BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 2017
CHARLOTTESVILLE
President Trump hits media for misrepresenting Charlottesville remarks [links to Benton summary]
President Trump’s false claim that counter-demonstrators lacked a permit [links to Washington Post]
President Trump is sabotaging himself by attacking the media after Charlottesville - WaPo analysis
President Trump and race: Decades of fueling divisions [links to Benton summary]
President Trump’s business advisory councils disband as CEOs abandon president over Charlottesville views
President Trump cuts ties with business leaders who criticized him [links to Politico]
President Trump vs. Amazon: So much for the businessman president [links to Benton summary]
New Media and the Messy Nature of Reporting on the Alt-Right
Protests against Google are postponed as culture wars roil Silicon Valley
University Of Florida Denies Richard Spencer Event, Citing 'Likelihood Of Violence' [links to National Public Radio]
Presidents George Bush and G.W. Bush issue joint statement condemning racism and anti-Semitism [links to Vox]
President Trump’s remarks defending neo-Nazis were full of right-wing media talking points [links to Benton summary]
Op-ed: The ACLU Needs to Rethink Free Speech [links to New York Times]
ACLU of California: ‘White Supremacist Violence is Not Free Speech’ [links to Washington Post]
Writers Guild: President Trump Disgraces Nation [links to Broadcasting&Cable]
Silicon Valley escalates its war on white supremacy despite free speech concerns
Internet turns on white supremacists and neo-Nazis with doxing, phishing [links to Ars Technica]
Web hosting, CDN companies torn as to how to respond to racist websites [links to Ars Technica]
Facebook's Zuckerberg condemns hate groups [links to CNN]
Apple Pay is dropping support for websites that sell white supremacist merchandise [links to Vox]
Spotify pulls white supremacist "hate music" from platform [links to USAToday]
Squarespace is latest to purge white-supremacist sites after Charlottesville [links to CNN]
Service Provider Cloudflare Boots Hate Site off the Internet [links to ProPublica]
Spotify pulls several ‘hate bands’ from its service [links to Verge, The]
Twitter is joining its fellow tech companies in clamping down on the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website [links to Vox]
After Charlottesville, PayPal says it won’t do business with hate groups [links to Fast Company]
Racist Daily Stormer moves to Russian domain after losing .com address [links to Ars Technica]
How the alt-right got kicked offline after Charlottesville — from Uber to Google [links to Washington Post]
The Myth Of The Neutral Silicon Valley Platform Is Crumbling [links to Fast Company]
If you kick a white supremacist group off one service, another will be waiting for them [links to Minnesota Public Radio]
Op-ed: National revulsion over the Charlottesville march shows why we shouldn’t ban hate speech [links to Vox]
What if Western media covered America’s white tribalism the same way it covers other nations [links to Washington Post]
Violence adds momentum to removal of Confederate statues [links to Associated Press]
Op-ed: The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy [links to Washington Post]
Charlottesville Violence Spurs New Resistance to Confederate Symbols [links to New York Times]
COMMUNICATIONS AND DEMOCRACY
Un-American activities - op-ed
CEOs Long Avoided Politics. Trump Is Changing the Calculus. [links to New York Times]
Editorial: Sessions should back off of crackdown on reporters [links to San Jose Mercury News]
A political scientist has discovered a surprising way to increase voter turnout. It starts in childhood. [links to Washington Post]
ELECTIONS
The “Freelancer” Hacker Who Could Be Key To Proving Russian Election Meddling [links to Fast Company]
INTERNET/BROADBAND/TELECOM
Distinguishing Bandwidth and Latency in Households’ Willingness-to-Pay for Broadband Internet Speed - TPI analysis
Lifeline Connects Coalition Discusses Lifeline Reform Issues [links to Benton summary]
Charter suspends complaint against Verizon over utility pole access [links to Fierce]
CBO Scores Public Lands Telecommunications Act - CBO research [links to Benton summary]
ACA: FCC Needs More Input on VoIP Robocall Proposal [links to Multichannel News]
NETWORK NEUTRALITY
FCC Net Neutrality Comments Top 20 Million [links to Broadcasting&Cable]
Don't want your phone bill to rise? It's time to learn about net neutrality - News Tribune op-ed [links to Benton summary]
Internet providers urge Montana's senators to push for net neutrality laws [links to Missoulian]
SECURITY/PRIVACY
Verizon -- Yes, Verizon -- Just Stood Up for Your Privacy [links to Benton summary]
CONTENT
Lawsuit over false online data revived after US top court review [links to Benton summary]
WGN America Looks Abroad for Programming [links to Hollywood Reporter]
Facebook Shut Down Employee Chat Room Over Harassing Messages [links to Wall Street Journal]
WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
T-Mobile 600 MHz Spectrum Will Boost Rural Coverage; Buildout Begins [links to telecompetitor]
