Friday, August 31, 2018
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California Advances Net Neutrality Rules
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President Trump: Truth doesn’t matter to media, only ‘hatred & agenda’
Susan Crawford: How Curbs Became the New Urban Battleground
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President Trump: Truth doesn’t matter to media, only ‘hatred & agenda’, Calls for CNN to fire its boss
President Donald Trump in a tweet ramped up his criticism of the media, saying “truth doesn’t matter to them.” "I just cannot state strongly enough how totally dishonest much of the Media is. Truth doesn’t matter to them, they only have their hatred & agenda. This includes fake books, which come out about me all the time, always anonymous sources, and are pure fiction. Enemy of the People!" A few minutes before, President Trump attacked CNN. "The hatred and extreme bias of me by @CNN has clouded their thinking and made them unable to function. But actually, as I have always said, this has been going on for a long time. Little Jeff Z has done a terrible job, his ratings suck, & AT&T should fire him to save credibility!" CNN president Jeff Zucker is currently on six weeks' leave from CNN to recover from having heart surgery.
President Trump tweeted shortly after, "What’s going on at @CNN is happening, to different degrees, at other networks - with @NBCNews being the worst. The good news is that Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse. When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!"
There is increasing evidence that this skepticism, exacerbated by the president’s relentless attacks, is trickling down to the next generation of voters. A 2017 report on a series of focus groups with 52 people between the ages of 14 and 24, conducted by Data & Society and the Knight Foundation, found that many young Americans believe the news is biased and are skeptical of its accuracy. “There was no assumption that the news would convey the truth or would be worthy of their trust,” the study reported. Teenagers, in particular, appear to be increasingly questioning the credibility and value of traditional media organizations. In interviews with The Atlantic, teens expressed great skepticism about the accuracy of the mainstream media, reiterated Trump’s biased characterization of many news sources, and said the president’s outrageous tweets have become so much a part of everyday life that they’ve morphed into catchphrases.
Vice President Mike Pence said that "liberals in the national media" have met their match in President Donald Trump, who frequently derides the press as "fake news." Vice President Pence sat down with David Brody of the Christian Broadcast Network, who asked whether the combative nature of the "mainstream media" provided a beneficial foil for Trump. "Well, all I know is for a lot of the liberals in the national media, they met their match in President Donald Trump," Pence said, before pivoting to Trump's reputation as a "fighter." "He's willing to fight every day to move this country forward to see jobs created, to see us reaffirm our commitment to the timeless principles in the Constitution, to see our military standing tall again, to see America respected in the world again," Pence said. "And to be able to take on his critics, one after another, and the only thing I know for sure is that President Trump is going to keep on fighting and we're going to keep on winning for the American people," he added.
Sen Orrin Hatch (R-UT) sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons, expressing concerns about the competitive effects of Google’s conduct in search and digital advertising. This letter cites a number of antitrust complaints and reports, and urges the Chairman to consider potential anti-competitive developments since the last investigation in 2013. “I write to urge the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to reconsider the competitive effects of Google’s conduct in search and digital advertising. As I explained in a speech last year, the procompetitive aspects of conduct should be weighed against its anticompetitive potential. I have no doubt that the career staff, you, and the other new FTC commissioners can and will do that here. In the past, Google has offered arguments that its conduct is procompetitive. And Google does have a long track record of providing valuable services and making important, innovative contributions. But much has changed since the FTC last looked at Google’s conduct regarding search and digital advertising.”
As President Donald Trump goes to war against Silicon Valley technology firms over what he believes is a left-wing bias against conservatives, a right-wing group has launched a lawsuit targeting this region’s tech giants and accusing them of a conspiracy. Freedom Watch, run by infamously litigious far-right former US prosecutor Larry Klayman — who once used conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ video show to call former President Barack Obama “a Muslim through and through” — accused Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple of “suppression and censorship of conservative content.” Freedom Watch is seeking class-action status and $1 billion in damages. The companies acted in concert with traditional media firms, including CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post, Freedom Watch alleged in the suit filed Aug 29 in US District Court in Washington (DC). Their goal, according to the suit? The tech firms and media companies want to “take down President Donald Trump and his administration with the intent and purpose to have installed leftist government in the nation’s capital and the 50 states,” the suit said.
Former White House Chief Strategist Steven Bannon recently discussed President Donald Trump's rhetoric toward Big Tech.
Asked about President Trump pushing misleading info to advance a war on Big Tech, Steve Bannon said, "The president often times sees information and thinks it ought to be in the public dialogue." Bannon said the "direction" of Trump's rhetoric is "correct" and that his tweets on issues often help get things "into the conversation." Bannon said Big Tech's data should be seized and put in a "public trust." Specifically, Bannon said, "I think you take [the data] away from the companies. All that data they have is put in a public trust. They can use it. And people can opt in and opt out. That trust is run by an independent board of directors. It just can't be that [Big Tech is] the sole proprietors of this data...I think this is a public good." Bannon added that Big Tech companies "have to be broken up" just like Teddy Roosevelt broke up the trusts."
