April 2015

Bright House Networks joined Time Warner Cable in offering home phone subscribers the ability to call friends and family in Nepal for free through the end of May in response to the earthquake that rocked Nepal. Those free calls to Nepal will be retroactive to Saturday, April 25 and continue through May 31, Bright House said, noting that customers placing direct calls there during the period will be issued a credit on their Home Phone account. Credits for all calls made during the program time period will appear on customer accounts in June 2015. Calls to operators or directory assistance are not direct dial calls, so these will be charged at the usual rate, the company said. Comcast also announced that it is providing free calls to Nepal, also between April 25 through May 31.

Less than half of American adults who use the Internet at least once a week want the federal government to dive deeper into digital service delivery, according to a Forrester Research study. 2014 saw the launch of both two government tech teams designed to help agencies whip their digital offerings into shape, the General Services Administration's 18F team and the US Digital Service. In 2016, the White House plans to devote tens of millions of dollars more to digital services, according to the report.

In other words, the federal government has clearly caught the digital bug. Still, the survey is clear, the public remains fairly uninterested in federal digital services -- at least so far. “Despite the administration’s success in improving both the quantity and the quality of digital experiences, the public’s interest remains only lukewarm,” the study stated. The survey polled over 4,500 American adults. When asked how respondents interact with federal agencies, 40 percent cited in-person visits to an agency's branch location -- the same number that cited visiting an agency website. Just 20 percent of respondents said they communicated with agencies via email, according to the survey.

It’s official, at least according to Chinese authorities: Officers for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) did not kill several CIA agents sent to Macau and Hong Kong to assassinate National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Wait, what? Over the last year or so -- it’s difficult to date the rumor’s exact beginning -- a segment of the Chinese Internet has been trying to figure out why in March 2014 China’s military bestowed a top honor on a group of special forces soldiers stationed in Macau in peacetime. And so one of the more popular explanations is that this group of soldiers earned the honor by dispatching a group of CIA operatives sent to kill the world’s most famous whistleblower. The Chinese Internet -- particularly its military forums, powered by a relatively small but dedicated and paranoid coterie of fanboys -- is no stranger to rumors and conspiracy theories.

The Snowden assassination story, along with its Macau connection, is merely one of its gems, and it showcases the Chinese media’s willingness to traffic in unsourced reports and unnamed (and perhaps nonexistent) sources and to cater to the worst instincts of China’s reading public. Now, what was once a rumor has risen to the level that Chinese security officials are batting down the report. In a widely syndicated article published April 27, the investigative outlet Southern Metropolis Daily reported that it reached out to security officials in Macau who said that after investigating the matter and verifying with the PLA’s Macau unit, the reports are “absolutely” not true. The rumor’s eventual jump from the seedy edges of the Internet to the pages of a major online outlet like Phoenix showcases the Chinese media’s unfortunate aversion to proper sourcing. Neither the article repeating the rumors -- nor the story debunking it -- give proper names, dates, or web links for the individuals or articles cited. That makes it much harder for readers to sniff out nonsense and it allows the story to spread. So with facts having long ago been tossed out the window, the story of Snowden’s attempted assassination in Macau has now become a parable for how what you find online only confirms what you already know.

[Commentary] I’ve maintained since the day the proposed Comcast-Time Warner deal was announced that combining America’s two largest cable providers would have been an anti-competitive, anti-consumer and anti-democracy. Despite my concerns, most industry watchers anticipated the Federal Communications Commission would allow the merger. Why? Because too often, Big Cable and Big Telecom call their own shots. They donate heavily to politicians in both parties, and the FCC has historically done their bidding. Now, consumers and their allies in a coalition of reform organizations are largely responsible for putting the brakes on the Comcast-TWC deal. They’ve demonstrated that even in this era when big money and powerful corporations wield such outrageous power, genuine grassroots concern can still win out. It turns out that everyday citizens do care about communications policy and can still make good things happen. I wish we could say the same about the majority in Congress.

Unfortunately, Capitol Hill is awash with lawmakers who have built their careers around fealty to corporate interests and irrational antipathy to those charged with protecting the public interest. Just as the FCC -- often rightly charged in the past with being captured by the businesses it’s supposed to regulate -- seems at long last to be getting serious about its public interest responsibilities, many in Congress seem disconnected from their constituents and in thrall of their Big Cable and Big Telecom benefactors. There’s a serious disconnect between too many members of Congress and the folks they’re supposed to be representing. Comcast’s withdrawal of the merger plan is wonderful news for consumers concerned about the abysmal state of competition and customer service in cable and broadband, and for citizens who have had enough of gatekeeping and consolidation in the communications infrastructure on which our civic dialogue and our democracy so heavily depend. Too bad too many in Congress are still so in thrall to the status quo.

[Michael Copps is a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. He serves as the special adviser to the Media & Democracy Reform Initiative at Common Cause and is a contributor the Benton Foundation's Digital Beat Blog]