JOURNALISM
A Fox News Host Attacks Trump, and Some Viewers Bristle [links to New York Times]
Exploring the Ideological Nature of Journalists’ Social Networks on Twitter and Associations with News Story Content - research [links to Benton summary]
Missed deadline: The delayed promise of newsroom diversity [links to Asian American Journalists Association]
The AP Revisits ‘Alt-Right’ and Adds Guidance on ‘Antifa’ [links to AdWeek]
BROADCASTING
Michigan Radio Station Designated For Hearing Surrenders License [links to Federal Communications Commission]
OWNERSHIP
Digital platforms force a rethink in competition theory - op-ed
Will Bunch: Why the looming sale of PHL17 is a threat to democracy [links to Philadelphia Inquirer]
LABOR
Alphabet’s boss should write a “detailed, ringing rebuttal” of a viral anti-diversity memo sent at Google. Here’s how it should read [links to Economist, The]
GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
2016/2017 Mobile Analysis: Mobile Device Trends on Government Websites [links to Benton summary]
LOBBYING
Tech companies ramp up NAFTA lobbying on eve of trade talks [links to Reuters]
POLICYMAKERS
Breaking: Simons is Trump's pick for FTC chairman [links to Politico]
Steve Bannon, Unrepentant [links to Benton summary]
Trump’s lack of discipline leaves new chief of staff frustrated and dismayed [links to Washington Post]
Hope Hicks to serve as interim White House communications director
Waiting on Redl
Congress Innovation Fellowship 2018 [links to Benton summary]
Consumers Union Names Former FTC Policy Director Justin Brookman as Director, Consumer Privacy and Technology Policy [links to Consumers Union]
COMPANY NEWS
Does Amazon Pay Taxes? Contrary to Trump Tweet, Yes [links to New York Times]
Down the Breitbart Hole: Steve Bannon once said it was the platform for the alt-right. Its current editors disagree. Is the incendiary media company at the nerve center of Donald Trump’s America simply provocative — or dangerous? [links to New York Times]
Verizon to Compete With AT&T for Police, Emergency-Response Customers [links to Wall Street Journal]
Verizon FirstNet Alternative Aims to Retain Company’s Public Safety Customers [links to telecompetitor]
Apple Readies $1 Billion War Chest for Hollywood Programming [links to Wall Street Journal]
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CHARLOTTESVILLE
PRESIDENT TRUMP SABOTAGING HIMSELF
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Callum Borchers]
What would possess the president of the United States, after he finally called out white supremacists, to return a day later to the flimsy position that attracted so much criticism in the first place? Part of the answer is that he hates the media and just can't stand to give reporters what they want — or admit that he was wrong. Take it from someone who knows President Trump pretty well. “I think there's — it's almost like a counterintuitive thing with him, as it relates to the media,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told Stephen Colbert on “Late Show.” “The media's expecting him to do something; he sometimes does the exact opposite.” Scaramucci shared his insight before President Trump doubled down on remarks he delivered over the weekend, when white supremacists protesting the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville clashed with counterprotesters. Though it was a Nazi sympathizer who drove a car into a crowd, killing one and injuring 19 others, the president reiterated his position that “both sides” were to blame for the violence while speaking at an impromptu news conference at Trump Tower in New York. This was President Trump, furious at the media, freelancing in self-destructive fashion.
benton.org/headlines/president-trump-sabotaging-himself-attacking-media-after-charlottesville | Washington Post
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TRUMP BUSINESS ADVISORY COUNCILS DISBAND
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Damian Paletta, Jena McGregor]
President Donald Trump’s relationship with the American business community suffered a major setback Aug 16 as the president was forced to shut down his major business advisory councils after corporate leaders repudiated his comments on the violence in Charlottesville (VA) this weekend. President Trump announced the disbanding of the two councils — the Strategy & Policy Forum and the Manufacturing Council, which hosted many of the top corporate leaders in America — amid a growing uproar by chief executives furious over President Trump's decision to equate the actions of white supremacists and protesters in remarks he made Aug 15. But those groups had already decided to dissolve on their own earlier in the day, apparently. Earlier Aug 16, the chief executives of Campbell Soup and the conglomerate 3M resigned from the manufacturing council. “Racism and murder are unequivocally reprehensible and are not morally equivalent to anything else that happened in Charlottesville,” Campbell Soup chief executive Denise Morrison said. “I believe the president should have been — and still needs to be — unambiguous on that point.”
