bill likely won't restore the net neutrality rules in the end, even if it passes in the Senate. Forcing a vote will be more difficult in the House, where Republicans hold a larger majority. Even if the bill passes both the Senate and House, President Donald Trump is likely to issue a veto in order to let the FCC's net neutrality repeal go forward. Still, Sen Markey's resolution could pass in the Senate if all Democrats and two Republicans vote in favor of it. A vote would keep net neutrality in the spotlight as Democratic lawmakers prepare to make the repeal a campaign issue in the November 2018 elections.

The Trump administration is eyeing multiple “work streams” to help speed along broadband deployment, the National Economic Council’s Grace Koh told reporters: easing the permitting process on federal lands; letting towers built on federal lands also include infrastructure from telecom companies; and using dark fiber agencies have deployed to help rural providers through interconnection agreements. “We'll also look at funding sources,” Koh added, noting the existence of “funding sources for both broadband deployment and adoption scattered across the federal government” and a plan to look at “how we can coordinate those funding sources and bring them together in order to get the maximum effect for the subsidy.” But senior administration officials weren’t prepared, when asked later in the call, to say the degree to which the Trump White House aspires to close the digital divide or provide a dollar estimate for what the administration may be interested in spending. Keep an eye out later today for the administration’s release of recommendations from the Rural Prosperity Task Force, counting Cabinet members and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai among its members.

Today I want to discuss Federal Communications Commission Chairman Pai’s belief that we are on the cusp of a new era of partnership between the FCC and rural electric cooperatives. Specifically: our hope that electric coops will become a bigger part of closing the digital divide and delivering online opportunity to rural Americans who have been bypassed by the broadband revolution. And how the FCC can work with you all to bring about this change. The main opportunity I wanted to highlight today is the Commission’s upcoming Connect America Fund Phase II auction (CAF 2). Our Connect America Fund auction will use competitive bidding to efficiently allocate up to $2 billion over the next ten years to support deployment of networks providing both voice and broadband service, thereby expanding broadband availability to many more unserved Americans. I’m excited to let you know that today, Chairman Pai shared with his colleagues proposed bidding rules and procedures for this CAF 2 auction. He also has proposed an order resolving all remaining petitions for reconsideration regarding CAF 2 that will clear the way for the auction. At our next meeting on January 30, the FCC is expected to vote on these proposals—the last significant step before we can begin the application process and get this auction underway. So get ready: We are planning on beginning the CAF 2 auction this July.

[Commentary] Platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas. It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic...I realized that the problems I had been seeing couldn’t be solved simply by, say, Facebook hiring staff to monitor the content on the site. The problems were inherent in the attention-based, algorithm-driven business model. And what I suspected was Russia’s meddling in 2016 was only a prelude to what we’d see in 2018 and beyond. The level of political discourse, already in the gutter, was going to get even worse. Our final hypothesis was that 2016 was just the beginning. Without immediate and aggressive action from Washington, bad actors of all kinds would be able to use Facebook and other platforms to manipulate the American electorate in future elections. But we’ve seen where self-regulation leads, and it isn’t pretty. Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach. [Roger McNamee is the managing director and a cofounder of Elevation Partners, an investment partnership focused on media and consumer technology.]

The engineer who was fired by Google after he criticized its diversity policies is suing the internet giant, alleging that he and others at Google were harassed over their conservative political views. James Damore filed a class-action complaint Jan 8 after setting off a firestorm in August with a 10-page memo blasting what he called Google’s “left bias” for creating a “politically correct monoculture.” He alleged that the presence of women is celebrated because of their gender and that white men were mocked with boos at companywide meetings. “Google’s open hostility for conservative thought is paired with invidious discrimination on the basis of race and gender, barred by law," says the complaint, filed in California Superior Court in San Jose. “Google’s management goes to extreme — and illegal — lengths to encourage hiring managers to take protected categories such as race and/or gender into consideration as determinative hiring factors, to the detriment of Caucasian and male employees and potential employees at Google." Damore’s lawyer is Harmeet Dhillon, a civil rights lawyer who has taken on cases that push back against the Bay Area’s progressive tendencies. She reportedly was on President Trump’s shortlist to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in March; the president ended up nominating a different attorney.