September 2017

The online tumult of the 2016 election fed into a growing suspicion of Silicon Valley’s dominance over the public sphere. Across the political spectrum, people have become less trusting of the Big Tech companies that govern most online political expression. Calls for civic responsibility on the part of Silicon Valley companies have replaced the hope that technological innovation alone might bring about a democratic revolution. Despite the focus on algorithms, A.I., filter bubbles, and Big Data, these questions are political as much as technical.

Regulation has become an increasingly popular notion; the Sen Cory Booker (D-NJ) has called for greater antitrust scrutiny of Google and Facebook, while Stephen Bannon reportedly wants to regulate Google and Facebook like public utilities. In the nineteen-thirties, such threats encouraged commercial broadcasters to adopt the civic paradigm. In that prewar era, advocates of democratic radio were united by a progressive vision of pluralism and rationality; today, the question of how to fashion a democratic social media is one more front in our highly divisive culture wars.

[Commentary] We have come to the end of the comments period set by the Trump Federal Communications Commission (FCC) during which the public could respond to the FCC’s efforts to deregulate high-speed Internet service and roll back network neutrality rules that designate the Internet a utility. There have been over 22 million comments to the FCC’s proposed rule making, or ‘rule unmaking’ — surely a testament to the Internet’s potential to encourage participation — and it appears the huge majority of those comments have spoken against the FCC’s proposal to deregulate.

The public now understands, just as the courts have always understood, the the Internet is an incredible information transmission utility that has fallen into the hands of monopolists and should be regulated in the public’s interest. But the Trump FCC has only free market solutions to problems we don’t have in 2017, so it is highly likely that this FCC will indeed do away with the Net Neutrality rules set forth by the FCC in 2015.

[Fred Johnson is a documentary maker and telecom policy analyst]

The tech industry's top CEOs are demanding President Trump and Congress continue a program that protects young undocumented immigrants from being deported. "Dreamers are vital to the future of our companies and our economy," the CEOs wrote in a letter posted on FWD.us, an immigration advocacy organization. "With them, we grow and create jobs. They are part of why we will continue to have a global competitive advantage." The letter was signed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai, Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Meg Whitman, Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Netflix's Reed Hastings, among 350 others. Tech investors and board members, including Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett and General Motors' Mary Barra also signed the letter.

The House Commerce Committee has switched gears and will hold a Sept. 7 hearing on the post-incentive auction repack in its Communications Subcommittee. The committee had planned to hold a high-profile hearing on network neutrality on that date, but sources say that has been indefinitely postponed. Now, the Communications subcommittee will hold a hearing at 10 a.m. titled “The Broadcast Incentive Auction: Update on Repacking Opportunities and Challenges.” No witnesses had been set at press time. The repack will be getting in gear this fall, with almost a thousand TV stations having to move to make room for wireless operators in the swaths of broadcast spectrum purchased in the spectrum auction.