Why is it important whether broadband internet access service (BIAS) is considered a common carriage service or not? Because if BIAS is a common carriage service, then BIAS providers bear the fundamental obligations of common carriers.  These common carriage obligations are:

• To provide service upon reasonable request (i.e. the carrier may not selectively refuse to serve),
• Without unreasonable discrimination (i.e. similarly situated customers must be treated similarly),
• At just and reasonable rates, and
• With adequate care.

If BIAS is deemed an information service, then the above-described common carriage obligations do not apply — and the FCC does not have the authority to impose them.  Furthermore, the scope of permissible regulatory authority over information services is unclear as a legal matter, and resultant efforts to test that scope can fluctuate over time as the political party (Democrat or Republican) maintaining a majority of Federal Communications Commission commissioners shifts back and forth. Thus, the differential impact of legal classification on BIAS’s providers’ regulatory obligations is the key to understanding what is really at stake.  In essence, the legal classification battle leads us to a fork in the road – one traversed by classification as a telecommunications service, and the other traversed by classification as in information service.  

[Barbara A. Cherry is a Professor in the Media School at Indiana University]

The “brain drain” from rural areas has been a problem across the country for decades. Since 2000, Emporia's population has declined more than 7 percent. It's now home to 24,724 people. 

“We understood that nobody was going to invest in us if we didn’t,” says Casey Woods, executive director of Emporia Main Street, a non-profit that advocates for local businesses and heritage. Woods and other city leaders think they have a solution. They plan to make Emporia (Kansas) a rural tech hub built with local investment in a fiber network, assistance from the Rural Innovation Initiative, and a long-held entrepreneurial spirit. Emporia was, after all, “named after the marketplace, the emporium,” says City Commissioner Rob Gilligan said. “Business and enterprise was always that founding idea.” That idea dates back to the end of the Civil War, when Emporia become a big railroad hub. “Broadband is the new railroad,” Woods says. “Broadband is that new iteration. It represents commerce, just in a digital format.”

Of the new priorities Bozeman city commissioners added to their strategic plan recently, perhaps none will prove to be more consequential than declaring broadband internet service to be essential infrastructure – just as important as streets, bridges and water and sewer systems. It was a logical next step in the city’s broadband policy evolution. It started six years ago with the formation of committee of professionals and business owners that identified a demand for high-speed internet service in the city. That was followed by the creation of Bozeman Fiber, a non-profit organization tasked with constructing a broadband network. The basic mid-city network has been completed and connects the city, county and the Bozeman School District with high-speed service. The city has spent a little over $1 million on this project so far. The county and school district pay about $50,000 a year for access to the network. The city should be able to recoup its investment through those fees and fees paid by future users. The city’s involvement in this venture has been forward thinking.

In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but consumer attention. We examine user priorities over the allocation of their time, and interpret that behavior in light of policy discussions over universal service, data caps, and related policy topics, such as merger analysis. Specifically, we use extensive microdata on user online choice to characterize the demand for the services offered online, which drives a household's supply of attention. Our data cover a period of time that saw the introduction of many new and notable sites and new devices on which to access them. In our analysis, we assess “how” households supply their attention along various dimensions, such as their concentration of attention across the universe of sites and the amount of attention expenditure per domain visit. Remarkably, we find no change in “how” households allocated their attention despite drastically changing where they allocated it. Moreover, conditional on total attention expenditure, demographics entirely fail to predict our key measures of attention allocation decisions. We highlight several important implications, for policy and beyond, stemming from the persistence and demographic orthogonality of our novel attention measures.

Amid public sparring in Trumpworld about how best to advance next-generation wireless technology, the issue has been a field day for federal lobbyists. Some 50 tech and telecom firms lobbied on 5G issues in the first stretch of 2019, more than double the number over the same period in 2018. The Chamber of Commerce and Qualcomm were the top-spending 5G advocates during the first quarter.

Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey phoned Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and stood by the company’s decision to permit a tweet from President Donald Trump that later resulted in a flood of death threats targeting the congresswoman. The previously unreported call focused on an incendiary video that President Trump shared on April 12, which depicts Rep Omar discussing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks interspersed with footage of the Twin Towers burning. The clip did not include the full context of Omar’s remarks, which were taken from a public event on the broader issue of Islamophobia. Rep Omar pressed Dorsey to explain why Twitter didn’t remove Trump’s tweet outright. Dorsey said that the president’s tweet didn’t violate the company’s rules. Dorsey also pointed to the fact that the tweet and video already had been viewed and shared far beyond the site. But he did tell Rep Omar that Twitter needed to do a better job generally in removing hate and harassment from the site.

Facebook is banning personality quiz apps, which have for years been able to collect and store a great deal of information about their users. The ban comes a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it came out that the data firm had acquired information on up to 87 million people through the quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife.”

To be clear, personality quizzes themselves were not the problem here. While they offer an easy way for unscrupulous developers to gather masses of data — after all, they’re premised on handing over personal information — the problem was that Facebook allowed developers, for many years, to collect information on friends of friends and never thoroughly enforced policies to ensure that the data was kept secure and only used for intended purposes.

The ban on personality quizzes is part of a broader crackdown by Facebook on what developers are able to do and access across its platform. Facebook is locking down a number of older APIs for accessing user data, and it’ll prevent developers from accessing new data if a person hasn’t used the app in the past 90 days.