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February 2016

The Partisan FCC

[Commentary] Voting data from the Federal Communications Commission shows that the share of commissioner votes on orders split along party lines is higher in Chairman Tom Wheeler’s commission than under the average of either Republican or Democratic chairmen back to Reed Hundt in 1994. In the past, votes at the FCC tended to be unanimous—under both Democratic and Republican chairs more than half of votes on major orders were unanimous (about 65 percent for Democrats and 58 percent for Republicans). Under Chairman Wheeler that has dropped to 47 percent.

Perhaps more worrisome is the increase in votes that split along party lines. Under Democrats, about eight percent of votes on major orders split along party lines. Under Republicans, only four percent split on party lines. Under Chairman Wheeler, 26 percent of votes on orders have passed with yes votes from the Democratic Chairman, Commissioner Rosenworcel, and Commissioner Clyburn, with Republican Commissioners O’Rielly and Pai dissenting. The difference from the past is stark. This analysis comes with some important caveats to consider. Most importantly, the comparisons are not quite apples-to-apples.

Gearing Up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else

Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman and chief executive, is trying to reinvent the company so it can compete more deftly. Not that long ago it had to fight for business with other phone companies and cellular carriers. Then the Internet and cloud computing came along, and AT&T found itself in a tussle with a whole bunch of companies. AT&T’s competitors are not just Verizon and Sprint, but also tech giants like Amazon and Google. For the company to survive in this environment, Stephenson needs to retrain its 280,000 employees so they can improve their coding skills, or learn them, and make quick business decisions based on a fire hose of data coming into the company.

In an ambitious corporate education program that started about two years ago, he is offering to pay for classes (at least some of them) to help employees modernize their skills. But there’s a catch: They have to take these classes on their own time and sometimes pay for them with their own money. To Stephenson, it should be an easy choice for most workers: Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited.

Why Facebook’s push to end poverty is actually self-serving

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wants to end poverty; he regularly says that for every 10 people who gain Internet access, one person is raised out of poverty. Yet some experts say Zuckerberg is wrong. There’s no proof that giving Internet access to a person raises them from poverty. They say Facebook’s efforts to connect the developing world smell of colonialism and will ultimately serve Facebook’s long-term business interests.

“Here’s a large American company coming into India and appearing to try to have its way to gain eyeballs for what is ultimately a company that sells eyeballs to advertisers,” said Kentaro Toyama, a Michigan professor. He also rejects Zuckerberg’s claim about the benefits of providing access. “Any idea that Internet access itself decreases poverty is deeply flawed,” Toyama said. He noted that as the United States has gone through a golden Internet age, its poverty rate hasn’t declined. While there’s some anecdotal evidence pointing to the positive effects of Internet access for the poor, information on the long-term effects is “sketchy,” according to Johannes Bauer, chair of Michigan State’s department of media and information. “The bigger challenge of really lifting people out of lasting poverty, that’s a more complicated policy that’s not simply addressed by providing access,” Bauer said.

The Internet in Africa: How much do governments matter?

[Commentary] There’s a flood of innovation happening in Africa, particularly on mobile networks. Governments can pass laws which either hinder or enable competition, innovation, and freedom of expression. Based on those laws, a nation and its citizens might have a single, state-run telecommunications network or fierce competition among several networks and technologies. They might encounter a bounty of diverse views online, or they might only have a single set of government-approved opinions there for them to find.

Good governance can, in turn, foster decentralized, resilient networks that are far more difficult for governments to censor or shut down, and which are far more useful to the people who rely on them. To be sure, governance isn’t all that matters for Internet deployment. Other factors — such as the size of a country, whether it is predominantly urban or rural, and precedents in telecommunications deployment — have an influence on how easily the Internet can be expanded and adopted. However, governments and the laws and regulations they pass are significant, and efforts to improve global Internet access absolutely must take them into account. Africa’s governments are no exception.

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