Daily Digest 3/2/2018 (FCC's March Agenda)

[Press release] I want the United States to win the 5G race. I outlined the Federal Communications Commission’s strategy for 5G leadership and delivering next-generation wireless connectivity to American consumers using a three-part approach: forward-thinking spectrum policy, modernized rules for infrastructure deployment, and light-touch network regulation.Today, I’m unveiling a lineup for the FCC’s March 22 open meeting that builds on this momentum. Headlining the meeting will be a vital part of our 5G strategy: modernizing our rules to promote the wireless infrastructure of the future. I asked my colleague, Commissioner Brendan Carr, to lead the FCC’s effort to modernize our wireless infrastructure rules.  Thanks to his efforts, we’ll be voting on an order at our March meeting that would do just that.  Most importantly, it would find that the private sector’s deployment of certain small wireless facilities shouldn’t trigger federal historic preservation and environmental reviews.  Red tape like this is not only unnecessary for small cells, but also increases the cost and slows down the deployment of wireless networks. [FCC Chairman Ajit Pai]

In the early years of the 20th Century, Louis Brandeis was America’s most influential advocate for antitrust enforcement but his contributions to antitrust have been much debated ever since. Given the current, prominent discussion of the future of antitrust in these economic times, this essay proposes a five-part framework to describe Brandeis’s approach, which relies heavily on institutional roles and responsibilities: (1) Legislators creating antitrust laws should consider broad economic and social issues, including democratic values, (2) Antitrust laws should translate those broad motivations into administrable legal standards within the scope of professional obligations familiar to antitrust enforcers and the courts, (3) Legal professionals vindicate the legislature’s larger social and economic goals by relying on learnings from economics and the social sciences and applying the chosen legal standard to the facts in a determined and detailed manner, while avoiding day-to-day political considerations, (4) Sectoral regulation should be used where justified by specific industry circumstances, such as the existence of local utility monopolies or in circumstances in which normal competitive forces cannot get the job done, and (5) Competition policy, both in antitrust and sectoral regulation, is to be informed by a spirit of experimentation.

Sallet, Jonathan, Louis Brandeis: A Man for this Season (March 1, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3132482

[Jonathan Sallet is a Benton Senior Fellow. He works to promote broadband access and deployment, to advance competition, including through antitrust, and to preserve and protect internet openness. He is the former-Federal Communications Commission General Counsel (2013-2016), and Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Litigation, Antitrust Division, US Department of Justice (2016-2017).]

The Senate has passed the Rural Wireless Access Act of 2017. Senate Communications Subcommittee Chairman Roger Wicker's (R-MS) bill would require the Federal Communications Commission to come up with a consistent methodology for wireless broadband coverage data. The goal is to make sure rural areas and urban areas get equitable broadband infrastructure treatment.

[Press release] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has said that bridging the digital divide is his highest priority. And now, we have a valuable tool that will aid in efforts to bridge the gap: a new interactive broadband map, which will help the public and policy-makers understand where there are gaps in delivering fixed broadband and much more. This new map is built on the latest data for fixed-broadband deployment, collected every six months by the FCC from providers on Form 477.  Right now, that’s data as of December 2016, but the new map is designed to be quickly and easily updated with the most recent data sets.

The social media landscape in early 2018 is defined by a mix of long-standing trends and newly emerging narratives. Facebook and YouTube dominate this landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. At the same time, younger Americans (especially those ages 18 to 24) stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day. Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users. Facebook remains the primary platform for most Americans. Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) now report that they are Facebook users, and roughly three-quarters of those users access Facebook on a daily basis. With the exception of those 65 and older, a majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups now use Facebook. But the social media story extends well beyond Facebook. The video-sharing site YouTube – which contains many social elements, even if it is not a traditional social media platform – is now used by nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults and 94% of 18- to 24-year-olds. And the typical (median) American reports that they use three of the eight major platforms that the Center measured in this survey. These findings also highlight the public’s sometimes conflicting attitudes toward social media. For example, the share of social media users who say these platforms would be hard to give up has increased by 12 percentage points compared with a survey conducted in early 2014. But by the same token, a majority of users (59%) say it would not be hard to stop using these sites, including 29% who say it would not be hard at all to give up social media.

Google gives $10,000 in credits each to 35,000 nonprofits worldwide every month to buy ads on its search engine. But Google found that some ads received few clicks and announced in December 2017 that it would stop funding groups that generate clicks off less than 5 percent of their ads in two consecutive months. Grant recipients called it a wake up call to pay attention to Google after years of focusing on social media marketing. But despite rushing to comply, several said they could not do so in only two months and that their accounts may not get funded for March. “We’re very grateful for the program,” said Conrad Contreras, communications manager for Greenlining Institute, an Oakland (CA) social justice organization afraid of losing the funds. “But five percent in two months, it’s just unrealistic.” Organizations can seek reinstatement after demonstrating changes. The 15-year-old AdWords Ad Grants program did not previously have a click threshold. Advertisers list search terms such as “donate clothing” for which they would like their ads to appear. Perfecting phrases is key to garnering clicks.

Federal Communications Commission  Chairman Ajit Pai turned down an National Rifle Association of America (NRA) gun award he received at the Conservative Political Action Conference, citing the advice of ethics officials at his agency. An executive from the NRA named Chairman Pai the Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award recipient at CPAC for his efforts to repeal the Obama-era net neutrality rules. The award was a Kentucky handmade long gun, which the NRA said would be housed at the organization’s museum until he could retrieve it. But Chairman Pai, in letters sent to the NRA and to the American Conservative Union, which puts on the conference, noted he was "surprised" by the award and turned down the gun. “As you know, once my staff became aware of what was happening, they asked backstage that the musket not be presented to me to ensure that this could be first discussed with and vetted by career ethics attorneys in the FCC’s Office of General Counsel,” Chairman Pai wrote, according to an FCC source who relayed the text of the letters. “Therefore, upon their counsel, I must respectfully decline the award,” he wrote. “I have also been advised by the FCC’s career ethics attorneys that I would not be able to accept the award upon my departure from government service.”  Government ethics rules would generally prevent FCC officials from accepting awards worth more than $200 without written clearance from their agency’s ethics officials, said Larry Noble, senior director and general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit organization that studies ethics rules. Noble noted he had "serious questions" about Pai receiving the award when he learned of it.