Washington Post

Democratic Sens successfully blocked Judge Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court from advancing in the US Senate on April 6, sparking a bitter clash with Republicans over how the chamber confirms high court nominees. By a vote of 55 to 45, Gorsuch failed to earn the 60 votes needed to end debate on his nomination. In response, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has vowed he will change Senate rules in order to confirm Gorsuch and all future Supreme Court nominees with a simple majority vote.

A final confirmation vote on Gorsuch is not scheduled until April 7, when 52 Republicans and at least three Democrats — from states won by Trump in 2016’s election — are expected to vote for him to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the high court. But the next 24 hours could be among the most contentious in recent Senate history. “This will be the first and last partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nomination,” McConnell vowed April 6.

President Donald Trump recently signed a congressional resolution completing the repeal of broadband privacy rules announced by the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission. According to news reports, the purpose of the repeal was to allow broadband Internet service providers to conduct the same sort of monitoring of user online activities, such as Web-surfing habits, that companies like Google and Facebook can conduct. I don’t know much about communications law or the proposed regulations. But the description of what the repeal was designed to do made me wonder: Isn’t that kind of monitoring mostly illegal under the Wiretap Act?

As I see it, the Wiretap Act substantially limits what kinds of surveillance broadband providers can conduct even without the Obama-era rules. Given that, it’s not clear to me how much the repeal actually matters. I have been told that [the arguments I described] never entered the debate over the FCC regulations because communications lawyers just don’t think about the Wiretap Act. The Wiretap Act is a criminal statute in Title 18, and it’s just something off the radar screen of lawyers who practice communications law. If so, that should change. Depending on what the broadband providers want to do, the Wiretap Act may be a serious bar to the companies doing it legally. And given the hammer of statutory damages that the Wiretap Act allows, a mistake that implicates the Wiretap Act might end up as a very costly mistake.

Comcast leapt into the cutthroat market for cellphone service by unveiling Xfinity Mobile, a move that other cable companies are expected to follow as consumers' rising Internet consumption increasingly pits providers of home and mobile broadband against each other. The company will offer its Xfinity customers two wireless options: one for unlimited data that costs from $45 to $65 per line a month, and a pay-as-you-go plan for $12 per gigabyte. The service will be available to customers starting in the second quarter, Comcast said.

The new offering is aimed at helping Comcast compete outside the home as Americans' Internet usage increasingly shifts to mobile devices. The cable company's service relies primarily on Comcast's network of 16 million public Wi-Fi hotspots for connectivity, allowing users to surf the Web, watch video and listen to streaming music on their phones without paying for cellular data. Where the company's WiFi signals are unavailable, Xfinity Mobile will connect to the traditional cellular network owned by Verizon, which Comcast is using as a result of an airwaves agreement signed several years ago.

[Commentary] Anybody who works in Washington knows that think tanks play an important role in advising the government on policy. In the foreign policy community, think tanks are widely viewed as the traditional brokers in the marketplace of ideas. But this is changing. Whether based in investment banks like Goldman Sachs, management consultancies like McKinsey or political risk firms like the Eurasia Group, private-sector institutions have started to act like policy knowledge brokers. Consultants have been key advisers to the government for decades, but recent trends have caused their star to rise at the same time that traditional think tanks face new challenges. While for-profit intellectuals make valuable contributions, it would be problematic if they crowded out traditional think tanks.

[Daniel Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University]

[Commentary] As the White House and Congress develop an infrastructure plan promised during the campaign, many, including senators, House members and mayors, are urging that broadband be included. Here are eight simple ground rules we hope Congress will follow in crafting broadband-related infrastructure incentives:
1. Limit and carefully control direct investment funds.
2. Don’t offer ongoing support.
3. Use market mechanisms where possible.
4. Extend “Dig Once/Climb Once” policies on government property.
5. Improve government processes that hinder private investment.
6. Embrace emerging technologies.
7. Address nonfinancial causes of the digital divide.
8. Use the bully pulpit to encourage digital want-nots.

[Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Larry Downes is project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.]

Now that President donald Trump has signed legislation repealing landmark federal privacy protections for Internet users, many in Washington are trying to decipher what the move could mean for network neutrality.

