Wall Street Journal

Facebook said it would hire 3,000 more staffers to review content in an attempt to curb violent or sensitive videos on its site without scaling back its live-streaming tools. The planned hires, announced by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, are in response to the Facebook posting of such violent videos as one in April showing a Cleveland (OH) man fatally shooting another man.

Zuckerberg’s proposed fix, which would increase Facebook’s roster of 4,500 reviewers by two-thirds over the next year, addresses the amount of time it takes Facebook to remove graphic content, as opposed to preventing its site from being used to display such content. The Cleveland video was up for roughly two hours; the Thailand video stayed up for 24 hours.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said he’ll advance his network neutrality proposal under a notice and comment procedure, instead of offloading the rules with a blunt agency tool known as a declaratory ruling. This is a welcome departure from his predecessor, Tom Wheeler, who ditched his own network neutrality proposal after President Barack Obama ordered the agency to invoke public-utility regulation.

Chairman Pai’s open process won’t prevent a synaptic breakdown by the lobbyists who want political control of the internet and are calling him a shill for cable companies and a fascist who wants to squelch speech on the web. No matter that Chairman Pai wants to divest government and himself of discretionary power. Pai deserves particular credit for calling out Free Press as a “spectacularly misnamed” group that deployed net neutrality as a pretext for government control. The Pai plan will take regulatory shape in stages over the next few months, and perhaps his actions will galvanize Congress to take the hint and codify his protections into law.

[Commentary] Silicon Valley wasn’t a happy place when Donald Trump was elected president. Tech companies have thrived on international trade and immigration and see President Trump as hostile to both. While the digital economy is concentrated in liberal, coastal enclaves, President Trump draws his most intense support from the old-economy states of the upper Midwest. Yet as the Nasdaq Composite Index’s first-ever close above 6000 demonstrates, technology has flourished more under President Trump than any other industry, save banking. President Trump has been much less negative for tech than his rhetoric implied. US tech companies are disproportionately exposed to foreign markets and would have been among the first casualties of a trade war. But President Trump has so far restricted his protectionist actions to narrowly focused industries rather than entire countries, and a trade war looks increasingly unlikely. Companies such as Apple Inc. with large stashes of foreign profits would gain big if President Trump cuts the tax rate on such profits. And his antiregulatory appointees are less likely to impose onerous privacy protections on the likes of Google.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai faces a tough challenge in coming days: rolling back network neutrality rules that he regards as an overreach, without reaching too far himself.

In the highly charged legal and political debate over how the Trump administration and Republican Congress would reverse the Obama-era rules, almost any misstep could be fatal to the effort. Chairman Pai could announce his game plan as soon as this month to start acting at the commission’s May meeting, according to some people familiar with the matter. His timing will be crucial. If Chairman Pai moves too fast to kill the existing rules, he risks provoking a court fight he could lose, according to some experts. But if he goes too slowly—potentially, by starting over with the government’s full rule-making process—he and his GOP allies might suffer politically, as online activists’ protests multiply.

[Commentary] Shares of broadband providers have run up since the election on the hope that the Trump administration will bring a lighter touch to telecom policy. But even with looser network neutrality rules on the horizon, little may actually change.

New rules are expected to end the policy of classifying broadband as a utility subject to price regulation and return providers to a more limited regulatory framework. That would remove a big long-term risk for cable and telecom companies. But it may not make much of a difference in the short term, raising the question of whether recent stock-price gains are fully justified. Critics of the current rules argue that the threat of price regulation has chilled investment. But cable capital expenditures at Comcast , the largest wired broadband provider, have continued to climb since the new rules and are expected to rise again in 2017, according to UBS. Any declines in capital spending at other companies could be chalked up to normal pauses between investment cycles.

Altice USA filed paperwork to go public April 11, in an offering that would raise more than $1 billion, apparently. The US arm of French mogul Patrick Drahi’s cable operator Altice NV filed a registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of shares of Class A common stock.

