Lauren Frayer

Lester Holt’s interview with President Donald Trump made huge, splashy headlines when the President confirmed that he always intended to fire FBI Director James Comey, and that he was thinking of the investigation into Russia’s influence on the 2016 election when he did it. Holt’s wasn’t the only interview with Trump that aired during the week. Trump’s conversation with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro was less explosive, but from a Trump watcher’s perspective, it was more revealing. The interview was a near-perfect example of what President Trump would like his relationship with the media to be. And it was proof of why no respectable news organization can give it to him. Making Trump comfortable means allowing him to seal any cracks or flaws in his facade, rather than eliciting any revelations or new insights from him. Trump wants the press to perform public relations, not journalism. And as long as people like Pirro are willing to flatter him, Trump will never understand why real journalists can’t give him what he wants without losing who we are.

In recent years, government agencies, private foundations, and community-based organizations have increasingly sought to understand how programs that promote digital inclusion lead to social and economic outcomes for individuals, programs, and communities. This push to measure outcomes has been driven, in part, by a larger trend to ensure that dollars are being used efficiently to improve lives rather than simply to deliver services. A new report, published by Benton Foundation, describes the challenges facing community-based organizations and other key stakeholders in using outcomes-based evaluation to measure the success of their digital inclusion programs and offers recommendations toward addressing these shared barriers. This new research builds off Dr. Colin Rhinesmith’s Digital Inclusion and Meaningful Broadband Adoption Initiatives, released in early 2016. That report identified the core offerings of digital inclusion organizations – from providing low-cost broadband, and the devices to connect to it, while helping new broadband adopters gain the skills they need to navigate the Internet and online services. In this national study of digital inclusion organizations, Dr. Rhinesmith also noted that most of the digital inclusion organizations that participated in this study did not have outcomes-based evaluation frameworks. However, all recognized the importance of having them. This finding led us to conduct this deeper research on the challenges surrounding outcomes-based evaluation. Twenty-some years ago community technology centers offered training and public access to computers (a few with Internet access). Today we have digital inclusion programs provided by community-based organizations, libraries, and local government. The purpose twenty years ago was not the technology but what one could do with it. The same is true today. The difference is that we are now trying to clearly define the outcomes of access and use of the technology. What we do with the technology and the outcomes will continue to evolve as the technology evolves.

Financial and marketplace evidence demonstrates that the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order is an absolute success, accomplishing its stated goal of preserving and promoting the online ecosystem’s “virtuous cycle of investment.” ISP investments accelerated following the vote (e.g., aggregate capital expenditures by publicly traded ISPs have risen by more than 5 percent during the two-year period since the FCC’s February 2015 vote; investments in core network technology at cable companies during that same time period are up by more than 48 percent). Investments in the edge, including those by online video providers and edge computing firms, are up as well (e.g., capital expenditures by firms in the U.S. data-processing sector increased 26 percent in the year following the FCC’s order while there was just 4 percent growth in the year prior). More new U.S. “over-the-top” video services launched in the two years following the vote than in the seven years prior. Furthermore, the certainty the FCC’s action created spurred the entry of numerous pay-TV full replacement providers, with vertical carriers such as AT&T now distributing (and others poised to distribute) their pay-TV services via other ISPs’ last mile networks. In sum, the 2015 Open Internet Order and accompanying legal classification decision settled the prior uncertainty about open, nondiscriminatory broadband telecom service access. What followed that decision was a historic period of U.S. investment and innovation.

[Commentary] For several years, Kansas City has been at the forefront of a movement in the Midwest. The region was an early leader of the Silicon Prairie, showing firsthand that a thriving startup ecosystem is not the exclusive purview of the coasts. But federal regulators are about to hurt the open internet and put this growth at risk. These startups’ successes are dependent on an open internet. The rise of digital technologies has eroded boundaries: Anyone can participate, start a business and reach a global audience. Thanks to the way the internet was designed, it’s one of the most open, competitive markets we’ve ever known. Consumers can reach any site they want, without interference from the big telecom and wireless companies that provide access to the internet. This is often called “net neutrality.” But many of the incumbent internet access providers have long wanted to change the way the internet works. This sort of behavior has been kept in check because of net neutrality rules enforced by the Federal Communications Commission, but new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai plans to do away with the existing legal protections. Without net neutrality, the incumbents who provide access to the internet would be able to pick winners or losers in the market. They could impede traffic from startups’ services in order to favor their own services or established competitors. They could also impose new fees on startups, inhibiting consumer choice.

