Ownership

A class-action complaint against Comcast can move forward after a federal judge rejected a Comcast motion to dismiss it. The lawsuit, filed in October 2016 in US District Court in Northern California, accuses Comcast of falsely advertising low prices and then using poorly disclosed fees to increase the amount paid by cable TV customers. Those fees are the "Broadcast TV Fee," which had increased from $1.50 a month to $6.50 since 2014, and the "Regional Sports Fee" that rose from $1 to $4.50 since 2015. These fees are not included in the advertised prices, so customers end up paying higher prices than the ones they are led to believe they will pay, the lawsuit said.

When customers question Comcast reps about the fees, "Comcast staff and agents explicitly lie by stating that the Broadcast TV Fee and the Regional Sports Fee are government-related fees or taxes over which Comcast has no control," the complaint said. Comcast filed a motion to dismiss, claiming that its order submission process could not have created a contract and that customers agreed to pay the fees in the "Subscriber Agreement" and "Minimum Term Agreement." But US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria disputed Comcast's reasoning and wrote that the class-action plaintiffs have made plausible claims.

In making decisions about the limits of free speech, Facebook often fails the racial, religious and sexual minorities CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to protect. The 13-year-old social network is wrestling with the hardest questions it has ever faced as the de facto arbiter of speech for the third of the world’s population that now logs on each month. In February, amid mounting concerns over Facebook’s role in the spread of violent live videos and fake news, Zuckerberg said the platform had a responsibility to “mitigate the bad” effects of the service in a more dangerous and divisive political era. In June, he officially changed Facebook’s mission from connecting the world to community-building. The company says it now ­deletes about 288,000 hate-speech posts a month. But activists say that Facebook’s censorship standards are so unclear and biased that it is impossible to know what one can or cannot say.

The result: Minority groups say they are disproportionately censored when they use the ­social-media platform to call out racism or start dialogues. “Facebook is regulating more human speech than any government does now or ever has,” said Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit group that researches the intersection of harmful online content and free speech. “They are like a de facto body of law, yet that law is a secret.”

Apparently, President Donald Trump's administration is considering using rarely invoked US trade laws to fend off China's demands that foreign companies share their technology in return for access to the country's vast market.

The administration is discussing the use of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which empowers Washington to launch an investigation into China's trade practices and, within months, raise tariffs on imports from China or impose other sanctions, apparently. The investigation would be focused on China's alleged "forced technology transfer policies and practices," the person said, adding that the Trump administration could move to launch such a probe this week.

Cable providers are among the most despised businesses in the country, regularly coming in below airlines, banks, and drug companies in public-opinion polls. "Cable is essentially a monopoly now in urban areas,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former policy adviser to President Barack Obama on science, technology, and innovation.

Internet service was deregulated during the George W. Bush Administration, with the theory that fewer rules would foster greater competition. For a time, as AT&T and Verizon started building fibre-optic networks to compete with cable Internet, there seemed to be truth to the idea. Over the past few years, however, the companies have largely abandoned those projects; according to Crawford, the capital investments required were too high. Rather than fuel vigorous competition and lower prices, the rise of these giant companies has meant that Americans are paying inflated costs for poor service.

If Sinclair Broadcast Group has its way, the local broadcast industry would boil down to two, maybe three, station groups, with one or two of them churning out local content in each market. “Right now there are three to five local players, and to us that doesn’t make sense,” CEO Chris Ripley said Aug 2 during the group’s Q2 2017 earnings call. Consolidating news operations would lead to “significant savings.” In addition, “after that you have stronger local content producers which will be able to spread their content and resources across multiple platforms." “The strategic output would also be great for the industry,” he said.

Although such consolidation is dependent on the Federal Communications Commission relaxing regulations, Ripley said he and his fellow Sinclair executives believe that is where the industry is heading. Ripley's comments come as Sinclair’s acquisition of Tribune Media – which would create a station group of unprecedented size – move through the regulatory approval process.

