Fast Company

Nowadays, students looking to go to college complete almost the entire application process online: finding schools, sending in application forms and essays, and applying for financial aid, all with the click of a mouse or tap of a screen. By fall 2014, colleges and universities received 94% of their applications online, up from 68% in 2007 and 49% in 2005, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling (the NACAC).

But between getting into college and figuring out how to pay for it, a strictly online application process can become an additional challenge for teens who have limited financial means and minimal access to the internet. Students whose application fees are waived due to family incomes often end up only applying to a single college. Meanwhile, the average American teen applies to between four and six, according to Annie Reznik, executive director of the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success, a group of more than 90 colleges including Harvard, Princeton, Penn State, and the University of Arizona working to improve application success. “This digital divide is essentially one more barrier that low-income students face,” says David Hawkins, NACAC’s executive director for educational content and policy.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s central argument for eliminating network neutrality rules, which he introduced with a plan to “reverse the mistake” of the Obama-era regulations, is that doing so will fire up investment in broadband networks. But that prediction is very optimistic, say experts who warn that his proposal could very well do little or nothing to stimulate such investment.

Chairman Pai’s central argument is that [the Title II] net neutrality rules had the immediate effect of slowing down investment in broadband networks. He said the internet was already working fine before the FCC stepped in to impose unnecessary regulations for purely political reasons. “While investment in broadband infrastructure has certainly dwindled in recent years, the impact that net neutrality regulation has had is very much open to debate,” says Dan Hays, global tech, media, and telecom lead at PwC’s Strategy& group. “In fact, it’s quite plausible that growth in market penetration of broadband services, coupled with acceleration of industry consolidation over the past few years, have more to do with reduced spending, despite the pleas of network operators,” Hays says. The subtext here is that investors in telecommunication companies, as a rule, detest massive new capital expenditure spending on network infrastructure. Combining with other networks is one way to avoid doing so.

Earlier in 2017, AZ officials announced a plan they say could harness more than $100 million in federal funds to bring broadband internet connections to schools and libraries across the state. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, appointed in January to head the agency by President Trump, has generally spoken in favor of the E-Rate system.“Regarding E-rate, Chairman Pai strongly supports the program,” an FCC spokesman wrote.

But the FCC retracted the largely favorable January report shortly after Pai’s appointment, and it remains to be seen whether he will seek to make changes to the E-Rate rules approved under his Democratic predecessor, and what effects that may have on the program. Whether E-Rate will continue in its current form under the Trump administration and the Republican-led FCC is still an open question. Some conservatives have spoken out against the E-Rate program altogether; a 2015 set of budget recommendations from the conservative Heritage Foundation advocated phasing out the program.

Years before Donald Trump took over the government, secure digital communication tools including Signal and Tor have been receiving substantial funding from a perhaps surprising source: the US taxpayer. Since 2012, an organization called the Open Technology Fund (OTF) has operated within an often overlooked offshoot of the US government that traces its origins back to the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcasts that took otherwise censored information—and highlighted American culture and prosperity—behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

The OTF’s budget is inexpensive by the standards of government programs, and laughably small for a tech incubator—its reported budget last year was $7.5 million, compared to $27 million that Y Combinator invested in early-stage startups. Yet it faces an uncertain future under President Donald Trump.

A combination of political transition, economic forces, and good timing may spark a flurry of mergers and acquisitions in the telecommunications and media industries in 2017. Deregulation and market determinism are major parts of the new administration’s agenda. And the new Republican Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai isn’t likely to push against the tide when it comes to industry consolidation. Chairman Pai recently said that he’ll use a “light touch” approach to regulating the industry, and not “micromanage” the marketplace.

In 2015, shortly after Donald Trump announced that he was running for president, polls found that only 19% of Americans trusted the government “always” or “most of the time.” (The survey has not been repeated, but presumably, the numbers have not improved.) Only 11% approved of Congress. Those numbers are historic lows; in 1958, when a poll first asked the question, 73% of Americans said that they could trust the government most of the time.

