Los Angeles Times

After a month worrying about the fate of funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the hundreds of community organizations that the agency supports nationwide, the arts world found hope in congressional leaders’ agreement April 30 that would not only maintain NEA funding for fiscal year 2017 but increase it by $2 million. In a statement May 1, the NEA struck an optimistic note, pointing out that the proposed appropriation of about $150 million was the level of funding that it requested from Congress in February 2016. “This morning Congress released the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017, a bipartisan agreement that will fund the government for the remainder of FY 2017,” the NEA wrote. “In this bill, the NEA is funded at its FY 2017 request level of $149.849 million. … The agency has been operating at its FY 2016 appropriation of $147.949 since October 1, 2016. Congress is expected to pass this bill later in the week, and the President is expected to sign it.”

The argument that the private sector can do things better, faster and cheaper than government never seems to go out of style. But a new report on AT&T’s strategy for rolling out high-speed Internet service in California underscores what may be the biggest flaw in that argument: When critical infrastructure construction is left entirely to private companies, much of the public gets shortchanged.

In deciding where to build its network, AT&T chooses to “follow the demand for high internet speeds and determine where there are solid investment cases and receptive policies,” and prefers cities that have “established a strong environment for investing.” By their nature, these are likely to be more affluent communities with residents who appreciate the benefits of high-speed communications because they have experience using them. But that also leaves behind communities whose residents don’t voice a demand for the best services because they don’t know what they’re missing—or who don’t have the money to buy the Internet-connected goods and services that put additional revenues in the ISP’s pocket. At its heart, this is a strategy in which the rich get richer—widening, not narrowing, the digital divide. One can’t blame a private company for responding to the profit motive any more than one can blame a dog for drinking from the toilet. But that’s what government regulation is for — to ensure that a private company endowed by government with a largely monopolistic franchise compensate the community for its windfall in part by serving all residents equally.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s latest target is the network neutrality rules the commission adopted in 2015 after a federal appeals court threw out the commission’s previous neutrality regulations. The 2015 rules try to preserve the openness that has been crucial to the Internet’s success by barring broadband providers from blocking or impeding legal sites and services, favoring some sites’ traffic in exchange for pay, or unreasonably interfering with the flow of data on their networks. These are all vitally important principles, as even opponents of the rules recognize.

The fight has largely been over how strictly they should be interpreted and enforced. In particular, the dispute has been over the FCC’s move to reclassify broadband providers as utilities, which a federal appeals court ruled the commission had to do before it could impose blanket prohibitions on blocking, throttling or prioritizing data. The reclassification also subjected providers to some of the same, decades-old rules as local phone monopolies. The process of undoing a rule usually requires another public notice and months of public comment on the proposed change. But Chairman Pai may take a procedural shortcut next month that undoes the utility classification right away. And instead of having neutrality rules that the FCC would enforce, Chairman Pai may call on broadband providers to pledge not to block, impede or prioritize traffic unreasonably — with the Federal Trade Commission available to slap the hands of any provider that goes back on its pledge. That’s a laughable idea.

Protecting net neutrality shouldn’t be a partisan issue, considering how widely shared that goal is. If Chairman Pai manages to kill the current rules, Congress shouldn’t wait for the courts to settle the matter. Instead, lawmakers should make clear once and for all that broadband providers mustn’t pick winners and losers online, and that the FCC has the power to make sure they don’t.

Arlene Howard’s phone bill said she made a bunch of calls to Cuba, which she didn’t. Her service provider, Charter Communications, acknowledged that her office line must have been hacked. But it still demanded that she pay thousands of dollars to cover the cost of the bogus calls. To which all customers of Charter’s Spectrum service should rightly respond: Say what?! You probably didn’t know this — I didn’t — but buried deep within the fine print of Spectrum’s terms of service for business and residential landlines is a provision that the customer, not the company, is responsible for any fraudulent use of the phone service. I found similar provisions tucked away in AT&T’s and Frontier Communications’ terms. You get hacked, you pay.

Media companies and their advertisers are shortchanged $8 billion a year because of scams, or more than the estimated combined revenue of Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures and MGM Studios. Advertisers think they're getting the desired views and clicks. But companies taking closer looks are finding unwelcome results. Websites where ads appear are visited by robots — computers hacked to impersonate real browsing behaviors. Others traffic in content people crave but upstanding businesses wouldn’t want to support, such as bootlegged movies or terrorist propaganda.

