Daily Digest 2/21/2018 (Net Neutrality Update)

[Press release] A task force created by President Donald Trump developed recommendations for promoting prosperity in rural America, and one of its key recommendations is to deploy high-speed internet access to this nation’s farms, factories, forests, and small businesses in rural America. The President’s infrastructure plan will help states achieve this access by streamlining the arduous permitting approval process for deploying broadband infrastructure like fiber and towers and by incentivizing private capital investment, including the use of public-private partnerships. The President is seeking long-term reforms for infrastructure by stimulating at least $1.5 trillion in new investment and shortening the project approval process to two years. The President’s plan dedicates $50 billion for rural infrastructure capital investments in broadband, power generation, water facilities, transportation, and other asset classes. Given the level of discretion granted to states under the President’s Rural Infrastructure Program, governors can spend 100 percent of the Federal funds they receive under the Program on broadband.

Inexplicably, in many instances, officials under your leadership failed to respond to our last request for 9-1-1 information on fee collection and allocation. At the very least, given the importance of this information, you should have been aware of the impending failure to respond....[S]ince your states and territories have either been a self-admitted diverter of 9-1-1 fees in the past or guilty of failing to respond to a previous inquiry, it can only be assumed that your state or territory diverted 9-1-1 fees for 2016. Neither of these outcomes is appropriate or acceptable. Accordingly, I respectfully request that each of you remedy your failure to respond to the Commission's inquiry on 9-1-1 fee diversion. 

Establishing an integrated first-responder communications system is all about the details, not just the big picture overview and goals.  That reality became obvious as Michael Poth, CEO of The First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), explained the agency's objectives to a Media Institute monthly luncheon in Washington on Feb 15. Poth cited "improved situational awareness" as a keystone of the FirstNet project, but also acknowledged that the near-term requirement is "getting technology to first responders using the technology that now exists."

A federal judge has ruled against AT&T in its effort to force the Justice Department to reveal whether President Donald Trump inappropriately interfered with a regulatory review of the telecommunication company's $85 billion Time Warner merger.  The ruling from Judge Richard Leon rejects AT&T's argument that the government has singled out the company for special scrutiny. The move blocks an attempt by AT&T to draw Trump into the legal battle by raising questions as to what, if any, pressure he may have placed on antitrust regulators to stop the acquisition. AT&T had requested that Leon compel the Justice Department to provide a log of any communications that may have transpired between the White House and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as well as communications that could have taken place between Sessions and the department's antitrust team. If President Trump did pressure the Justice Department, that could be a potentially illegal exercise of executive authority. Agency lawyers argued in court that the Justice Department had already provided more than enough evidence to disprove President Trump's involvement, beginning with a log of direct communications between the White House and the department's antitrust division.

“Indications suggest 2018 is going to be a big year for telecom-related spending,” wrote the analysts at Wall Street Research firm Barclays. Specifically, the analysts said they expect capital expenditures among the “big four” (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint) to rise by 10 percent in 2018, which they said would be the largest increase in the past five years. That growth is likely to be driven mainly by AT&T and Sprint. Both companies have made it clear that they are getting ready to open their purse strings in order to grow their respective network strategies. For Sprint, the carrier’s significant increase in network spending is mostly due to a renewed commitment to the carrier by Japanese parent SoftBank. And AT&T’s increase is due in part to savings from the government’s recent tax reform and partly due to its own pledge to build out FirstNet’s 700 MHz spectrum for public safety users. Nonetheless, it’s clear that “that the tides are turning in the U.S. market,” said Dell’Oro Group analyst Stefan Pongratz.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants a report by June on the best way for Department of Justice to confront the cybersecurity threats from terrorists, criminals and enemy governments, with efforts to interfere with elections a top priority. Top intelligence and law enforcement officials, including from the DOJ, told a congressional hearing panel recently that Russia will almost certainly try to interfere with the midterms, as they did the 2016 presidential elections, and that the country was not adequately prepared to combat the threat. AG Sessions announced the creation of a Cyber-Digital Task Force comprising representatives of DOJ's Criminal Division, the National Security Division, the United States Attorney’s Office community, the Office of Legal Policy, the Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Chief Information Officer, the ATF, FBI, DEA, and the US Marshals Service. He said the priorities would be "study of efforts to interfere with our elections; efforts to interfere with our critical infrastructure; the use of the Internet to spread violent ideologies and to recruit followers; the mass theft of corporate, governmental, and private information; the use of technology to avoid or frustrate law enforcement; and the mass exploitation of computers and other digital devices to attack American citizens and businesses."

[Op-ed] The Mueller investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election is shining a welcome light on the Kremlin’s covert activity, but there is no similar effort to shine a light on the social media algorithms that helped the Russians spread their messages. There needs to be. This effort should begin by “opening up” the results of the algorithms.  The government should require social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to use a similar open application programming interface. This would make it possible for third parties to build software to monitor and report on the effects of social media algorithms. (This idea has been proposed by Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian Google employee who helped organize the Tahrir Square uprising in 2011.) To be clear, the proposal is not to force companies to open up their algorithms — just the results of the algorithms. The goal is to make it possible to understand what content is fed into the algorithms and how the algorithms distribute that content. [Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017, is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.]

Thanks to a relentless news cycle — and a dedicated fan in the Oval Office — Fox News has defied the downward trends in the television business, notching its highest-rated year in 2017 even as audiences dwindled for many networks. But the mass migration of viewers away from traditional cable and satellite packages is accelerating. And now Fox News is plotting a leap into the uncertain digital future that rivals like CNN have so far put off. Fox Nation will be a stand-alone subscription service available without a cable package. The streaming service, expected to start by the end of the year, would focus primarily on right-leaning commentary, with original shows and cameos by popular personalities like Sean Hannity. It would not overlap with Fox News’s 24-hour cable broadcast — not even reruns — because of the channel’s contractual agreements with cable operators. Instead, the network is planning to develop hours of new daily programming with a mostly fresh slate of anchors and commentators. “Fox Nation is designed to appeal to the Fox superfan,” John Finley, who oversees program development and production for Fox News, said in an interview. “These are the folks who watch Fox News every night for hours at a time, the dedicated audience that really wants more of what we have to offer.”