Government & Communications

For the last decade or so, China has defied the truism that only free and open societies can innovate. Even as the Communist Party has kept an iron grip on politics and discourse, the country’s technology industry has grown to rival Silicon Valley’s in sophistication and ambition. President Xi Jinping’s tilt toward strongman rule could put all that to the test. As Mr.

The global internet is a lot less global than it was a few years ago. The US government, which used to be the loudest advocate for knocking down digital barriers, has begun to erect barriers of its own since the 2016 election and the Russian hacking and influence operation that upended it. US officials and lawmakers once merely condemned Russian and Chinese laws that forced tech companies to share their source code or to store citizens’ data within national borders.

The Trump Make America Great Again Committee launched a “mainstream media accountability survey” into inboxes around the country. The effort is a joint project paid for by the Donald Trump presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee. “The media loves to pretend they’re unbiased, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” an email promoting the survey reads. “Liberal propaganda machines have used every possible tactic to slander, undermine, and insult the President as he fights to put AMERICA FIRST.”

Al Franken returned to the spotlight to deliver a blistering rebuke of tech companies, specifically Facebook, over abuse of users privacy data while speaking at a cybersecurity conference in Lisbon, Portugal. He suggested Facebook was careless with users' information. "Facebook doesn't have to care about the privacy and security of their users' online information because there's no mass exodus when it violates those rules," said Franken.

[Commentary] Criticism of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau acting director Mick Mulvaney’s recent comments to a banking group has largely focused on his advocating a pay-to-play system for interest groups to access government officials. But similarly disappointing is his wanting to close the CFPB consumer complaint database, on the grounds that he shouldn’t have “to run a Yelp for financial services sponsored by the federal government.” Mulvaney has it backward. We think governments need more, not fewer, Yelp-like services in their arsenals.

The US Office of Special Counsel (OSC) has wrapped up its investigation of Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly's statements at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 23, 2018, and concluded he violated the Hatch Act prohibition on certain political activities by federal branch employees. He was issued a warning letter that a repeat of such statements could incur more than a warning.

Sens Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Roger Wicker (R-MS) announced the passage of their legislation, the Precision Agriculture Connectivity Act of 2018, by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. The bill would direct the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to establish a task force to identify gaps in broadband connectivity for the nation’s cropland and ranchland. The measure also instructs the agency to develop ways to help encourage broadband adoption and precision agriculture in areas where it is currently unavailable.

In March, Quinnipiac University’s pollsters asked Americans if they thought certain news outlets — unnamed by Quinnipiac — were enemies of the American people? Nearly 4-in-10 said yes — including more than 8-in-10 Republicans. In a poll released April 26, Quinnipiac was more direct. Less than a quarter of the public says that the news media broadly is better described as “enemy of the people” than an “important part of democracy.” But among Republicans, more than half preferred the former term to the latter. Granted, there was a limited set of options from which to choose.

Big business is quietly trouncing cities in the fight over the future of the internet. The results of an obscure, bureaucratic battle inside the U.S. communications regulator could decide not only which Americans get ultra-fast internet but how much it’ll cost and even what city streetlights will look like.