Watchdog group Campaign for Accountability is calling for an investigation into political campaigns' use of "imbedded" Facebook and Google staffers. It wants the House and Senate Rules Committees to investigate the practice and whether new laws are needed to prevent what it says are edge providers "abusing their relationships" with Washington. 

The campaign, which runs the Google Transparency Project, also released a report outlining what it says is the quid pro quo for such imbeds: "Campaigns get free help targeting and persuading voters; the companies reap valuable intelligence for their lobbying operations and forge relationships with politicians who will be responsible for laws affecting their interests." The campaign argues that the imbeds gives the edge providers inside knowledge of the campaigns and muscle with policymakers and potential policymakers that other industries can't get, calling it an "undisclosed, and largely unregulated influence channel." "Academics who interviewed the tech company embeds shortly after the election found they made no bones about the purpose of the embeds. '[S]taffers at these firms stated that providing tools to candidates to help them get elected was a way to build relationships with the elected representatives who would be in a position to regulate them in the future," the report said.

[Commentary] First came the scaremongering. Then came the strong-arming. After being contested in arguably the biggest lobbying exercise in the history of the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation became fully applicable at the end of May. Since its passage, there have been great efforts at compliance, which regulators recognize. At the same time, unfortunately, consumers have felt nudged or bullied by companies into agreeing to business as usual. This would appear to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the new law.

Under the GDPR, a contract cannot be used to obtain consent. Some major companies seem to be relying on take-it-or-leave-it contracts to justify their sweeping data practices. Witness the hundreds of messages telling us we cannot continue to use a service unless we agree to the data use policy. We’ve all faced the pop-up window that gives us the option of clicking a brightly colored button to simply accept the terms, with the “manage settings” or “read more” section often greyed-out. One of the big questions is the extent to which a company can justify collecting and using massive amounts of information in order to offer a “free” service.

Independent EU enforcement authorities — at least one in each EU member state — are already investigating 30 cases of such alleged violations. The public will see the first results before the end of 2018. Regulators will use the full range of their enforcement powers to address abuses, including issuing fines.

[Giovanni Buttarelli is the European Union’s data protection supervisor. Because of his advocacy for the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation law, he is sometimes called “Mr. GDPR.”]

For its part, the Federal Communications Commission will not take the value of broadcasting for granted so long as I am Chairman. I’m committed to modernizing our rules in order to allow broadcasting to flourish. Our record over the past year-and-a-half is proof of this. And with your indulgence, I’d like to walk through some of that record.

One of the biggest things we’re doing for broadcasters at the FCC is something that the typical American would probably expect to be typical for any agency: making sure that our rules match today’s marketplace and technology. That’s often a heavy lift. Broadcasting’s virtues may be timeless, but many broadcast regulations most certainly are not.

The last policy matter I’d like to discuss also featured at the FCC’s August meeting, and that deals with the incentive auction repack. As you know, when Congress authorized the FCC to conduct the incentive auction in 2012, it required the Commission to reimburse certain costs incurred only by full power and Class A stations that were reassigned to new channels as a result of the auction, as well as certain costs incurred by multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to continue to carry such stations. Recently, however, Congress passed legislation that, among other things, expanded the list of entities eligible to be reimbursed for auctionrelated expenses. It now includes LPTV stations, TV translators, and FM stations. Last week, we started to implement Congress’ directive. We want to disburse funds fairly and efficiently while at the same time ensuring that there are robust safeguards against waste, fraud, and abuse. If you’re interested, tell us—we need and want to hear from you.

While unlikely to draw the level of attention given to abortion rights, the Affordable Care Act, and affirmative action, the status of the “Chevron doctrine” is, to many, a crucial consideration for and against the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. The Chevron doctrine gives regulatory agencies substantial discretion to decide what they can do under the laws that define their authority. Perhaps the most relevant Supreme Court Chevron-related opinion these days is National Cable Television Association v. Brand X, decided in 2005. “Brand X” was a generic name for firms that wanted to offer broadband service by using facilities owned by the existing cable operator at regulated wholesale access prices, not by building their own facilities. As with Chevron, the real respondent was the regulator, in this case the Federal Communications Commission. The majority found that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was sufficiently vague that the FCC could classify broadband as either a telecommunications or, as it did at the time, an information service. Here again, Chevron deference to the regulator led to an arguably procompetitive and certainly deregulatory outcome.

Undoubtedly, one can imagine circumstances where agencies interpret vague statutory provisions in ways that limit rather than advance market-like outcomes and economic efficiency. And certainly, respecting the constitutional division of governmental labor between legislative, executive, and judicial branch warrant some if not primary consideration in the debate over the Chevron doctrine. But those who want to get rid of Chevron to limit regulatory aversion to markets should look at the record and think again.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is set to testify Aug 16 in front of a Senate oversight committee. He's certain to have to respond to questions while there about false statements he and some of his subordinates made to lawmakers about an incident in 2017 in which the agency's computer systems got overwhelmed during the comment period for its then-ongoing net-neutrality proceeding. Chairman Pai has tried to distance himself from those false statements, blaming them on the agency's former chief information officer, David Bray. But lawmakers are sure to want to know when Pai knew the statements were false and why he didn't retract them earlier. Perhaps more importantly, lawmakers may well try to delve into the role the incident played in Chairman Pai's effort to overturn the FCC's net-neutrality rules. And the incident and Pai's answers about it could factor into ongoing court battle over his repeal of those rules.

Free Press, Public Knowledge, and other groups have sued the FCC to try to overturn the new rules, which the agency passed in December and which basically remove all net-neutrality protections. When considering new rules, the FCC is required by law to take public comments into account. As part of the case the groups are making against the rules, they plan to argue that the agency didn't, in fact, make a good-faith effort to do that. Instead, they plan to argue that it failed in its duty to seriously gather and consider the public's comments. The groups will point at numerous examples of this, but one of the examples will be the agency's inability to handle the comments coming in from "Last Week Tonight" viewers and falsely ascribing that inability to a DDoS attack. "If that were only thing, it wouldn't be fatal on its own," said Public Knowledg'e Harold Feld. "But it's part of a general pattern of the FCC failing to conduct the process in an above-board way that adequately gave the public a genuine opportunity to be heard."