The IPO is likely to value Altice USA at more than $20 billion. BC Partners Ltd. and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which together own 30% of Altice USA, are likely to sell 5% to 10% of the company, apparently. Altice is so far planning to keep its 70% stake in Altice USA, although the IPO process is likely to take several months, and Altice’s approach could change over that time.

An investigation of Google has found it systematically pays female employees less than their male counterparts, US Department of Labor officials said, a claim that adds to allegations of gender bias in Silicon Valley.

The Labor Department found the gender-pay gap during a routine probe into whether Google, a federal contractor, is complying with laws that prohibit contractors from discriminating against applicants or employees. The department is suing Google to compel the company to disclose more compensation data for its investigation. At a procedural hearing before a federal administrative law judge in San Francisco, Labor Department Regional Director Janette Wipper said the agency “found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce” at Google.

Apparently, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai laid out preliminary plans to roll back the agency’s network neutrality rules in a meeting with trade associations. The conversation shows that the FCC chairman is inching closer to making his plans public, possibly as soon as April.

The plans appear aimed at preserving the basic principles of net neutrality but shifting enforcement to the Federal Trade Commission, while undoing what Republican critics regard as the regulatory overreach of the FCC’s rules. Pai’s plans likely would reverse the reclassification of broadband Internet access service as a telecommunications service, so the FTC again would have jurisdiction over the telecommunications carriers. To preserve the basic tenets of net neutrality, the plans would require broadband providers to pledge to abide by net neutrality principles such as no blocking or paid prioritization of internet traffic. That would allow the FTC to go after violators for deceptive or unfair trade practices. Chairman Pai also is believed to be considering provisions to restore FTC oversight of broadband providers’ consumer privacy protections. GOP lawmakers, with the backing of Chairman Pai, recently passed a measure repealing an Obama-era FCC privacy rule that broadband providers criticized as unfairly restrictive. Pai’s plans could begin to be adopted as soon as the FCC’s monthly meeting in May, although the June meeting remains possibility.

Federal regulators plan to reverse an Obama-era rule that prevented major television-station owners from buying stations or readily selling themselves, a move that could touch off a wave of deals among media companies.

The proposal, which would effectively loosen a national cap on audience share for station owners that the rule had tightened, is scheduled to be put before the Federal Communications Commission in late April, an agency official said. Chairman Ajit Pai is expected to announce the plan on March 30. The longstanding ownership cap limits TV groups to a 39 percent national audience share. But for years, the government said station owners didn’t have to fully count UHF stations in calculating their share because UHF was typically a less powerful signal.

The Obama-era FCC eliminated the so-called UHF discount last September, contending that the distinction between UHF stations and VHF stations had effectively disappeared. The FCC under Chairman Pai is expected to revert to the previous rule in one of a series of actions he is taking as he plans to reverse several policies adopted under his predecessor, Tom Wheeler, who was FCC chairman for much of President Barack Obama’s second term.

For the first six weeks of the Trump Administration, the State Department didn’t hold a single on-camera press briefing — long a fixture of US diplomatic communications — finally beginning them on March 7. Less than three weeks later, they’ve stopped again.

Officials said the on-camera briefings won’t resume for at least two weeks as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson moves to get a permanent spokesperson in place. Mark Toner, a career foreign service officer who has been the department’s acting spokesman, is slated for another assignment. He might return to the podium on camera in April, but the Trump administration doesn’t yet have a full-time spokesperson in place. That official is expected to be Heather Nauert, until now a Fox News anchor, but she is awaiting approval of her security clearance. She hasn’t been officially named and hasn’t yet started at the State Department. In the interim, the State Department will hold background briefings, in which unnamed officials will brief intermittently on specific topics. Under the Obama Administration and those before it, the State Department took questions on-camera on a nearly daily basis. The briefings are closely watched by foreign officials as well as US diplomats around the world for public guidance on US policy.