Government & Communications

Today I'm going to talk about what the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NDIA) and the Administration are doing to help promote investment in broadband and ensure that all Americans have access to the connectivity they need to meaningfully participate in the modern economy.

At its own discretion, the Federal Communications Commission has chosen to block the release of records related to a video produced in 2017 in which FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and a Verizon executive joke about installing a “Verizon puppet” as head of the FCC.

[Commentary] China is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism.

I would like to discuss how my approach to select communications policies is informed by certain conservative principles, with a fair hint of libertarianism. In my first visit to Hudson, I declared preserving and advancing economic freedom to be my primary goal
and the paramount lens by which I would examine issues at the Commission.  Fast forward four years and economic freedom has generated some subcomponents worthy of discussion, thereby allowing a more fulsome examination of certain policy matters. So, with your indulgence, I’d like to explore some of these this afternoon:

US presidents are held up as examples on the world stage. For the past several decades, they have aggressively pushed for human rights and free press, while critiquing countries that don’t share these values. Past presidents have pushed for free press — regardless of the type of coverage they receives. President Donald Trump shifted this rhetoric. His willingness to dismiss negative news coverage as “fake” appears to have opened the door for leaders of other countries to follow suit.

Department of Homeland Security draft report from late January called on authorities to continuously vet Sunni Muslim immigrants deemed to have “at-risk” demographic profiles.

The New York Times is asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to unseal secret documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page, the onetime Donald Trump campaign adviser at the center of a disputed memo written by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee. The motion is unusual. No such wiretapping application materials apparently have become public since Congress first enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978.

Rep Eric Swalwell (D-CA), a member of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, introduced the Journalist Protection Act to make a federal crime of certain attacks on those reporting the news.

In December 2017, the White House took down the popular “We the People” petitions website with the promise that it would be restored by “late January.” Now petitions.whitehouse.gov has relaunched. A number of petitions have signature totals that surpass the 100,000 threshold used during the Obama years to initiate a formal response, but the White House has not responded to a petition since President Donald Trump took office.

The practice of printing hard-copies of the “FCC Record” should be eliminated. To be crystal clear, I am not suggesting that we keep its contents or information from the public.  On the contrary, I suggest that it makes little sense to continue to publish paper copies when other mechanisms are more consumer friendly, cost-efficient, and easier to access.  Instead, the Commission should make its documents centrally located and easier to find for interested parties electronically, making paper copies of the Record unnecessary on a going forward basis.  If Encyclopedia Britannica coul