November 2016

President-elect Donald Trump is tapping another critic of network neutrality to help with the transition at the Federal Communications Commission. The Trump transition team announced that Roslyn Layton will join the FCC landing team. Layton will work alongside Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark Jamison.

Layton, like her two colleagues, has served as a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank. The three are all critics of the agency's controversial net neutrality rules. “The FCC's recent actions and the White House's intervention is inconsistent with a stable, evidence-based regulatory approach,” Layton wrote about net neutrality in a 2015 op-ed cowritten with Jamison. Layton went on to say that the FCC should focus on other matters. “The situation distracts the FCC from its mission-critical responsibilities, such as the upcoming incentive auction to get more spectrum in the marketplace and meet consumers’ increasing demand for wireless technologies.”

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission under President-elect Donald Trump is likely to take a hard look at network neutrality and the reclassification of broadband as a Title II common carrier service. Repealing a regulation so recently blessed by the Court of Appeals may, however, be a lengthy and difficult process. The Internet Service Provider (ISP) privacy regulations pursuant to the Title II reclassification may be more readily overturned because no court has yet ruled on them. But that would still take some time.

In the interim, the new FCC should adopt a more rational enforcement policy. One early candidate should be the treatment of "pay-for-privacy" or "financial incentive" plans. These are broadband service plans that offer discounts to subscribers who permit their ISP to collect and use their data. The new FCC privacy regulations suggest an enforcement policy that will actively discourage these plans, notwithstanding FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's claim that, "The bottom line is that it's your data. How it's used and shared should be your choice." Left unsaid was that he prefers some choices to others.

[Thomas M. Lenard is senior fellow and president emeritus of the Technology Policy Institute.]

A US District Court Judge has denied the Center for Public Integrity’s request for access to a taxpayer-funded study about cybersecurity vulnerabilities at the Federal Election Commission. The court’s decision comes more than 13 months after the Center for Public Integrity sued the FEC for access to the security study, which the FEC commissioned following a Center investigation revealing how Chinese hackers infiltrated the FEC’s computer systems.

The 44-page document — known within the FEC as the “NIST study” — in part provides recommendations on how to fix the FEC’s problems and bring its computer systems in line with specific National Institute of Standards and Technology computer security protocols. The study cost $199,500 to produce. In its lawsuit and the requests for the security study that preceded it, the Center noted that it had no quarrel with the FEC redacting sensitive passages that, if revealed, could compromise agency security.