[David Cohen is the founder and co-CEO of Techstars and a serial entrepreneur.]

Libraries straddle the information needs of the 21st century. The wifi, computers and now mobile hotspots that some libraries provide their patrons are gateways to a broad, important, and sometimes essential information resources. The research summarized here examines how rural libraries negotiate telecommunications environments, and how mobile hotspots might extend libraries' digital significance in marginalized and often resource-poor regions.

The Internet has grown tremendously in terms of its centrality to information and entertainment resources of all sorts, but the ability to access the Internet in rural areas typically lags that experienced in urban areas. Not only are networks less available in rural areas, they also often are of lower quality and somewhat more expensive; even mobile phone-based data plans — assuming there are acceptable signals available — may be economically out of reach for people in these areas. With older, lower income and less digitally skilled populations typically living in rural areas, the role of the library and its freely available resources may be especially useful. This research examines libraries' experiences with providing free, mobile hotspot-based access to the Internet in rural areas of Maine and Kansas.

A recent study by Ohio State University (OSU) researchers found broadband access severely lacking in the state’s rural areas, a deficit they reported could yield significant economic growth if corrected — but if resolved could also lead to other, unintended consequences.

Connecting the Dots of Ohio’s Broadband Policy found that 76 percent of Ohio households had broadband subscriptions in 2015, a share that led neighboring states and lagged just 1 percent behind the national average of 77 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. More troublingly, the report from OSU’s Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics highlighted a disparity between urban Ohio areas, where fixed broadband access is “near universal” and adoption in metro areas ranges from less than 60 percent to more than 90 percent; and rural communities where 31 percent of the population lacks access to fixed broadband — and lives in areas where extending service is “prohibitively expensive.” Overall, the report found more than 1 million Ohioans still lack access to fixed broadband service.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Doanld Trump. Just days earlier, KT McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter. President Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.

Stephen Colbert’s late-night jabs at President Donald Trump have drawn plenty of heat, with talk of Federal Communications Commission investigations and threats to creative content. But while the FCC is highly unlikely to take any action, there is still a cost to the regulatory overhang of a government investigation regardless of the eventual outcome.

Even complaints that are eventually dismissed have costs, says John Crigler, a partner with Garvey Schubert Barer in Washington, who has defended broadcasters against indecency and even obscenity claims. “The complaint can be the punishment,” he said, and have real consequences that can include holding up license renewals or transfers — the complaint would be against any CBS affiliate where there is a complaint from a viewer in that market (FCC complaints are against stations, not networks). A pending complaint is also something that a station has to report to its auditors. A complaint could also prompt a settlement with the FCC to get out from under the cloud of an investigation that can drag on, particularly if there is a pending merger with license transfers that need approving. “Sometimes it is worth it to pay the piper and march on,” Crigler said.

Ideologically committed people are similarly motivated to avoid ideologically crosscutting information. Although some previous research has found that political conservatives may be more prone to selective exposure than liberals are, we find similar selective exposure motives on the political left and right across a variety of issues. The majority of people on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate willingly gave up a chance to win money to avoid hearing from the other side

The Federal Communications Commission says it wants to hear from you about the future of net neutrality. But in opening its virtual doors to the public, it’s also opened them to spammers and trolls, some of whom might have even managed to knock the FCC’s site offline this past week.

On the one hand, these problems are mere hassles: The FCC’s site was only down for a few hours, and the flood of spam was easy to identify. On the other hand, they show just how hard it is to turn the web into a platform for democratic participation. Just look at any comments section on the internet.