Flux’s app is one of a handful of new platforms that aim to use technology to let people participate directly in politics, at scale. All are premised on the fact that–around the world–representative democracy isn’t working well. But technology could potentially help end corruption and lobbying, allow people to delegate votes to trusted friends rather than politicians, and empower experts in a field to meaningfully impact policy.

Many in the media are already writing the epitaph for net neutrality in the Trump era. And it’s true that with every new press release and statement out of the Federal Communications Commission (and they’re coming fast and furious) it’s become pretty clear that new chairman Ajit Pai is aligning the agency with Donald Trump’s business-friendly and less consumer-friendly agenda. But six weeks into the new administration, it seems less and less likely that Chairman Pai has it in mind to completely kill the network neutrality principles.

Apparently, Chairman Pai is more likely to scale back the effects of the order, rather than pushing the commission to withdraw it or asking Congress to pass legislation that overrides it, two commission insiders who insisted on anonymity told Fast Company. Chairman Pai may “soften” the order by allowing broadband carriers some kinds of web traffic prioritization or throttling under clearly defined conditions, one source said. For example, if a broadband customer is paying for 100 megabit-per-second broadband service, the provider might be allowed to prioritize some kinds of bandwidth-sensitive traffic (like video) in order to meet the speed promise. There are other ways to “lighten” Wheeler’s order. Regulatory agencies like the FCC can write new rules, and they can decide how vigorously to enforce existing ones. The FCC under Chairman Pai might do a little of both.

With every change in power, especially in the social media era, questions are raised about the new US president’s commitment to privacy rights. Here are some of the biggest things to look out for:
1) The Federal Communications Commission Makes it Easier for ISPs to Share Your Data
2) Citizens and Non-Citizens: Since Donald Trump entered office, the news media has regularly reported on phones and social media being searched at the airport. Although this also took place during the Obama era, anecdotal reports suggest that immigration officers are now requesting these searches of more travelers, and of both citizens and non-citizens.

As the CEO of Connecting for Good, a nonprofit in Kansas City, Esselman helps several thousand households at low-income housing projects in the city get free access to the internet. His group has provided such services since 2012, in addition to conducting computer training sessions for poor and working-class Kansas City residents. Now it wants to expand its reach, having recently applied for a federal program called Lifeline, which provides a monthly subsidy of $9.25 to low-income Americans to allow them to get online. But the Trump administration just made it harder for the new program, which launched in December, to have an impact.

Ajit Pai, the newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has announced a review of the program and blocked most of the already-vetted companies from participating in Lifeline, which could make it difficult for tens of thousands of low-income Americans to get online. The move shocked broadband access proponents in both parties, who have long argued that helping low-income and rural Americans get internet access is essential to educating young people and training the workforce of the future.

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t commented publicly on the issue of network neutrality since his election, nor has he indicated who he’d nominate to fill Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler’s position or another open commissioner’s seat at the FCC. But some of his top tech advisers have backed calls to reduce the telecommunication regulator’s clout.

"In terms of net neutrality, I think their intention is to deregulate the cable and telephone industry completely," says Ernesto Omar Falcon, legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I think that’s their intention right off the get-go, and I think that’s a fight that we’ll have to engage in pretty quickly." Traditionally, the FCC doesn’t issue major new policies in the absence of a permanent chair, as will be the case after Chairman Wheeler’s departure, but it’s unclear whether the regulator will maintain that tradition under Trump, Falcon says. But any push to revoke the existing Open Internet Order would require a period of public comment and could potentially spur Congressional hearings as well, he says. And while Republicans and telecom groups have publicly denounced the FCC rules, business groups are also averse to regulatory uncertainty and shifting legal frameworks, says Harold Feld, senior vice president at the pro-neutrality group Public Knowledge.