Bannon attacked the executives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google. "These are run by sociopaths," he said. "These people are complete narcissists. These people ought to be controlled, they ought to be regulated." At one point during the phone call, Bannon said, "These people are evil. There is no doubt about that." Bannon said he thinks "this is going to be a massive issue" in future elections. He said he thinks it will probably take until 2020 to fully blossom as a campaign issue, explaining, "I think by the time 2020 comes along, this will be a burning issue. I think this will be one of the biggest domestic issues." Bannon said the "#MeToo movement has brought the issue of consent front and center" and argued that "this is going to bring the issue of digital consent front and center."
Google does feature work by traditional media organizations more than insurgent conservative outlets. Of course, Google’s ability to divine “quality” as distinct from “popularity” is limited. Search-ranking technology relies on the implicit votes of readers, with all the human biases that come bundled with them. Google, for its part, categorically rejected the claim that it tinkered with search results for political reasons. “When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds. Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” a spokesperson said. “Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries.” There you have it: Google says it is optimizing for relevant answers and high-quality content, not “political ideology.” But—and this is the part Google won’t say—what if relevance and quality are not equally distributed across the media?
Of course the mainstream organizations—with larger staffs, generally better-trained journalists, and deeper roots in the field—would rank higher. The New York Times and Washington Post have thousands of journalists between them. In 2017, The Times’ subscription revenue broke a billion dollars. The institutions of modern conservative journalism are simply not staffed or funded at the same level as what gets called the mainstream media. Many right-wing outlets are embedded inside advocacy groups, like the Heritage Foundation’s The Daily Signal. Others are tiny blogs without the human resources to do original reporting.
One of the key ingredients in Ron DeSantis’ victory in the Florida GOP governor’s race turned out to be makeup. The once little-known congressman spent so much time broadcasting Fox News TV hits from Washington in 2018 that he learned to apply his own powder so he could look as polished as he sounded. In his primary election campaign against Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, DeSantis’ cultivation of his Fox relationship made all the difference. It powered him to a double-digit win over a once better-known and better-funded candidate whose nomination appeared inevitable months ago. Just as important, the cable network introduced the Harvard-educated lawyer to his most useful patron — President Donald Trump, who endorsed him on Dec. 22. Since then, DeSantis made 121 appearances on Fox and Fox Business — his campaign estimates it would have cost his campaign $9.3 million to purchase all that airtime. It’s impossible to overstate the value of a steady stream of Fox appearances among Florida Republicans: Seventy percent of likely Florida GOP voters regularly watch Fox News and Fox Business channels, according to the DeSantis campaign’s polling. DeSantis’ campaign research made one thing clear: a Fox first campaign was superior to a Florida first effort. For Republicans, all politics isn’t local — it’s on Fox News.
Federal investigators have provided ample evidence that President Donald Trump was involved in deals to pay two women to keep them from speaking publicly before the 2016 election about affairs that they said they had with him. But it turns out that Trump wanted to go even further. He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on President Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Trump’s associates. The existence of the plan, which was never finalized, has not been reported before. But it was strongly hinted at in a recording that Cohen’s lawyer released in July of a conversation about payoffs that Cohen had with Trump. The move by Trump and Cohen indicated just how concerned they were about all the information amassed by the company, American Media, and its chairman, David Pecker, a loyal Trump ally of two decades who has cooperated with investigators.
California moved to reinstate Obama-era open-internet rules, challenging Trump administration rollback efforts and setting the state on a path to have the strongest net-neutrality rules in the nation. The California bill would forbid internet service providers from blocking websites, intentionally slowing down a website or app, or accepting payments to make online services go faster. The California bill also says interconnection agreements—in which an online service pays a cable or wireless provider to carry its traffic—can’t be used by companies like streaming video services to circumvent the open internet rules and improperly receive faster speeds. Such regulations resemble those adopted by the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission. The bill passed the California assembly by a preliminary count of 59-18, according to the clerk’s office, and now returns to the state senate, which previously passed a similar version. If it passes again there and is then signed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA), California would have the nation’s strongest net-neutrality rules. Gov Brown hasn’t publicly indicated his position on the bill.
