October 2016

It’s the $85 billion question. Will the Federal Communications Commission have jurisdiction over AT&T’s blockbuster $85 billion buyout of entertainment giant Time Warner? The reason why this is important is that the FCC is likely to take a more skeptical view of the deal than the Justice Dept. In mergers like these, the Justice Dept.’s job is to ensure that the deal doesn’t run afoul of antitrust laws. The FCC, by contrast, has a more rigorous responsibility: To ensure that the deal serves the public interest. That’s why AT&T wants to avoid FCC scrutiny in this case.

As a technical matter, it would be very difficult for AT&T to absorb CNN and HBO without the broadcast functionality that these licenses provide, according to John Gasparini, policy fellow at DC-based consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “It appears that AT&T and DirecTV do not currently have sufficient satellite licenses to forgo acquiring the Time Warner licenses without impacting the operations of big-name properties like CNN and HBO,” Gasparini said. “As a result, it’s more than likely that AT&T and Time Warner will need to secure FCC approval before the deal goes through.” “The only way AT&T could avoid FCC scrutiny is if they deliberately structure this deal in a convoluted way to avoid a transfer of these licenses and thus FCC review,” Gasparini added.

Frontier’s request to the Federal Communications Commission to modify its CAF-II phase one incremental broadband deployment plans is facing a protest from Charter and Comcast, who said that the telecommunication company is asking for funds to build out broadband in areas they already serve.

Frontier initially accepted $283 million annually in CAF II support from the FCC to deploy broadband to more than 650,000 high-cost rural locations throughout its current 28-state service area. In August, Frontier submitted a list of 3,146 census blocks that it had not previously identified with its initial election. It now intends to serve those locations using Phase I incremental support. At issue are rules developed by the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau. They require that any service provider who wants subsidies to provide broadband services must complete the required certifications, and the “location in question must be eligible at the time." Charter, which entered into a number of new markets to compete with Frontier and others via its acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Communications, said in a response filing it already offers internet speeds that exceed 3 Mbps/768 Kbps in 126 of the census blocks designated by Frontier. The cable company said that it “believes that the census blocks in Exhibit A are already served by an unsubsidized competitor, and thus not eligible for Phase I support.” Comcast cited a similar situation. The cable company said that in 19 of the census blocks Frontier had identified, it “already provides broadband service at speeds exceeding 3 Mbps downstream and 768 kbps upstream as of June 2016.”

[Commentary] If you are reading this sentence, you participate in a minority cultural practice. You get your news by reading traditional newspapers, whether in print or online. Let some facts sink in. Barely more than a decade ago, the majority of Americans with a high school degree or above were daily readers of traditional print newspapers and their news sites. This is no longer true. Now, at best, about 40 percent of American adults “often” get their news from newspapers and their websites. In contrast, roughly 60 percent often get their news from television. Of course, television has dominated since the era of the broadcast big three. What’s new is reading’s precipitous decline.

The country’s conversational universe has split between those who primarily get their news by reading and those who primarily depend on watching and listening. I say primarily because of course few people are exclusively in one camp or the other, and many of us also participate in circulating news via social media. But where we spend most of our time matters. On that we are split. Understanding American public opinion now means discerning three things: what the conversation sounds like on TV and radio, what it sounds like in traditional text-based journalism, and how these two conversations differ. Understanding our political dynamics means spotting how those streams do or don’t mingle, and tracking the eddies, riptides and surf storms their convergences generate. In this campaign, we haven’t seen a silent majority suddenly awoken. Instead, we’ve seen a coming-of-age of a vocal minority that was nearly invisible to another vocal minority, the community of readers of traditional text-based journalism, a community dominated by the professional classes. Over the past nine months, these two minorities have been battling for the country’s soul.

[Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University]

A teenager has been arrested in connection with a cyberattack on the county's emergency call-in system. Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai, 18, was taken into custody after the Surprise (AZ) Police Department, northwest of Phoenix, notified the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office of more than 100 hang-up 911 calls within a few minutes late Oct 25.

Desai was booked into a Maricopa County jail on suspicion of three counts of computer tampering. Interference with critical infrastructure could have disrupted the 911 system in the Phoenix area and potentially other states. Investigators traced the calls and discovered they originated from a link posted to Twitter, according to the statement. The link was to a site named "Meet Desai" and its domain was hosted out of San Francisco. When the link was clicked, it continually called 911 and would not let the caller hang up.