Today in federal court, this Federal Communications Commission is attempting to explain why it ignored the evidence before it and hastily abandoned the carefully crafted, common sense Open Internet framework established in 2015. In the process, it ignored the will of millions of people who made their support for a free and open Internet crystal clear. Like many others, I am paying close attention. We know that consumers cannot count on the goodwill of big business to protect their interests. Unfettered access to the Open Internet provides a gateway to opportunity. Strong, enforceable rules empower consumers to make sure they get the service that they pay for and expect. I strongly believe that the FCC made the right call with the framework it established in 2015, and I am hopeful that these critical consumer protections will soon be restored.

An organization run by a former Trump campaign statewide director is being investigated by the New York attorney general’s office for its role in submitting potentially hundreds of thousands of fraudulent comments to the Federal Communications Commission during the agency’s 2017 efforts to rollback Obama-era network neutrality rules. Research reveals the group’s deep ties to prominent GOP firms, including one paid more than $31 million by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to provide email lists of potential voters during the 2016 campaign. Americans whose names were attached to fraudulent FCC comments linked to the ex-Trump campaign staffer confirmed during a series of interviews that their identities had been stolen. Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has repeatedly pressed the FCC for answers about potential malfeasance during the net neutrality process, said it was clear that “dirty tricks” had been used, including identity theft, to generate millions of fake comments ascribed to real Americans. “It is especially troubling,” he said, “that someone closely associated with the Trump campaign may have been the mastermind behind the underhanded, likely illegal, tactics waged against internet freedom.”

Fall 2018, Corey Chase drove 6,000 miles around his state to ground-truth what every Vermonter with a cell phone knows: there are many, many places in the state where you simply can't get a signal, not to mention the 5 megabits per second data download speeds the carriers were claiming. What Chase, a VT Department of Public Service employee, found is now part of a detailed challenge before the Federal Communications Commission that officials hope will bring federal dollars into the state to improve the wireless network. Chase says roughly two-thirds of the tests that the FCC accepted showed service less than the carriers claimed. "What we were looking at was being almost completely foreclosed from any [federal money] because our state was considered nearly completely covered with 4G LTE service," said ClayPurvis, VT's telecommunications director. "And now we've opened up a significant amount of that space."

In the last Weekly Digest, I presented a retrospective of a major policy story from 2018: The democratic harms of “Big Tech.” This week, a polar vortex accompanied a vortex of more privacy abuses from Big Tech, and further concerns about the very bigness of Big Tech. The major news: Facebook has been secretly paying users -- some as young as 13 years old -- $20 each month to install a “research app” that collected intimate information about online behavior and communications. Some lawmakers are not happy. And the calls to break up Facebook are mounting. All signs point to lots of policy debates over the privacy violations of Big Tech in 2019. Whether those debates turn into meaningful privacy legislation will be one of the main telecommunications policy stories in 2019. 

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) reintroduced two pieces of legislation to modernize antitrust enforcement and promote competition. 1) The Merger Enforcement Improvement Act would update existing law to reflect the current economy and provide agencies with better information post-merger to ensure that merger enforcement is meeting its goals. This bill would modernize antitrust enforcement by improving the agencies’ ability to assess the impact of merger settlements, requiring studies of new issues, adjusting merger filing fees to reflect the 21^st century economy, and providing adequate funding for antitrust agencies to meet their obligations to protect American consumers. 2) The Consolidation Prevention and Competition Promotion Act of 2019 would restore the original purpose of the Clayton Antitrust Act to promote competition and protect American consumers. The bill would strengthen the current legal standard to help stop harmful consolidation that may materially lessen competition. It would clarify that a merger could violate the statute if it gives a company “monopsony” power to unfairly lower the prices it pays or wages it offers because of lack of competition among buyers or employers. The bill further strengthens the law to guard against harmful “mega-mergers” and deals that substantially increase market concentration, shifting the burden to the merging companies to prove that their consolidation does not harm competition.

The digital publishing industry took a big hit in recent days, when more than 1,000 employees were laid off at BuzzFeed, AOL, Yahoo and HuffPost. The cuts at BuzzFeed were the most alarming. Wasn’t this the company that was supposed to have it all figured out?  But look past the gloom, and a complicated narrative emerges that does not lend itself to a one-size-fits-all interpretation of What Went Wrong or a handy forecast of journalism’s future. While leading digital publishers have resorted to harsh measures, legacy titles such as The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New York Times have seen growth as they accommodate the habits of their increasingly digitally oriented readers. At the same time, a digital-native business, Vox Media, the owner of The Verge and Eater, turned a profit in 2018, its first as a large company. Even BuzzFeed may hit its financial marks in 2019. If it does, the reason will most likely be a combination of old-school business methods tried elsewhere (including layoffs), rather than its ability to crack some esoteric digital code.