This photo essay confirms that rural areas like Staunton (VA) are in critical need of high-speed broadband networks for economic and talent development, especially as access to technology has become the lever to avert the expected outcomes of poverty and social isolation, at least for vulnerable populations. Digital exclusion comes with costs. Rural residents are at risk of being marginalized in an information-rich economy where digital transactions and commercial sharing services are becoming more relevant. Already facing diminished life chances, people with lower incomes, people of color, the elderly, and foreign-born migrants in rural areas run the risk of being on the wrong side of the digital divide that further exacerbates their economic, social, and political marginalization. While Congress has recently called for increased funding earmarked for rural broadband infrastructure, Staunton businesses, entrepreneurs, and residents must work with what they have now. It’s expensive to bring high-speed broadband networks to rural America and the private sector has not been fully incentivized to accelerate deployment, especially in areas where the return on investment is not as obvious.
Whereas the digital divide has been historically viewed within a binary context of the haves and the have nots, it is much more complicated. It behooves the nation to not only rethink public policies and programs on this issue, but also to reconsider what value we put on how access to technology helps or hinders citizens in achieving their part of the American Dream, or at least what’s left of it.
That Time Telco Lobbyists Sent Me All Their Talking Points About Trying To Shift The Blame To Internet Companies
It's not every day that big telco lobbyists email me their internal documents about how they're going to try to shift all the negative press about themselves and try to flip it onto internet companies. But it did happen. A USTelecom executive emailed a 12-page document of talking points, asking the recipients to "review the document for accuracy and other thoughts" in order to help USTelecom President Jonathan Spalter for when he goes on C-SPAN. The big telcos really want to play up the recent attacks on social media companies ("edge providers," as they like to say), and throughout the document there are statements about taking advantage of the current political attacks on those companies.
USDA Launches Webpage Highlighting Resources to Help Rural Communities Bridge the Broadband e-Connectivity Infrastructure Gap
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue unveiled a new webpage featuring information about the importance of rural e-Connectivity and the ways the Department of Agriculture (USDA) is investing to help deploy high-speed broadband infrastructure in rural America. In the coming months, USDA will almost double longstanding programs with at least $600 million of additional funds for expanding rural broadband infrastructure in unserved rural areas and tribal lands.
It's common knowledge that city curbs are fiercely contested places, what with Ubers and Lyfts hovering inconveniently and blocking traffic; piles of shared bikes and scooters being dropped off and picked up; rapidly climbing numbers of deliveries being made by double-parked trucks; and buses and taxis pulling up—not to mention all the private-car parking going on. These daily dramas will only get more boisterous and difficult in the years to come, when fleets of city-licensed driverless cars join the fray. Like any complex policy regime aimed at changing the status quo, these plans require very detailed data to support them.
For a precedent that has caused a lot of policy misery for this country, consider high speed internet. Private companies selling us internet services have relied heavily on access to public rights-of-way for places to string their wires and install equipment, and for years have claimed that granular data about the locations they actually serve—households and businesses—is too confidential to provide to regulators. And price data—forget it. Without this information, the Federal Communications Commission makes policy in the dark, routinely overestimating the availability and speed of competitive connections, and having little insight into how much Americans are actually paying. Result: blindness on the government side, and a stagnant, oligopolistic marketplace on the consumer side. The risk of relying on third parties for data about shared mobility companies’ use of curbs is that policymakers will be stuck with whatever that third party chooses to make available, at whatever level of generality is deemed suitable by a group of private companies. Cities should demand granular location and pricing data (as well as data logging payments to drivers) as a condition of allowing access by shared mobility services—human-driven or driverless, tiny or huge—to their rights-of-way, including streets, curbs, and sidewalks.
[Susan Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School]
T-Mobile's proposed acquisition of Sprint would harm competitors and consumers, particularly in rural America, lobby groups for small carriers say. The Rural Wireless Association (RWA), NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association, and other groups filed petitions urging the Federal Communications Commission to block the T-Mobile/Sprint merger this week. "Removing Sprint from the equation through further industry consolidation will result in less competition which will drive prices higher for consumers, and would be decidedly contrary to the public interest," the RWA said. The FCC is required to evaluate whether mergers benefit the public. Rural providers often rely on Sprint for roaming, in part because "T-Mobile has not traditionally focused on rural consumers or markets," NTCA told the FCC. T-Mobile and other nationwide providers (i.e. Verizon and AT&T) charge roaming prices that are "multiple times higher than what Sprint offers," NTCA wrote. T-Mobile also differs from Sprint by demanding "one-sided roaming arrangements," the group said:
This paper explains how Mobile Network Operators (“MNOs”) are transforming their networks to meet the 5G challenge and the implications this transformation has for the structure of the cellular industry and broadband competition more generally. Among the many changes both large and small, the transition to 5G is driving MNOs to embrace: (a) agile management of diverse spectrum assets; (b) small cells; and (c) softwarization and virtualization. I explain how the 5G Future will be a converged market in which promoting the survival of fewer but stronger MNOs will promote the healthy evolution toward 5G, which will contribute to promoting innovation and sustaining energized competition across the broadband ecosystem. Accelerating the race to 5G will help intensify competition within the larger ecosystem from four important directions.