President Trump's role in repealing the rules is likely to be small; the real center of gravity lies outside the White House. Congress could intervene on net neutrality by writing a bill that repeals and replaces the FCC policy. But a legislative deal does not appear imminent. Republicans, lacking a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, need some Democratic support for any such bill. And Democrats have declined to play ball unless the legislation preserves the FCC's ability to regulate Internet providers like legacy telephone companies, something Republicans have strongly resisted. Despite a federal court ruling upholding the FCC rules in the summer of 2016, industry advocates are still pushing to have the regulations overturned by a fresh judicial hearing. If the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agrees to rehear the net neutrality case — a decision that could be announced this spring — Internet providers will have another shot at knocking down the rules. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai could make things even easier for the industry by not defending the suit, something he has already done in at least one separate case involving low-cost broadband access. If the court rules against the FCC, the regulations are as good as dead.

[Commentary] Let’s set the record straight: First, despite hyperventilating headlines, Internet service providers have never planned to sell your individual browsing history to third parties. That’s simply not how online advertising works. And doing so would violate ISPs’ privacy promises. Second, Congress’s decision last week didn’t remove existing privacy protections; it simply cleared the way for us to work together to reinstate a rational and effective system for protecting consumer privacy. We need to put the nation’s most experienced and expert privacy cop back on the beat, and we need to end the uncertainty and confusion that was created in 2015 when the Federal Communications Commission intruded in this space. The Obama Administration fractured our nation’s online privacy law, and it is our job to fix it. We pledge to the American people that we will do just that.

The philanthropy established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar will contribute $100 million to support investigative journalism, fight misinformation and counteract hate speech around the world. One of the first contributions, $4.5 million, will go to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the Washington-based group behind 2016’s Panama Papers investigation, which revealed offshore businesses and shell corporations, some of which were used for purposes such as tax evasion. Other early recipients will include the Anti-Defamation League, the Washington organization devoted to fighting anti-Semitism worldwide. ADL will use the Omidyar money to build “a state-of-the-art command center” in Silicon Valley to combat the growing threat posed by hate online. Another will be the Latin American Alliance for Civic Technology, which promotes civic engagement and government accountability in Latin America. It will receive $2.9 million from the network. The newly announced funding is intended to address “a worrying resurgence of authoritarian politics that is undermining progress toward a more open and inclusive society,” said Omidyar Network managing partner Matt Bannick. The network is also concerned about the declining trust in democratic institutions around the world, including the news media, he said. “Increasingly, facts are being devalued, misinformation spread, accountability ignored and channels that give citizens a voice withdrawn,” he said. “These trends cannot become the norm.”

An interview with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

Asked, "What's your reaction to last week's vote? Is it consistent with your vision for the Web?" Berners-Lee said, "We do things on the Web that are very intimate, like look up cancers we're worried other people might have or that we're having. We have intimate conversations with people in a way that we would have only in the very close quarters of a security-locked room. Just by the things that we do on the Web — we betray completely the most intimate details of our lives and hopes and fears and weaknesses that can be exploited. Maybe the ISPs don't go in this direction; maybe they realize it would be inappropriate. If they do [go in that direction] I think there'll be a massive outcry." When asked, "Google and Facebook already collect and share our data for advertising purposes. Are Internet providers that different?" Berners-Lee replied, "Absolutely those industries are completely different. The business of supplying bits is a really important business. It's like water; it's a lower part of the infrastructure on which everything else depends. The fact that [your provider] doesn't have an attitude about what you use it for is why it's been successful. It's why the Internet has taken over the world. A social network is different — it's not got much to do with moving bits from place to place. You have a choice, and even if you're a member of one of these social networks, you don't have to do everything there."

Technicians for Best Buy’s “Geek Squad City” computer repair facility had a long, close relationship with the FBI in “a joint venture to ferret out child porn,” according to claims in new federal court documents, which also note that Best Buy’s management “was aware that its supervisory personnel were being paid by the FBI” and that its technicians were developing a program to find child pornography with the FBI’s guidance.

The allegations are made by lawyers for a California doctor charged with possessing child pornography, after the doctor took his computer to a Best Buy store for repair. Computers which require data recovery are typically sent from Best Buy stores around the country to a central Geek Squad City facility in Brooks (KY) and customers consent to having their computers searched — and turned over to authorities if child porn is found. While there is no question that Geek Squad technicians have notified authorities after finding child porn, the new court documents assert that there is a deeper relationship than has previously been revealed between the company and federal authorities.