Daily Digest 4/02/2018 (Steven Bochco)

A top executive at Comcast testified at the AT&T-Time Warner antitrust trial that he has “no reason” to believe that the massive merger will have an impact on their company’s negotiations for Turner channels or HBO.  A key argument in the Justice Department’s case is that the merger will give AT&T-Time Warner increased leverage to demand more onerous fees from distribution rivals, ultimately driving up prices for consumers. But Greg Rigdon, executive vice president of content acquisition for Comcast, was asked by Time Warner’s attorney Kevin Orsini what would change after the merger. While cautioning that he didn’t know how the company would operate, he said he had “no reason to believe it will impact my negotiations with Turner or HBO.”

[Commentary] What matters is not whether internet companies “deserve” our private information but why we as consumers do not have meaningful ways to protect that data from being siphoned for sale in the first place. The American government has done little to help us in this regard. The Federal Trade Commission merely requires internet companies to have a privacy policy available for consumers to see. A company can change that policy whenever it wants as long as it says it is doing so. As a result, internet companies have been taking our personal property — our private information — while hiding this fact behind lengthy and coercive legalese and cumbersome “opt out” processes. The European Union, however, is handling the problem differently. Starting in May, its General Data Protection Regulation will go into effect in its 28 member nations. The regulation is powerful in its simplicity: It ensures that consumers own their private information and thus have the right to control its usage and that internet companies have an obligation to give consumers the tools to exercise that control.

[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 the Harvard Kennedy School.]

President Donald Trump continued to needle Amazon, claiming the company maintains an advantageous relationship with the US Postal Service amounting to a "scam" worth "billions of dollars." The President wrote on Twitter:

While we are on the subject, it is reported that the U.S. Post Office will lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon. That amounts to Billions of Dollars. The Failing N.Y. Times reports that “the size of the company’s lobbying staff has ballooned,” and that does not include the Fake Washington Post, which is used as a “lobbyist” and should so REGISTER. If the P.O. “increased its parcel rates, Amazon’s shipping costs would rise by $2.6 Billion.” This Post Office scam must stop. Amazon must pay real costs (and taxes) now!

The $1.50 figure comes from a Wall Street Journal op-ed, which cited a Citigroup analysis that the Postal Service loses $1.46 on each package it delivers for Amazon. But a Fortune Magazine report found that such a subsidy is due to congressional action that limits the postal service's ability to compete with companies like FedEx.

In a 2016 employee memo that was leaked the week of March 26, a Facebook executive defended the company's questionable data mining practices and championed the growth of social media at any cost — apparently even death. "Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies,” company vice president Andrew Bosworth wrote in the memo. “Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.” Bosworth, who oversaw Facebook's advertising and business platform at the time and is now in charge of the company's virtual reality department, has acknowledged writing the message but said he intended only to start a debate. “I didn't agree with it even when I wrote it,” he wrote on Twitter after the report was published. 

A second member has quit the Federal Communications Commission's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, also suggesting it has been carrying water for industry rather than drawing on a well of other sources to grow broadband deployment. Miguel Gamiño Jr., CTO of the New York City, said in a letter to FCC chairman Ajit Pai that after participating in 100 hours worth of calls, attending one all-day meeting in D.C. and submitting "countless" suggestions and comments," he has concluded that the committee has "has skewed the drafting of the proposed recommendations towards industry priorities without regard for a true public-private partnership." He said he could not recommend the city follow or promote BDAC's eventual work product, and instead suggested the city's nationwide partnership between Mayor Bill de Blasio and more than a dozen other mayors on promoting network neutrality would be a venue to share best practices on broadband deployment. Gamiño said he had no choice but to "step away" from the process and focus on efforts be thought would provide his city " more productive opportunities for achieving the kind of cooperative progress in advancing broadband deployment in the public interest."