You’re reading the Benton Foundation’s Weekly Round-up, a recap of the biggest (or most overlooked) telecommunications stories of the week. The round-up is delivered via e-mail each Friday; to get your own copy, subscribe at www.benton.org/user/register
Robbie's Round-Up for the Week of August 14-18, 2017
[Commentary] In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. Subsequently Cloudflare, whose service was used to protect the site from denial-of-service attacks, has also dropped them as a customer, with a telling quote from Cloudflare’s CEO: “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.” We agree.
Even for free speech advocates, this situation is deeply fraught with emotional, logistical, and legal twists and turns. All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with. Those on the left face calls to characterize the Black Lives Matter movement as a hate group. In the Civil Rights Era cases that formed the basis of today’s protections of freedom of speech, the NAACP’s voice was the one attacked. Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t. For any content hosts that do reject content as part of the enforcement of their terms of service, we have long recommended that they implement procedural protections to mitigate mistakes. These are methods that protect us all against overbroad or arbitrary takedowns.
I have directed that United States Cyber Command be elevated to the status of a Unified Combatant Command focused on cyberspace operations. This new Unified Combatant Command will strengthen our cyberspace operations and create more opportunities to improve our Nation’s defense. The elevation of United States Cyber Command demonstrates our increased resolve against cyberspace threats and will help reassure our allies and partners and deter our adversaries. United States Cyber Command’s elevation will also help streamline command and control of time-sensitive cyberspace operations by consolidating them under a single commander with authorities commensurate with the importance of such operations. Elevation will also ensure that critical cyberspace operations are adequately funded. In connection with this elevation, the Secretary of Defense is examining the possibility of separating United States Cyber Command from the National Security Agency. He will announce recommendations on this matter at a later date.
Shortly after Ajit Pai was named chair of the Federal Communications Commission in February, he said he wanted the agency to be “as open and accessible as possible to the American people." Six months on, the agency is falling short of Pai’s lofty goal in some key areas.
Critics are especially concerned about the FCC’s handling of complaints from the public about internet providers and the causes of a May 7 outage of the public-comments section of the agency’s website. "Chairman Pai promised to make the FCC more transparent, but the early returns aren't looking good," said Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR). "The FCC seems more concerned with helping Big Cable than living up to his promise." Many complaints about a lack of transparency at the FCC relate to the commission’s plan to reverse some of its net-neutrality rules, which prohibit internet providers from favoring some forms of traffic over others. The FCC’s proceeding failed to mention that the agency has received more than 47,000 informal complaints about alleged net-neutrality violations since the rules took effect in 2015.
In “,” Bob Crandall conducts a series of event studies to explore how investors view the effects of the rules on the firms most likely to be affected. Crandall tracks daily equity prices to measure how investors believe the net neutrality regulations will affect Internet service providers (ISPs) and new and traditional media companies (edge companies, or ECs). Overall, Crandall’s analysis identified a limited market response to net neutrality, suggesting that investors did not expect net neutrality regulations to effect significant change in the market. In addition, the small changes in EC equities suggest that investors also believed that net neutrality regulations might not be the boon to EC growth and success that net neutrality proponents expect it to be. This result is particularly notable given the fervor that has developed around this issue. Both proponents and opponents of the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet order argue that regulations or lack thereof will have dire consequences. Crandall’s analysis suggests that the reality may be far more modest.
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