The set-up is siphoning potential revenue from legitimate media companies to shady ones. And it’s enabling hucksters to profit in fake newswriting and piracy thanks to ad views. Stopping money from flowing to their operations has become a new priority for advertisers. Their results are difficult to measure, but early signs are encouraging.

[Commentary] Standing before the cheering throngs at the Republican National Convention last summer, Donald Trump bemoaned how special interests had rigged the country’s politics and its economy, leaving Americans victimized by unfair trade deals, incompetent bureaucrats and spineless leaders. He swooped into politics, he declared, to subvert the powerful and rescue those who cannot defend themselves. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” To Trump’s faithful, those words were a rallying cry. But his critics heard something far more menacing in them: a dangerously authoritarian vision of the presidency — one that would crop up time and again as he talked about overruling generals, disregarding international law, ordering soldiers to commit war crimes, jailing his opponent.

Remember that President Trump’s verbal assaults are directed at the public, and are designed to chip away at people’s confidence in these institutions and deprive them of their validity. When a dispute arises, whose actions are you going to consider legitimate? Whom are you going to trust? That’s why the public has to be wary of Trump’s attacks on the courts, the “deep state,” the “swamp.” We can’t afford to be talked into losing our faith in the forces that protect us from an imperial presidency.

[Commentary] In the days ahead, The Los Angeles Times editorial board will look more closely at President Donald Trump, with a special attention to three troubling traits:

1) Trump’s shocking lack of respect for those fundamental rules and institutions on which our government is based. He has lashed out at journalists, declaring them “enemies of the people,” rather than defending the importance of a critical, independent free press. His contempt for the rule of law and the norms of government are palpable.
2) His utter lack of regard for truth.
3) His scary willingness to repeat alt-right conspiracy theories.

[Commentary] If Americans are unsure which President Donald Trump they have — the Machiavellian negotiator who lies to manipulate simpler minds, or one of those simpler minds himself — does it really matter? In either case he puts the nation in danger by undermining the role of truth in public discourse and policymaking, as well as the notion of truth being verifiable and mutually intelligible. Our civilization is defined in part by the disciplines — science, law, journalism — that have developed systematic methods to arrive at the truth. Citizenship brings with it the obligation to engage in a similar process. Good citizens test assumptions, question leaders, argue details, research claims. Investigate. Read. Write. Listen. Speak. Think. Be wary of those who disparage the investigators, the readers, the writers, the listeners, the speakers and the thinkers. Be suspicious of those who confuse reality with reality TV, and those who repeat falsehoods while insisting, against all evidence, that they are true. To defend freedom, demand fact.

[Commentary] With so much going on in Washington, the American people may not be up to date with the Congressional Review Act — an obscure tool Congress has been using to rescind policies that were put in place by the previous administration. Most recently, the House and Senate voted to undo rules designed to protect the privacy of American consumers when they sign up for and use broadband Internet service. This would leave Internet users worse off, but there’s still time for President Trump to veto the legislation.

What people may not realize, moreover, is that if the legislation approved by Congress becomes law, there will be no privacy rules governing broadband providers. The FCC no longer will be able to protect consumer privacy and, because of arcane restraints on its jurisdiction, the FTC will be unable to pick up the slack. Last year’s election was fought over many issues; removing privacy protections from American consumers was not one of them. We have yet to hear from a single consumer who wants less control over their sensitive personal data. Unfortunately, that is exactly what this legislation would do. It is our hope that President Trump, who was elected by arguing that he would stand up for the average American, does what most Americans would expect and vetoes this legislation.

The major entertainment companies are putting a lot of money into luring cord cutters — millennials and others who want to ditch their cable companies — to new subscription streaming services that allow viewers to watch their favorite TV shows and movies directly over the Internet. The same industry that once blamed the Internet for stealing content now wants to use it to sell directly to consumers. It’s too bad that the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission is pursuing policies that could seriously harm these innovative efforts, just as the streaming business is getting going. And it’s really too bad that some in the media industry aren’t taking the threats seriously enough. The assault will come in the form of telecommunications regulation. Trump’s newly appointed FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has made it clear he wants to eliminate rules that establish net neutrality. In the past, technology companies and public interest groups pushed hard for net neutrality. Now it’s time for reinforcements.

[Brodsky is a consultant in Washington. He covered the FCC as a journalist, and is the former head of communications for Public Knowledge.]