benton.org/headlines/president-trumps-business-advisory-councils-disband-ceos-abandon-president-over | Washington Post | Los Angeles Times | The Hill
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NEW MEDIA AND THE MESSY NATURE OF REPORTING ON THE ALT-RIGHT
[SOURCE: Wired, AUTHOR: Issie Lapowsky]
The question of how to cover the alt-right and its leaders has long been a complicated one. It's grown even more so given that President Donald Trump appointed leaders of that movement—including White House adviser Steve Bannon, who previously ran the alt-right media company Breitbart—to his staff. At its core, the mainstream press is grappling with this conundrum: Ignore these groups and risk allowing a potential public threat to go unreported; shine too bright a light on them, and risk amplifying their message—or worse, attracting new acolytes to the cause.
There’s no right approach to covering this growing movement, but one thing is certain: The press has erred on the side of overexposure. It’s positioned the alt-right in the center of President Trump's story, in part because of the shock value of the movement’s actions. This fringe group has taken the country’s implicit history of racism and made it explicit, which is certainly newsworthy. But that's brought unpleasant side effects, namely, giving the leaders of these hate groups coverage disproportionate to their influence. After all, it took a whole lot of mainstream Republicans to help usher President Trump into office. He received the greatest number of primary votes in the history of the Republican party. He also won the general election with 88 percent of Republican party votes, according to exit polls. The right got President Trump elected; the alt-right was merely a subset. But as Trump's comments indicate, he clearly believes it is a crucial subset.
benton.org/headlines/new-media-and-messy-nature-reporting-alt-right | Wired
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GOOGLE PROTEST POSTPONED
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: David Pierson, Paresh Dave ]
Plans to protest outside Google’s offices this weekend have been postponed, but conservatives are taking America’s culture wars directly to Silicon Valley, a place that was long insulated from political rancor but is now one of the most important ideological battlegrounds. Organizers postponed the event — which was scheduled to take place in cities where Google has offices — saying that the news coverage surrounding their plans had led to threats from left-wing “terrorist groups.” The rallies were inspired by James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired last week for posting a 10-page internal memo arguing that the lack of women in tech could be attributed to biological differences. His dismissal sparked an outcry from conservatives who say their opinions are being muzzled by liberal technology companies and led Damore to criticize his former company for promoting a “particularly intense echo chamber.”
benton.org/headlines/protests-against-google-are-postponed-culture-wars-roil-silicon-valley | Los Angeles Times | USAToday | The Hill | Vox
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WAR ON WHITE SUPREMACY
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Tracy Jan, Elizabeth Dwoskin]
Silicon Valley significantly escalated its war on white supremacy this week, choking off the ability of hate groups to raise money online, removing them from Internet search engines, and preventing some sites from registering at all. The new moves go beyond censoring individual stories or posts. Tech companies such as Google, GoDaddy and PayPal are now reversing their hands-off approach about content supported by their services and making it much more difficult for “alt-right” organizations to reach mass audiences. But the actions are also heightening concerns over how tech companies are becoming the arbiters of free speech in America. And in response, right-wing technologists are building parallel digital services that cater to their own movement. Gab.ai, a social network for promoting free speech, was founded shortly after the presidential election by Silicon Valley engineers alienated by the region’s liberalism. Other conservatives have founded Infogalactic, a Wikipedia for the alt-right, as well as crowdfunding tools Hatreon and WeSearchr. The latter was used to raise money for James Damore, a white engineer who was fired after criticizing Google’s diversity policy. “If there needs to be two versions of the Internet so be it,” Gab.ai tweeted. The company’s spokesman, Utsav Sanduja, later warned of a “revolt” in Silicon Valley against the way tech companies are trying control the national debate.
benton.org/headlines/silicon-valley-escalates-its-war-white-supremacy-despite-free-speech-concerns | Washington Post | WSJ
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COMMUNICATIONS AND DEMOCRACY
UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Eugene Volokh]
[Commentary] I’ve been struck by the similarity between recent calls for suppressing white supremacist speech and past calls for suppressing Communist speech. Of course, there are differences as well — there always are for any analogy — but I thought I’d note some likenesses. Communists, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates — I can’t stand them. They are supporters of ideologies of slavery and murder. They are losers, who lost for very good reason. But their speech should be protected, I think; and the cases for stripping protection from such speech have always been very similar.
