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November 2016

President-elect Trump's Communication Rights Wrecking Crew

[Commentary] One of President-elect Donald Trump’s top tech-policy advisers has a plan: Do away with the main agency that protects the rights of Internet users and media consumers in America. You heard that right. Mark Jamison, who President-elect Trump chose to help oversee the tech-policy transition team, thinks that getting rid of the Federal Communications Commission would be a good thing for this country. “Most of the original motivations for having an FCC have gone away,” Jamison wrote in Oct, claiming that a heavily consolidated media marketplace would discipline itself to benefit ordinary people. He’s dead wrong.

If President-elect Trump were the least bit sincere about his claims to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and special-interest operatives, he couldn’t have done much worse than selecting Jamison and Jeffrey Eisenach. If he wants to make good on his pledge to block AT&T’s $107-billion acquisition of Time Warner — which he called “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few” — he’ll have to lock horns with these two big-media boosters.

Arkansas Utility to Offer 1-Gig Broadband

Tiny public utility Conway Corp., is the latest company to enter the ultra high-speed Internet arena, with plans to unveil a 1-Gigabit per second broadband service in Conway (AR) in December. Conway Corp. started operating the city-owned utility system 85 years ago. The company provides electric, water, wastewater, cable, Internet, telephone and security services within the Conway city limits. Conway Corp. plans to price the service at $94.95 per month.

Conway Corp. began offering broadband in 1997, after it completed construction on a city-wide fiber-coax network, a two-year project that cost $5.6 million. When the network went live, Conway Corp. said, it became the third company in the country and fifth in the world to offer high-speed, broadband cable Internet service.

People Censor Themselves Online for Fear of Being Harassed

Nearly half of American Internet users have been harassed or abused online, according to a new study published by Data & Society, a technology-focused think tank. Some groups are more often targeted than others. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual users are more than twice as likely than straight users to experience abuse online, the study found, and although men and women are subject to similar levels of abuse, the attacks on women were often of a more serious nature. Of the 20 categories of harassment the researchers looked at, men were more likely to report being called names and being embarrassed online, while women were more likely to be stalked, sexually harassed, or have false rumors spread about them.

But a person doesn’t have to be the target of abuse for it to color their experience online. More than 70 percent of Americans say they’ve seen others harassed on the Internet. For black users, that percentage rose to 78; among younger users and lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans, the proportion is close 90 percent. Groups that were more likely to come into contact with online abuse were also more likely to say that people on the Internet are mostly unkind.

Making Access to Broadband a Reality for Low-Income Americans

We are notifying the Federal Communications Commission that we are “opting-in” to the forbearance granted in the Commission’s 2016 Lifeline Modernization Order. By opting in to forbearance today, AT&T will not offer a Lifeline discount on our broadband products at this time except where we deploy broadband as part of a high-cost funded public interest commitment. Again, opting in to forbearance will still allow us to offer Lifeline-supported broadband in the future, should we choose to do so. We will continue to assess our options as the current Lifeline program reforms are implemented and further updates are adopted.

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