Discovery Communications' CEO, David Zaslav, has a plan. Perhaps, when you look beyond the headlines, you may think he has the clearest vision of how historic media properties can evolve and reinvent themselves in the new digital world. Yes, this is about the company’s $14.6 billion-dollar acquisition of Scripps — but it’s so much more than that. It comes down to this: Zaslav needs to be focused on both shoring up the current business and making meaningful inroads into the mobile/millennial media marketplace. Finding revenues and synergies between the old and new won’t be easy, but he’s been buying with clear-eyed focus, and the assets are performing.

A group of former Obama staffers, Higher Ground Labs, is taking a note from Sand Hill Road and applying venture-capital tactics to progressive politics. On Aug 2, Higher Ground is disclosing investments totaling nearly $1.5 million in 10 startups and enrolling them in a five-month accelerator program, during which they’ll work with mentors from the political-tech space to build their businesses. Higher Ground, whose founders also include former Obama-administration staffers Shomik Dutta and Andrew McLaughlin, debuted in May. Since then, some 150 groups have applied to participate in the accelerator program and a related fellowship program.

Higher Ground has raised $2.5 million from investors spanning politics and the tech industry. The companies receiving funding include Qriously, which uses programmatic online ads instead of phone calls to gauge public opinion, Victory Guide, a so-called “digital campaign manager” that gives local candidates a day-by-day agenda of campaign goals, and Tuesday Strategies, which helps volunteers send personalized text and social media messages to friends the campaign wants to reach.

Trade group INCOMPAS wants the Federal Communications Commission to include redacted materials from recent mergers involving Comcast, Charter and AT&T in its review of Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to roll back the agency’s network neutrality rules. The group, which counts Netflix and Sprint among its members, said economic studies, internal company presentations and other data submitted as part of the commission’s merger review process shows that internet service providers have incentive to curb competition. The information would be vital in a court review of final rules, said INCOMPAS CEO Chip Pickering. “The FCC has taken a position that the ISPs do not have the means and the motive to act against online competitors,” Pickering said. “And if that’s the question, you have to look at all the evidence. And a refusal to consider the evidence, I think any court would find unreasonable.”

INCOMPAS noted that its request would not make the information available to the general public. Instead, only certain parties would be able to see the documents — the same confidentiality the FCC used in the merger reviews. Comcast, Charter and AT&T opposed the request, arguing that sharing the information in the net neutrality proceeding risks disclosure of sensitive documents. Charter said the “unprecedented request is a harmful fishing expedition, which, if granted, would violate federal law.” Pickering finds the companies’ opposition suspect: “Their nuclear reaction for simply asking for the evidence to be included continues to beg the question, ‘What do they have to hide?’” INCOMPAS asks the FCC to act by July 31. Agency representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

Apparently, Bill Shine, a former co-president of Fox News and top lieutenant to the network’s founder, Roger Ailes, has spoken with White House officials about taking a position on President Donald Trump’s communications team. Shine has no political experience outside of producing cable news, and he was forced out of Fox News in May after his name surfaced in lawsuits that accused him of abetting Ailes’s harassing behavior toward women. (Shine has denied all wrongdoing, as did Ailes, who died in May.)

But Shine has an influential ally in the Fox News host Sean Hannity, an informal adviser to President Trump — and one of his most loyal on-air supporters — who dined with Shine, the president and the first lady at the White House the week of July 24. Shine’s job prospects are unclear now that Trump has fired his communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, who also attended last week’s dinner and worked with Shine during his tenure as a host on Fox News and the Fox Business Network. Shine’s association with Scaramucci may hinder his chances with some factions in the West Wing.

Steve Bannon, the chief strategist to President Donald Trump, believes Facebook and Google should be regulated as public utilities, according to an anonymously sourced report in The Intercept. This means they would get treated less like a book publisher and more like a telephone company. The government would shorten their leash, treating them as privately owned firms that provide an important public service.

The plan is a prototypical alleged Bannonism: iconoclastic, anti-establishment, and unlikely to result in meaningful policy change....Americans will have to examine the most fraught tensions in our mixed system, as we weigh the balance of local power and national power, the deliberate benefits of central planning with the mindless wisdom of the free market, and the many conflicting meanings of freedom.