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  2. March 2017

March 2017

Sen Markey Introduces Bill to Boost Broadband in Developing World

Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) has introduced a bill to boost the Barack Obama Administration era Global Connect Initiative, including through additional funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and with the goal of boosting access to broadband in developing countries. The DIGITAL AGE (Driving Innovation and Growth in Internet Technology And Launching Universal Access to the Global Economy) Act would include encouraging global "dig once" policies, spectrum re-use and promoting various internet values like lower costs, a free and open internet and nondiscriminatory access. The bill would direct the State Department, USAID and other relevant agencies—that would include the Federal Communications Commission—to work with other government, financial institutions and private industry to expand broadband development.

Putin, Politics, and the Press

The 2016 Presidential election, which upended voters, journalists, politicians, and special-interest groups, was remarkable for a number of reasons—not least Trump’s unconcealed contempt for the press, whose role was challenged again and again on the campaign trail.

The New York Times went further in a December 13 story detailing Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, describing “every major publication, including The Times,” as “a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.” Running more than 7,000 words, the story broke down how, in 2015, hackers linked to the Russian government compromised at least one Democratic National Committee computer system; how those hackers later accessed the DNC’s main network and targeted people outside the DNC, most famously Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta; and how “by last summer . . . Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day—procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media.”

Trump’s Net Neutrality-Hating FCC Chair Is Already Gutting Public-Interest Regulations

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has been an outspoken foe of network neutrality, the first amendment of the internet that guarantees the free flow of information without censorship or corporate favoritism. With President Trump’s backing, and that of a Congress whose Republican leaders never say no to telecom giants, Pai will have an FCC majority and plenty of leeway to go after net neutrality. Its “days are numbered,” he says.

Activists predict that he won’t stop there. Through formal actions by what will be a Republican-controlled FCC and by granting of waivers that allow corporations to get around cross-ownership and joint-sales rules that were designed to maintain competition in local television markets, the FCC could end up facilitating media mergers and monopolies at the national and local levels that will be devastating to competition and to the democratic discourse. At a time when the United States should be supercharging public and community media to prevent development of news deserts where the only “information” comes from partisan corporate outlets, Trump and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon are dusting off the playbooks of the 1990s. Schemes to weaken competition and diversity, to create one-size-fits-all “newsrooms,” to set-up digital fast lanes for subsidized content and slow lanes for democratic discourse—all were proposed back then.  “They’re coming for all of it,” Free Press president Craig Aaron says of the Trump administration’s agenda. “They’re coming for net neutrality. They’re coming for every protection for citizens and consumers. Our movements have to be bigger now. But if we could get four million for net neutrality under Obama, just imagine what we can get under Trump.”

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