Government & Communications

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission is expected to release its draft Network Neutrality Order on Wednesday, November 22—just before Thanksgiving. This timing has created an uproar among some opponents of the Order, who claim that the timing is merely part of what is admittedly an unfortunately common strategy among governments to release unpopular news when it thinks the public is least likely to see it. In this case, however, the claim has several problems.

Network neutrality is on its deathbed, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, appointed by President Donald Trump, is about to pull the plug. But not everyone on the FCC is gunning to undo the hard-won net neutrality protections. The FCC started soliciting comments from the public on Chairman Pai’s proposal to end network neutrality in May. More than 22 million comments came in, but there have been so many serious irregularities with the process that FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel thinks the FCC needs to slam on the brakes.

President Donald Trump’s post on Sen Al Franken (D-MN) allegations was the latest example of the president's habit of using his Twitter account to draw fire, rather than deflecting it. Controlling potentially damaging tweets was a job left mostly to the legal team in the early days of the administration. Marc Kasowitz, a former Trump attorney, and Jay Sekulow, a current member of the president's legal team, gave Trump one simple rule to guide his tweeting habit: Don’t comment online about the Russia investigation.

Sens Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Mike Lee (R-UT) released their bipartisan proposal to renew a powerful surveillance authority for collecting foreign intelligence on US soil, but with a new brake on the government’s ability to access the data. The bill would require government agencies to obtain a warrant before reviewing communications to or from Americans harvested by the National Security Agency under the surveillance authority known informally as Section 702. The measure stands little chance of passage.

[Commentary] Even if Trump is trying to undermine the press for his own calculated reasons, when he talks about bias in the media — unfairness — I think he has a point. I believe some of my colleagues — many of my colleagues — think this president has gone so far over the line bashing the media, it has given them an excuse to cross the line themselves, to push back. As tempting as that may be, I think it’s a big mistake. We are not players in the game. We are umpires, or observers, trying to be objective witnesses to what is going on. That doesn’t mean we’re stenographers.

Across the board, we are reviewing our regulations to make sure that they reflect current market conditions; that they are applied evenly and fairly; and that they are consistent with the law and sound principles of economics. In some cases, that means streamlining rules to reflect current technological and marketplace realities.  In other cases, that means eliminating them altogether.  In all cases, it means getting government out of the way as much as possible in order to encourage private initiative. Beyond that, we have adopted a posture of regulatory humility.

The Federal Communications Commission issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that seeks comment on whether to eliminate Form 325, which collects information about cable system operations, or, in the alternative, on ways to modernize and streamline the form to reflect technological and industry changes since the form was last updated in 1999. Form 325 must be filed annually by all cable systems with 20,000 or more subscribers and by a sample of small cable systems with fewer than 20,000 subscribers.

[Commentatry] We exist in a time when technological capabilities and economic incentives have combined to attack truth and weaken trust. It is not an act of pre-planned perdition. Unchecked, however, it will have the same effect. The broader question is how to deal with the exploitation of the Web as a vehicle for de-democratizing communities fueled by fact-free untruth? I would argue that it was software algorithms that put us in this situation, and it is software algorithms that can get us out of it.

Sen Ben Cardin (D-MD) called for a congressional hearing into Donald Trump Jr.'s communications with WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign, saying the matter was "troublesome."  "This is extremely troublesome and it really does require a congressional hearing," Cardin, who is the Ranking Member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  "First of all, we know that WikiLeaks has been working with Russia in regards to what happened in our election. Now we know there was communication between WikiLeaks and Donald Trump Jr.