New York Times

The timing could not be more fortuitous for Sinclair Broadcast Group: a Republican president is in the White House, his regulators have just eased rules on owning television stations and the dominant name in conservative media is reeling from a sexual harassment scandal. But as Sinclair tries to expand by buying even more local television stations, it has locked horns with that other broadcast giant known for its political bent, 21st Century Fox. Now the battle for a bigger audience is on, as Sinclair and Fox each look to broaden their reach in the Trump era.

[Commentary] Every year, the internet gets a little less fair. The corporations that run it get a little bigger, their power grows more concentrated, and a bit of their idealism gives way to ruthless pragmatism. And if Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gets his way, the hegemons are likely to grow only larger and more powerful.

At the moment, the internet isn’t in a good place. The Frightful Five — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company — control nearly everything of value in the digital world, including operating systems, app stores, browsers, cloud storage infrastructure, and oceans of data from which to spin new products. A handful of others — Comcast, AT&T, Verizon — control the wired and wireless connections through which all your data flows. People used to talk about the internet as a wonderland for innovative upstarts, but lately the upstarts keep getting clobbered. Today the internet is gigantic corporations, all the way down. Which brings us to net neutrality. The rule basically prevents broadband providers from offering preferential treatment to some content online — it blocks Comcast from giving, say, a speed boost to a streaming video company that can afford to pay over one that cannot.

Amid many legal battles, neutrality rules in some form have governed the internet for years. Does ending network neutrality help the big fish or the little fish? Will scrapping the rules make the internet fairer, more dynamic and more innovative? Will it create a more favorable atmosphere for potential challengers of the Frightful Five? Probably not. In fact, it could entrench their power even further.

“The FCC has basically said: ‘Game on. We’re going to let you consolidate further than anyone had imagined.’”
- Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at BTIG.

Just days after the November election, top aides to Donald Trump huddled with congressional staff members in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s suite of offices at the Capitol. The objective: not to get things done, but to undo them — quickly.

For about three months after Inauguration Day, President Trump would have the power to wipe away some of his predecessor’s most significant regulations with simple-majority votes from his allies in Congress. But the clock was ticking. An obscure law known as the Congressional Review Act gives lawmakers 60 legislative days to overturn major new regulations issued by federal agencies. After that window closes, sometime in early May, the process gets much more difficult: Executive orders by the president can take years to unwind regulations — well beyond the important 100-day yardstick for new administrations. So in weekly meetings leading up to Jan. 20, the Trump aides and lawmakers worked from a shared Excel spreadsheet to develop a list of possible targets: rules enacted late in Barack Obama’s presidency that they viewed as a vast regulatory overreach that was stifling economic growth. The result was a historic reversal of government rules in record time.

“The [Federal Communications Commission] has basically said: ‘Game on. We’re going to let you consolidate further than anyone had imagined,’” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at BTIG.

Consolidation of local broadcast stations could lead to more expensive fees for consumers as providers pass on ever-higher fees from broadcasters and content creators to subscribers. But to media companies, the mantra of late has been that bigger is better. For broadcast station companies in particular — including Sinclair, Fox and the Nexstar Media Group — owning more stations increases their power over cable companies, which pay to retransmit the stations. Fox’s motive for pursuing Tribune, which has more Fox affiliates than any other station owner, largely appears to be blocking a deal with Sinclair. It plans to form a joint venture with the Blackstone Group, an investment giant, in which Blackstone would provide the cash for a deal while Fox would provide its own television stations. If successful, Fox would then reduce its direct exposure to local television stations, while still holding on to a piece — and while stymieing a rival.

[Commentary] If the Federal Communications Commission, which has a 2-to-1 Republican majority, approves Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal, there will be little stopping the broadband industry from squelching competition, limiting consumer choice and raising prices. The previous FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, helped put the rules current Chairman Pai is attacking in place in 2015, and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld them.

Large telecommunications companies have been raking in profits in recent years. And they have been making multibillion-dollar acquisitions — not something you see from an industry that is withering from senseless regulations. Charter spent more than $65 billion last year to buy Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. AT&T bought DirecTV for $48.5 billion in 2015 and is trying to buy Time Warner, the media company, for $85 billion. Not only is Pai’s lament for the broadband industry based on alternative facts, it misses the bigger point. Net neutrality is meant to benefit the internet and the economy broadly, not just the broadband industry. That means the commission ought to consider the impact the regulations have on consumers and businesses. In particular, the commission has a responsibility to protect people with few or no choices; most Americans have access to just one or two companies for residential service and just four big operators for wireless.

“Fit and proper” is that so-perfectly British standard by which regulators decide whether a company should be allowed to gain and retain broadcast licenses. It’s based on the premise that those who control news, information and entertainment options on television and radio should be held to high ethical standards, and that doing so determines “the kind of country we are,” as Jane Bonham-Carter, a member of Parliament, recently put it. Understanding just how important the Sky deal (complete ownership of the popular and highly profitable Sky satellite and cable network) would be for the Murdochs’ personal and global ambitions, and the complications that “fit and proper” could present to them, is vital to understanding the head-spinning developments at Fox News these past few months.

The National Security Agency has halted one of the most disputed practices of its warrantless wiretapping program: collecting Americans’ emails and texts to and from people overseas that mention foreigners targeted for surveillance, according to officials familiar with the matter.

National security officials have argued that such surveillance is lawful and helpful in identifying people who might have links to terrorism, espionage or otherwise are targeted for intelligence-gathering. The fact that the sender of such a message would know an email address or phone number associated with a surveillance target is grounds for suspicion, these officials argued. The decision is a major development in American surveillance policy. It brings to an end a once-secret form of wiretapping that privacy advocates have argued overstepped the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches — even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court upheld it as lawful — because the government was intercepting communications based on what they say, rather than who sent or received them.

[Commentary] President Trump’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, announced plans to eliminate net neutrality (technically, make it “voluntary”) despite its popularity, record of success and acceptance by most of the industry. His proposal is of dubious legality. But should it succeed, the only real winners will be the cable and phone industries, which will gain yet another way to raise prices for everyone.

The proposal is the epitome of senseless government action and sharply out of step with Trump’s populist mandate. Did Trump voters really vote for higher cable bills? In analyzing the attack on net neutrality, one looks in vain for the problem that needs to be fixed. Net neutrality refers to rules intended to ensure that broadband providers cannot block content or provide faster delivery to companies that pay more. The policy was put in place in the George W. Bush administration, where it enjoyed bipartisan support. In the years since, it has sheltered bloggers, nonprofit organizations like Wikipedia, smaller tech companies, TV and music streamers, and entrepreneurs from being throttled by providers like AT&T and Verizon that own the “pipes.” The idea of killing net neutrality certainly has nothing to do with voters or majority will. Instead, the proposal, like Pai’s earlier gutting of privacy protections for cable customers, is at war with the economic populism that voters claimed they wanted and that Mr. Trump promised.
[Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School]

A Q&A with Jane Perlez, The New York Times’s bureau chief in Beijing.

Asked, "As Beijing bureau chief, what is it like to try to get information online given China’s Great Firewall, the system of filters and controls that can limit what people see on the internet there?" Perlez responded, "We live and die by the strength of virtual private networks, or VPNs. The Chinese government is always trying to disrupt VPNs. Some work relatively well for a few months, then all of a sudden they slow down, a sign that the government has successfully interfered with them. As journalists, we feel frustrated by the instability of the internet, the overall slowness. But we are not the only ones affected. Businesses operating in China have the same problems. So do researchers, scholars and scientists, all people who need to get information from websites — including Twitter, Facebook and Google — that the government blocks."