- Economies of scale for nationwide wireless operators are increasing with advances in network technology and architecture, which makes sustaining the pace of investment required to remain competitive with Verizon and AT&T more challenging for smaller operators.
- The move toward 5G will further drive the convergence of fixed and mobile broadband, which will increase the potential for intermodal competition between fixed and mobile providers and among wireless networking technologies (e.g., Wi-Fi and 4G-LTE-derived networks). The long-awaited convergence of fixed and mobile networking and the enhanced capabilities and localization of advanced wireless networking are creating new avenues for competition that increase the competitive pressure on the existing MNOs.
- The transition to smaller cells and more dynamic/flexible and heterogeneous local networking requirements, coupled with advances in networking equipment and software solutions, will open opportunities for new types of local facilities-based wireless infrastructure providers. These opportunities will include venue networks and neutral host deployments.
- The increased capabilities to virtualize every type of information communication technology (“ICT”) resource (including network resources) and grow demand for customized networking services will lead to more vigorous Mobile Virtual Network Operator (“MVNO”) competition.
Antitrust restrictions placed on Comcast after its takeover of NBCUniversal are due to expire in a few days. But that doesn’t mean the Justice Department is done scrutinizing the company. The department’s antitrust division wrote a letter Aug 14 to Comcast warning that it would continue to monitor developments in how the company handles TV programming and distribution. It also asked for notice by Aug 29 of any changes that the cable giant plans to make when the decree runs out on Sept 1. Comcast’s acquisition of NBC won the approval of regulators more than seven years ago. But a so-called consent decree with the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission imposed conditions designed to protect the emerging online-video market. “The department retains jurisdiction to enforce the antitrust laws and takes its obligations seriously,” Makan Delrahim, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said in the letter. “We would appreciate your cooperation in keeping us informed by providing the department with any plans you may have to change your policies or practices involving video programming and distribution.”
On Twitter, David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, sometimes tweets more than 30 times a day to nearly 50,000 followers, recently calling for the “chasing down” of specific black Americans and claiming the LGBTQ community is in need of “intensive psychiatric treatment.” On Facebook, James Allsup, a right-wing advocate, posted a photo comparing migrant children at the border to Jewish people behind a fence during the Holocaust with the caption, “They present it like it’s a bad thing #BuildTheWall.” On Gab, a censorship-free alternative to Twitter, former 2018 candidate for US Senate Patrick Little, claims ovens are a means of preserving the Aryan race. And Billy Roper, a well-known voice of neo-Nazism, posts “Let God Burn Them” as an acronym for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender.
Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies offer billions of people unparalleled access to the world. Users are able to tweet at the president of the United States, foster support for such social movements as Black Lives Matter or inspire thousands to march with a simple hashtag. "Social media companies have succeeded in sort of negotiating a place for themselves in the world where they are not the publishers,” said Benjamin Lee, senior research associate for the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats, who researches digital media and the far-right. “And somehow we all sort of sat down and accepted it up until the point we didn’t, and now they’re running to catch up.” “There is this kind of lingering question, which is, what obligation are they under to provide services to people?” Lee said. “Freedom of speech is freedom to express yourself, but it’s not freedom to force other people to publish what it is you have to say.”
Twitter said that it would begin requiring some organizations that purchase political ads on topics such as abortion, health-care reform and immigration to disclose more information about themselves to users, part of the tech giant’s attempt to thwart bad actors, including Russia, from spreading propaganda ahead of the 2018 election. The new policy targets promoted tweets that mention candidates or advocate on “legislative issues of national importance,” Twitter executives said. To purchase these ads, individuals and groups must verify their identities. If approved, their ads then would be specially labeled in users’ timelines and preserved online for the public to view. And promoted tweets, and the accounts behind them, would be required disclose the name of the actual organization that purchased the ad in the first place.
The policy changes will affect advocacy groups and candidates seeking public office. As opposed to Facebook, Twitter says news outlets get an exemption for promoted tweets that involve political content. Publications eligible to apply for exemption must meet criteria such as having more than 200,000 monthly unique visitors to their site, displaying available contact and "about" information online and having a searchable archive. “We don’t believe that news organizations running ads on Twitter that report on these issues, rather than advocate for or against them, should be subject to this policy,” wrote Twitter executives. The policies are set to go into effect on Sept 30 in the U.S.
Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O’Rielly announced that he has hired Arielle Roth as wireline advisor in his office. Roth intends to begin work on Sept 4, 2018. Roth is currently employed as legal advisor in the Wireline Competition Bureau where she provides counsel on universal service and pricing matters. Prior to this position, she served as a legal fellow for the Hudson Institute’s Center for the Economics of the Internet. She will be replacing Amy Bender, who will depart the Commission on August 31, 2018.
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