Op-Ed

Though women and minorities constitute an increasingly large portion of our country’s populace, ownership of broadcast media remains dominated by white males. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has long ignored its congressional mandate to ensure a diversity of media viewpoints and continues to disregard orders from federal courts to increase women and minority participation in media ownership. The time has long passed for Congress to act.

European Union communications ministers will gather in Brussels on Dec 3 to discuss how to safeguard emerging fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks. Their decisions could have lasting impacts on European countries’ ability to protect their people’s privacy, and ultimately, safeguard their freedoms. It’s critical that European countries not give control of their critical infrastructure to Chinese tech giants like Huawei, or ZTE. But securing 5G networks means more than preventing any one company from building them.

For anyone who is pregnant, having a hospital delivery room nearby means knowing that when the baby arrives medical assistance will be close at hand. But for too many of those in rural America, this comfort is often no longer available—and it is putting both women and babies at risk. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized nation with an increasing rate of maternal mortality and this problem hits women of color especially hard. The Federal Communications Commission has a long history of working to promote access to telehealth in rural communities.

A new movement toward public service digital media may be what we need to counter the excesses and failures of today’s internet. A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy. Digital public service media would fill a black hole of misinformation with educational material and legitimate news.

We don’t need to rank in importance the issues of special interest money, ludicrous redistricting, and big media.  They are each part of a linked democratic challenge.  There can be no real democracy without curbing big money.  There can be no real democracy without making Congressional districts representative of the areas they encompass.  There can be no real democracy without an electorate informed by media that digs for the facts citizens need to help chart the future of our country.   Bring these three abuses under control and democracy can flourish again.  Only We the People can make

Access to reliable, affordable broadband is critical in today’s economy, however, hundreds of Idaho communities have been left behind. Our state ranks 43rd for connectivity and 46th for speed. Too many Idahoans lack high-speed Internet service and those that have it pay too much because of weak competition. In May, Governor Little took an important first step, convening a Task Force to study how we improve Idaho’s broadband infrastructure. The Task Force determined that rural Idahoans should be given priority.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai says bringing broadband to rural areas is his highest priority, but since there aren’t lucrative deals to be made, service providers have generally ignored rural communities like the one I called home. This puts opportunities afforded to the connected population out of reach and disproportionately affects Native American communities. Service providers haven’t had the incentive to establish connectivity in areas with rugged terrain.

Facebook's hands-off policy toward political ads poses a danger to our democracy. Giving politicians free rein to spread lies using political ads shows a disregard for the role Facebook and other social media platforms play in disseminating information to voters and how political candidates can abuse these policies to spread disinformation. First, it's important to understand the unique role Facebook and other social media platforms play when it comes to advertising. Facebook's business model is based on collecting as much data on its users as possible.

The open internet is a founding principle of the web. It is an environment that allows all players to interact directly with audiences and consumers while ensuring fair and transparent access to data and measurement. It is an ideal that should unite all of us: citizens, governments and committed web companies.

[Jean-Baptiste Rudelle is chief executive officer, chairman and co-founder of Criteo]

When I was a young scientist working on the fledgling creation that came to be known as the internet, the ethos that defined the culture we were building was characterized by words such as ethical, open, trusted, free, shared. None of us knew where our research would lead, but these words and principles were our beacon. We did not anticipate that the dark side of the internet would emerge with such ferocity. Or that we would feel an urgent need to fix it. How did we get from there to here?