Financial Times

In some upside-down logic from the land of down under, Australian consumers have been able to upgrade their broadband internet access to the latest fibre-optic lines, only to receive slower speeds than over ageing copper wires. Such experiences are the absurd result of a grandiose government plan to bankroll what was supposed to be the world’s most advanced broadband network, called NBN.

[Commentary] With a speed many American internet users can only envy, the Trump administration is re-writing the rules for US internet providers. The administration is quite right that the industry has a serious problem: lack of competition. But a regulatory rollback, paired with the administration’s apparently sanguine attitude towards industry consolidation, will do nothing to solve it, and could make matters worse. The root problem is lack of competition in network construction and improvement. If consumers had more options, fewer rules would be required. President Donald Trump likes to talk about infrastructure investment. Encouraging investment in digital infrastructure — a natural area for private-public partnership — should be part of that agenda. That would do much more good than rolling back sensible if imperfect rules and waving through deals in an industry that already has the upper hand on the consumer.

Peers have dropped a demand for a minimum broadband speed of 30 megabits per second to be a legal requirement, as the Digital Economy Bill is rushed through parliament before the general election.

The government has pushed for a “universal service obligation” to be part of the legislation, with a benchmark minimum speed of 10Mbps — far lower than the “superfast” level the House of Lords had been demanding. The government has also dropped a 2020 deadline for that threshold to be introduced. The Lords amended the bill in February to raise the minimum obligatory speed to 30Mbps, saying 10Mbps would “unfit for usage in a very short time”. But both the government and Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, have argued that the universal service obligation should be raised over time and introduced by secondary legislation when deemed appropriate.

Trust in traditional media is at an all-time low, as many people prefer to get information from friends and social media contacts, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. Pew Research Center surveys show that ideological divisions have widened between Democrats and Republicans, more and less educated people, and older and younger adults.

Since Donald Trump’s election, several news organisations have set out to bridge the rift between liberals and conservatives who inhabit distinct ideological bubbles that determine the media they consume and fuel an increasingly uncivil public discourse. Diversifying media diets is also the goal of apps such as Read Across the Aisle, which notifies users when their news reading skews too far to the left or right. A browser extension called Escape Your Bubble slips stories into your Facebook feed that contain political views challenging your own.

According to lobbyists and consumer advocates, the overturning of broadband privacy rules a forerunner to a pair of bigger fights that will shape the US internet and media industries for years to come: the network neutrality regime that sets the ground rules for access to digital communications and media, and approval of AT&T’s $109 billion bid for Time Warner.

The severe retrenchment of FCC power fits with the agenda of Ajit Pai, the Republican-appointed commissioner who took over as chairman of the agency after the election. Chairman Pai has been a vociferous opponent of net neutrality, and has already taken snips out of the regime put in place by the Obama-era FCC to limit the powers of cable and telecoms companies to exert more control over the data flowing through their networks. The shift in direction to unshackle the network companies threatens to reset the competitive landscape, and is shaping up to be a mixed blessing for internet giants like Google and Facebook.

British Telecom and Ofcom have struck a deal about the future of the company’s Openreach broadband division after it agreed to transfer 32,000 staff into a legally separate company.

The agreement ends two gruelling years of debate between the telecoms regulator and BT over the future governance of Openreach, which owns the fibres and wires that provide homes and businesses with broadband. It is the biggest shake-up in the regulation of British telecoms in a decade. The deal finally removes the lingering threat of a full break up of BT and Openreach that rivals Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone had pushed for. The compromise to legally separate the network business and put in its own board is designed to give it more power to set its own strategy and invest in faster broadband services. But critics have questioned whether the move will lead to greater investment in ‘full fibre’ networks.

Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for a greater degree of “regulatory humility” to open the door to greater investment in 5G and fibre networks.

Chairman Pai defended the decision to do away with hard-fought rules on network neutrality that forbid broadband providers from blocking or limiting internet traffic from some content providers while selling “fast lanes” to others. He said that spending by telecoms companies had fallen after the regulations were introduced which he attributed to “heavy-handed legal framework applied by the FCC” that had deterred investment. “Infrastructure spending is lower today than in 2015. That does not benefit consumers,” he said. Chairman Pai argued that telecoms companies needed to be offered incentives to justify the billions of dollars of investment in 5G and fibre networks and has moved to deregulate the industry as a result. “My goal is to return to the goals of the open internet,” he said, rebuffing accusations that the removal of net neutrality regulations would lead to telecoms companies manipulating internet access to favour certain services.

Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka was a trustee for a large bloc of shares in 21st Century Fox and News Corp that belong to Rupert Murdoch’s two youngest daughters, underscoring the close ties between the US president’s family and the mogul behind the Fox News Channel.

The president’s daughter was a trustee of Grace and Chloe Murdoch, Murdoch’s children by his ex-wife Wendi Deng, during the campaign. The two girls, aged 15 and 13, hold shares worth close to a combined $300 million in the two companies, which are controlled by Murdoch and his family. Ivanka Trump said that she stepped down from the board on December 28.

Technology is transforming the classroom, with personalised learning at the heart of the curriculum. Is this the future?

Leading venture capitalist Marc Andreessen predicts a future with two types of job: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told what to do by computers. Silicon Valley wants to equip young people to rule the machines by focusing on what makes them individuals. But how far can this reinvention of learning be extended from the wealthy environs of northern California to the broader US education system, where some state schools struggle to provide up-to-date textbooks, let alone personalised, digital tutoring?

The year 2017 is shaping up to be a landmark in the US telecoms sector, with industry executives and analysts predicting a frenzied period of mergers under the more deal-friendly regulatory regime of President Donald Trump.

The sector is readying itself for a period of upheaval. “Now is the time to consider that, which in an earlier time might have been unthinkable,” says Jonathan Chaplin, analyst at New Street Research. A “Big Bang consolidation” is inevitable, he says. President Trump has boosted confidence that his administration will be more open to megadeals since assuming the presidency. He picked Ajit Pai — a Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission sympathetic to arguments that telecoms groups need to merge to compete with Silicon Valley rivals — to chair the US telecoms watchdog. And Jeff Eisenach, a consultant who has supported previously blocked telecoms mergers, is head of the FCC transition team. The prospect of lighter regulation has lifted shares across telecoms companies since election night.