[Eugene Volokh teaches at UCLA School of Law]
benton.org/headlines/un-american-activities | Washington Post
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INTERNET/BROADBAND
TPI REPORT
[SOURCE: Technology Policy Institute, AUTHOR: Yu-Hsin Liu, Jeffrey Prince, Scott Wallsten]
We measure households’ willingness-to-pay for changes in key home broadband Internet connection features using data from two nationally administered, discrete choice surveys. Both surveys include price, data caps, and download and upload bandwidth, but only one includes latency. Together, these surveys allow us to measure tradeoffs between bandwidth and other connectivity features such as price and data caps, and perhaps most notably, provide the only empirical evidence to date of tradeoffs between bandwidth and latency. We find that households' valuation of bandwidth is highly concave, with relatively little added value beyond 100 Mbps. For example, households are willing to pay about $2.34 per Mbps ($14 total) monthly to increase bandwidth from 4 Mbps to 10 Mbps, $1.57 per Mbps ($24) to increase from 10 to 25 Mbps, and only $0.02 per Mbps ($19) for an increase from 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps. We also find households willing to pay about $8.66 per month to reduce latency from levels obtained with satellite Internet service to levels more common to wired service. Household valuation of increased data caps is also concave as caps increase from 300 GB to 1000 GB, although consumers place a significant premium on unlimited service. Our findings provide the first relative valuation of bandwidth and latency and suggest that current U.S. policy may be overpenalizing
latency relative to reductions in bandwidth and data caps. For example, we find that in its CAF Phase II Auction, the FCC is imposing a bidding penalty for latency that is about five times higher than what our WTP estimates suggest it should be relative to bandwidth offered.
benton.org/headlines/distinguishing-bandwidth-and-latency-households-willingness-pay-broadband-internet-speed | Technology Policy Institute
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OWNERSHIP
COMPETITION THEORY
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Diane Coyle]
Anxiety about the health of competition in the US economy — and elsewhere — is growing. The concern may be well founded but taking forceful action will require economists to provide some practical ways of proving and measuring the harm caused by increasing market power in the digital economy. The forces driving concentration do not affect the US alone. In all digital markets, the cost structure of high upfront costs and low additional or marginal costs means there are large economies of scale. The broad impact of digital technology has been to increase the scope of the markets many businesses can hope to reach. In pre-digital days, the question an economist would ask is whether the efficiencies gained by big or merging companies would be passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. Another key question was whether it would still be possible for new entrants to break into the market. Digital platforms make these questions harder to answer. One much-needed tool is how to assess consumer benefits. A second issue is how to take into account the interactions between markets, given that most platforms and tech companies steadily expand into other activities and markets. A third issue, perhaps the most important, is the effect increasing concentration has on incentives to innovate and invest.
[Diane Coyle is professor of economics at the University of Manchester]
benton.org/headlines/digital-platforms-force-rethink-competition-theory | Financial Times
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POLICYMAKERS
HOPE HICKS
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Mallory Shelbourne]
Longtime aide to President Donald Trump Hope Hicks will take over the role as interim director of communications while the West Wing looks for someone to fill the position permanently. News of Hicks's appointment comes just over two weeks after the firing of Anthony Scaramucci, who spent a mere 10 days as Trump's communications director. “Hope Hicks will work with White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and all of the communications team and serve as the Interim White House Communications Director. We will make an announcement on a permanent communications director at the appropriate time,” a White House official said. Hicks, the president's director of strategic communications, worked for the Trump Organization before the president entered the 2016 Republican primary, and she served as a spokesperson during the presidential campaign. Scaramucci, a former hedge fund manager, was pushed out on July 31, the same day then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly took over as White House chief of staff.
benton.org/headlines/hope-hicks-serve-interim-white-house-communications-director | Hill, The | CNN
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WAITING ON REDL
[SOURCE: Politico, AUTHOR: Li Zhou]
The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration still lacks official leadership in the Trump administration, following Senate difficulties to advance even a committee vote earlier in August on NTIA administrator-nominee David Redl. But NTIA is still chugging along with career staff dating to the Obama administration, such as NTIA chief of staff Glenn Reynolds and spectrum management associate administrator Paige Atkins. Both attended a NTIA-convened spectrum meeting in Colorado. Reynolds referred to Redl's absence as "the elephant in the room" and assured meeting participants that their work would be "used and emphasized and studied by both the career staff and by the political leadership that we fully expect to get on board in the near future." He also lamented what he judged as tight budget constraints and "difficult decisions" on prioritizing. NTIA staffers are, in the meantime, looking to telecom-savvy administration officials such as the National Economic Council's Grace Koh and Office of Science and Technology Policy's Kelsey Guyselman: "We're working with them to keep the trains moving until we have our new political leadership on board," Reynolds said. Reminder: Redl, Guyselman and Koh all worked together recently as GOP telecom staffers for House E&C.
benton.org/headlines/waiting-redl | Politico
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