Editorial staff

[Commentary] The aftershocks of the political earthquake that shook Congress to its core will be felt in Silicon Valley. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's historic loss in the Republican Virginia primary shattered the Valley's hope that Congress would pass immigration reform.

The tech community needs to adjust to the fact that having Republicans in power no longer means a business friendly government. So tech companies will continue struggling to fill thousands of openings with skilled workers. And House Republicans will continue to block the bipartisan, Senate-passed immigration bill that would nearly double the number of H-1B visas for skilled workers from the current 65,000, among other reforms that are both pro-business and humane.

[Commentary] Telecommunications conglomerates often prevail in debates about the future of media by pretending that the issues are too complicated for Americans to understand.

But there is nothing complicated about the current battle over the future of the Internet. Nor is there anything complicated about the need for citizens to rise up and defend net neutrality -- also known as the First Amendment of the Internet, because it provides the guarantee of free speech online for all.

If the Federal Communications Commission allows the “paid prioritization” of some websites and communications over others -- as has been proposed under a plan the commissioners recently voted 3 to 2 to consider -- the basic premise of a free and open Internet will be undermined.

In a digital age, this threatens a lot more than online shopping. “Profits and corporate disfavor of controversial viewpoints or competing services could change both what you can see on the Internet and the quality of your connection,” warns the ACLU. “And the need to monitor what you do online in order to play favorites means even more consumer privacy invasions piled on top of the NSA’s prying eyes.”

The threat is real. Public interest groups warn that under a plan developed by FCC chair Tom Wheeler, cable and telecom companies could shape a pay-to-play Internet, in which they charge cash-rich corporations and special-interest groups to provide high-speed service while consigning websites without billionaire benefactors to a digital dirt road.

FCC Chairman Wheeler’s plan comes in response to an appeals court ruling that scrapped a previous FCC attempt to preserve net neutrality. A Democrat, albeit one with a background as an industry lobbyist, Chairman Wheeler says he wants to maintain an open Internet. But he’s going about it the wrong way. His plan is much like the one the courts rejected: he envisions a complex set of rules that would require the FCC to constantly “scrutinize” these pay-for-priority schemes for certain websites, apps and online services.

[Commentary] We don’t usually venture into politics here at GigaOm. Now we are making an exception to that rule because of a grave threat to the very foundation of technology-driven innovation.

The founding principle of GigaOm has always been that broadband is a transformative factor that enables innovation and brings about positive change for industries and societies alike. And while we have expanded our focus over the years to cover emerging technologies in fields like mobile, cloud computing, media, data and science, broadband has always been a key enabler of those technologies.

Without the transformative power of broadband, there would be no Amazon Web Services, no Netflix, no iOS and no Android, no Facebook, no Bitcoin and no Internet of Things. There would be no Teslas as we know them today, Pandora would stream no music and we wouldn’t be able to share our photos and videos over Instagram and Vine.

But broadband isn’t just about speed. It’s also about providing equal access, about enabling small startups to compete with the big guys and in turn become the next YouTube, Instagram or Twitter. It’s about a diversity of voices and opinions that can be found via search engines or social networks.

That’s why it is so important to have strong net neutrality protections that prevent access providers, many of which have their own competing business offerings and a monopoly over the eyeballs of end users, from discriminating against network traffic.

[Commentary] The online world that most of us have come to depend upon for information, communication, commerce and entertainment is changing in ways that could leave Concord residents paying more for less.

In response, the city should prepare to create a municipal fiber- optic network of its own. That means that every time a city street is dug up and repaved, high-capacity fiber-optic cable should be installed.

Compared to the cost of laying open and repaving a street, the cost of the cable is small. While the Comcast and Time Warner merger needs regulatory approval and may never happen, other factors suggest the city should, as technology expert Susan Crawford suggests, see high-speed Internet service as a basic utility like the provision of electricity or water.

Concord does not have a municipally owned electric company, but it does have a municipal utility known for dependable service and a high-quality product at a fair price -- its water department. Who’s to say that it couldn’t someday provide Internet service as well as water?

All these developments bear watching. But in the meantime, the city is about to dig up Main Street and repave Loudon Road. When it does, it should lay down the cables that could eventually connect Concord to a future free of exorbitant cable bills.

[Commentary] Proponents of the “sharing economy” say websites like Airbnb that make it easy for people to rent a spare bedroom or an apartment on a short-term basis are a boon to cities like New York and San Francisco because they generate income for residents while giving visitors a cheap place to stay.

But advocates often ignore or casually dismiss big problems with these short-term rentals, including the fact that they are making housing less affordable in big cities by restricting supply. And in some cases the rentals may be illegal, which is one reason the New York state attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has begun an investigation.

