1. Monthly archive
  2. January 2017

January 2017

Why Is The Media Smearing New FCC Chair Ajit Pai As The Enemy Of Net Neutrality?

[Commentary] Media outlets across the political spectrum reporting on Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s promotion have focused on a single issue—the FCC’s controversial 2015 open Internet rulemaking, which transformed Internet access providers into public utilities. In doing so, they have trivialized the very real and important issues facing the agency and its new Chairman. Much worse than that, they have badly conflated and misreported Pai’s views on network neutrality itself—an almost entirely separate topic. The how and why of this serious reporting failure is the real story here.

Nowhere has Pai indicated hostility to basic net neutrality principles themselves, or disavowed his repeated pledge “to protect them going forward.” Nor has he ever proposed to “kill,” “destroy,” “gut,” “end” or “hate” those protections.

[Larry Downes is the Project Director, Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.]

NIST Releases Update to Cybersecurity Framework

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a draft update to the Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity—also known as the Cybersecurity Framework. Providing new details on managing cyber supply chain risks, clarifying key terms, and introducing measurement methods for cybersecurity, the updated framework aims to further develop NIST’s voluntary guidance to organizations on reducing cybersecurity risks. The Cybersecurity Framework was published in February 2014 following a collaborative process involving industry, academia and government agencies, as directed by a presidential executive order

FCC: Carriers Accept $4.5 Billion in Revised A-CAM Broadband Support for Rural Broadband Expansion

The majority of rural rate of return carriers that initially opted to receive broadband support based on the Federal Communications Commission alternative Connect America model (A-CAM) have reconfirmed those plans based on revised A-CAM broadband support offers. Those offers were reduced when demand for the A-CAM program was greater than expected. Although the commission raised the budget for the program, the additional funding was not sufficient to cover a total funding gap of $1.6 billion over 10 years. A total of 182 carriers accepted a total of 217 revised A-CAM broadband support offers, the FCC said Jan 24.

The total number of carriers that received revised offers was 191, and the total number of offers that were revised was 228. (Some carriers received more than one offer because they operate in more than one state and offers were made on a state-by-state basis.) Forty-five initial A-CAM offers made to 35 carriers were for less money than the carriers would have received by staying on the traditional program and therefore were not revised. Instead those carriers will receive the total amount of A-CAM funding they initially were offered.

Beyond convergence: a new policy paradigm for information technology

[Commentary] We’ve been discussing technological “convergence” in one way or another for at least 25 years. 25 years ago, convergence meant that we might soon be sending voice, data, and video over the same wire. Telephone, cable, fax, and television, in other words, might mush together.

In the last few years, however, the tensions between technological reality and our outdated communications laws have reached a breaking point. No matter which side one took in the network neutrality wars, it became apparent to nearly all — including legislators, regulators, and judges — that the 1934 and 1996 Acts governing communications no longer fit the world in which we live. Some tried to force our converged world into the old silos, but it didn’t work. Political upheaval in Washington may come with challenges. But one advantage is that it provides an opportunity to sweep away this legal clutter. With some luck and good will on both sides, it may even lead to a durable, bipartisan framework that can propel the technology economy for decades to come.

[Bret Swanson president of Entropy Economics LLC]

Facebook Live Is the Right Wing’s New Fox News

Facebook Live might well be Mark Zuckerberg’s gift to right-wing-news—a medium designed to be low-key and at home in your News Feed, with a potential reach in the millions. There’s a unique opening in conservative media, one that has a slew of sites systematically turning to the live-streaming feature.

It stems from a single idea: Liberals have more choice in what they watch, and for a long time Republicans have felt limited to Fox News. In 2014, the Pew Research Center released a poll showing that unlike their liberal or moderate peers—who watched and consumed a wide variety of news—conservatives were limited to Fox for most of their political information. That seems to be changing. Facebook doesn’t release rankings of Facebook Live pages, and few analyst organizations are equipped to independently verify their traffic. But in the months just after the election, using word of mouth and sources at Facebook, I spent time with a few conservative news organizations and individuals who are using the emergence of live-streaming and the massive reach of the Facebook platform to reach legions of conservatives hungry for their kind of news.

© 1994-2024 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.