Los Angeles Times

Rupert Murdoch is one of the most driven moguls in media, defying the odds for more than a half-century to build a global media empire from a small newspaper in Australia. So many people were startled to learn the 86-year-old tycoon and his sons appear willing to sell some of their prized 21st Century Fox media assets.  Walt Disney Co approached the Murdoch family in recent months to inquire about buying key Fox properties, including the Los Angeles-based movie and television studios, cable TV channels FX and National Geographic, and Fox’s international TV operations.

Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, has said its “blue tick” verification process is “broken” after it verified the organiser of a far-right rally. Twitter  was criticised after Jason Kessler, who organised the Unite the Right rally which sparked violence in the US town of Charlottesville in August, tweeted on Wednesday to confirm he had been verified by the platform. Twitter’s official support account confirmed that its verification system had been “paused” following the backlash.

We demonstrate that exposure to the news media causes Americans to take public stands on specific issues, join national policy conversations, and express themselves publicly—all key components of democratic politics—more often than they would otherwise. After recruiting 48 mostly small media outlets, we chose groups of these outlets to write and publish articles on subjects we approved, on dates we randomly assigned.

A warning to the hundreds of thousands of people publicly urging the Federal Communications Commission to keep its tough net neutrality rules: You might be wasting your time.

The FCC’s Republican majority has indicated it won’t be swayed by the electronic messages flooding the agency’s website. “Commission outcomes are not and cannot be decided by poll numbers or letter counts,” said FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, a Republican. A top aide to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who is leading the charge to repeal the rules, echoed that view. Robert McDowell, a former Republican FCC commissioner who has known Chairman Pai for years, said the facts on the issue will outweigh the volume of public comment. “Ajit Pai will be data-driven and not poll-driven,” McDowell said. Supporters of the regulations said it’s still important for members of the public to express their views: The opinions of average Americans could influence judges if a rule change is challenged in court as well as members of Congress if they decide to write net neutrality legislation.

Commissioners Pai and O’Rielly could be taking a big risk if they dismiss public sentiment, said Gigi Sohn, who served as counselor to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, a Democrat who pushed the rules into place. “I say defy the American people at your own peril,” Sohn said. “To the extent the FCC is supposed to act in ‘the public convenience interest and necessity,’ it might be important what the people think,” she said, quoting a phrase from the telecommunications law regarding the FCC’s oversight of the public airwaves.

American Enterprise Institute’s Jeffrey Eisenach, who advised the Trump transition team on telecommunications policy, said, “When you get millions of comments that basically say, ‘Net neutrality is a principle that has to be upheld. I don’t really know the facts. If you vote against this rule, you’re the scum of the Earth,’ that’s not the kind of evidence that the commission should be weighing.” But Sohn said Americans are busy and even filing a short statement to the FCC shows that the issue is important to them. The agency’s leaders should care about that. “To simply kind of wipe your hands of the public submissions is really not what an administrative agency should be doing,” she said. “They’ve got to take them into account.”

HBO’s John Oliver isn’t about to let the tough network neutrality rules he helped get enacted be erased without a fight. Three years ago, a 20-minute net neutrality segment on his HBO show “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” went viral. It helped spur an outpouring of public comments that led the Federal Communications Commission to enact tough regulations protecting the free flow of online content. Now, with current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai moving to dismantle the tough legal oversight behind those rules, Oliver took to the airwaves again urging Internet users to tell the agency to leave net neutrality alone. As further encouragement, Oliver’s team created a quicker way to navigate in the FCC website. Rather than searching for the specific page that solicits public comment on this topic, people can go to gofccyourself.com and click the “express” link on the right side to express their views.

Veterans of high-profile political campaigns and White House administrations — who in years past would have turned their public-service resumes and connections into jobs as lobbyists on K Street, advisers at Fortune 500 firms or leaders of nonprofits — are increasingly heading west, attracted by the opportunities to put their political skills to use in the technology industry.

It can lead to strange bedfellows: Democrats and Republicans who fought each other while working on opposing campaigns find themselves working on shared goals and trying to effect change outside the nation’s gridlocked capital. It’s a new gold rush — to social media companies, tech start-ups, incubators and key players in the sharing economy.

It began as an academic subject with a wonky name — network neutrality. But at its heart, the issue was simple: Internet service providers should treat all content equally. Within a few years, the phrase — shortened to the slightly less-wonky net neutrality — became a rallying cry for Silicon Valley technology companies, liberals and online free-speech advocates.

For broadband companies and free-market conservatives, net neutrality became code for a government meddling in the vibrant Internet economy. Now, after some bizarre pop culture moments, an embrace by a young senator on his way to the presidency, three major court rulings and more than 4 million public comments (and counting) to federal regulators, the term has become part of the online and political lexicon.