There are good reasons that governments regulate housing. For example, officials use zoning laws to separate hotels and residential development so apartment buildings are not overrun by tourists. Rent control policies exist to help ensure that lower-income tenants have a place to live. Laws against short-term rentals make sure landlords do not operate illegal hotels and reduce the number of apartments available to permanent residents.

[Commentary] Imagine if businesses had to go to after every sale so a federal agency could pass judgment on whether the deal is "commercially reasonable."

Readers in heavily regulated industries may say they already do. But it's not the way to prosperity and it's not the model that has allowed the Internet to become an engine of the US economy. Yet new Chairman Tom Wheeler previewed the Federal Communication Commission's latest attempt to enforce "net neutrality" rules on Internet service providers. These are the companies like AT&T and Comcast that run wires into homes and businesses to deliver Internet connections.

A long-standing dream among liberal activists is to prevent these firms from charging higher prices to heavy consumers of Internet bandwidth. The most zealous promoters of this idea don't even believe that capacity hogs like Netflix or Google's YouTube should pay extra for all the video they send over digital communications networks (though the companies themselves have more nuanced positions). The net-neuts also want new rules preventing networks from blocking or discriminating against websites -- say, by slowing down connections to websites that aren't affiliated with the network.

Although Congress has never appointed the FCC to run the Internet, Chairman Wheeler will now try a third time to sneak this idea past the judiciary and fulfill a 2008 campaign promise from President Obama. Chairman Wheeler will likely present his proposal, which he briefly described in a blog post, as a compromise between free markets and the heavy-handed regulation that the FCC has always applied to the traditional telephone system. And our liberal friends are already howling that to allow any variable pricing will relegate average customers to an endless Internet traffic jam while well-heeled companies take the fast lane on a private cyber toll road.

[Commentary] Tens of millions of Americans have been affected by the theft of their personal information in the digital age. Then, it was discovered that a bug had crept into OpenSSL that could allow intruders to read encrypted data contained in memory, such as passwords or credit cards. The bug has been called “Heartbleed” and could allow attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data and even impersonate users and Web services. We’re tempted to say this ought to be a wake-up call, but we have already had so many wake-up calls.

To put it bluntly: As a country and as a society, we have come to depend on a vast, interconnected system; if one small part fails, the impact is widespread. As noted in a forthcoming Atlantic Council report, the Internet was created to be based on trust, not security. Yet we continue to discover that it is vulnerable to theft, intrusion and disruption on an appalling scale. We are living in an age of growing danger but reacting with complacency.

The Administration unveiled a useful initiative, promising that sharing cyberthreat information among companies would not bring on antitrust liability. But this, and President Barack Obama’s other measures, including his voluntary cybersecurity framework, represent only what is doable given a continued lack of a consensus in Congress and a failure in the private sector to take all threats more seriously. They are timid measures in the face of an epic heartburn that will be costly for us all.

[Commentary] Dozens of Greater Minnesota residents who have come to the State Capitol this session to plead for help in improving broadband access.

They aren’t seeking mere convenience, an exotic lifestyle, or a deep discount at taxpayers’ expense. Rather, they’re asking that their communities be given a chance to survive economically in the 21st century. That’s how essential high-speed Internet has become.

The market hasn’t stood still in the intervening years. The share of state households with Internet service at or exceeding those speeds grew by 18 percentage points from April 2011 to October 2013, according to a report of the Governor’s Task Force on Broadband. But that leaves nearly 30 percent of Minnesotans, and more than half of Greater Minnesota residents, still lacking affordable access -- and, too often, any access at all -- to the Internet speeds required to conduct a video chat or participate in a webinar. Forget about taking an online high school or college class, consulting with a physician in another city about a changing medical condition or serving business clients around the world.

The Governor’s Task Force does not think the state’s statutory broadband goal can be reached by the end of 2015, or anytime soon, without state and local government giving the market a push. Gov Mark Dayton said recently that he concurs in that assessment. But his spending recommendations to the 2014 Legislature did not include his task force’s recommended remedy -- a $100 million fund, from which competitive grants would be awarded to public-private partnerships committed to bringing broadband to places without it.

If market forces alone were sufficient, Minnesota would not rank 23rd among the 50 states in broadband availability. The time is right to initiate a broadband incentive fund for another reason: Now, the state can afford it. An improving economy is generating forecasted revenues through June 30, 2015, that exceed scheduled expenditures by $1.2 billion. The pleas of Minnesota residents deserve heed. In fact, a meaningful response from state government is past due.