March 2017

[Commentary] Today’s internet has transformed media and delivered prodigious value to consumers in entertainment, ecommerce, and personal productivity. Yet the next waves of the internet will extend to new industries in the physical world, delivering a far greater variety of services and requiring connectivity that is even faster, more ubiquitous, and more robust than today. To drive and accommodate this embrace of information by the real economy, we’ll need something bigger and better than the internet. We’ll need the “exanet.”

If the first several decades of internet were based on interoperability through digital packet switching and expanded capacity via fiber optics and broadband, the next phase will (in addition to continual capacity additions) focus on ubiquity, latency, reliability, application diversity, and security.

[Swanson is president of Entropy Economics LLC]

On the campaign trail, none of President Trump's rivals could — or would — match the brazenness of his attacks on the news media. Trump's rejection of basic political norms helped him win the election, but it is becoming a problem now that he is president. As other Republicans refuse to follow his lead, Trump is growing frustrated.

A recent Washington Post story claims, "A few hours after Trump had publicly defended his attorney general and said he should not recuse himself from the Russia probe, [Jeff] Sessions called a news conference to announce just that — amounting to a public rebuke of the president." The president became irritated all over again March 5, after he received little support for his unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign: "Few Republicans were defending him on the Sunday political talk shows. Some Trump advisers and allies were especially disappointed in Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL), who two days earlier had hitched a ride down to Florida with Trump on Air Force One. Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd to explain Trump’s wiretapping claim, Rubio demurred. 'Look, I didn’t make the allegation,' he said. 'I’m not the person that went out there and said it.'"

[Commentary] Here is what Attorney General Jeff Sessions should have said when he stepped up to the podium and addressed reporters last week at the Justice Department: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Sessions is the victim of the type of McCarthyite character assassination that the left used to condemn. Remember when accusing people without evidence of coordinating with the Kremlin was frowned upon? No longer, apparently.

In fact, what Sessions faced may be worse than McCarthyism. At least McCarthy was right when he claimed that there were Russian spies in the State Department (see Hiss, Alger, among others). On “Meet the Press” this weekend, former Obama director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. declared that the US intelligence community he headed until a few weeks ago had found “no evidence” of any collusion between members of the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. No evidence.

[Thiessen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush]