Lauren Frayer

On orders from Mark Zuckerberg, more than 100 employees at Facebook were put into what the company calls “lockdown” when they showed up for work one Thursday early in 2016. They had been plucked from other projects to focus on the chief executive’s top priority—making it possible for more than a billion Facebook users to stream video live. Zuckerberg had made a snap decision near the end of a product meeting in his glass-walled office in Menlo Park (CA), to work around the clock to roll out Facebook Live, which took just two months. “This is a big shift in how we communicate, and it’s going to create new opportunities for people to come together,” he wrote in a Facebook post during the world-wide launch in April 2016.

At traditional companies, major product launches often take years. Technology firms, and Facebook in particular, emphasize speed even though they know it means there will be problems to iron out later. And there were problems. The live-video rush left unanswered many questions with which Facebook is still wrestling, especially how to decide when violence on camera needs to be censored. According to a tally by The Wall Street Journal, people have used Facebook Live to broadcast at least 50 acts of violence, including murder, suicides and the beating in January of a mentally disabled teenager in Chicago.

AT&T is currently conducting Wireless Local Loop (WLL) technology tests on its LTE network in two locations in the United States, part of the carrier’s ongoing efforts to evaluate a range of high-speed transmission technologies in order to determine how they stack up against each other. John Donovan, AT&T's chief strategy officer and group president for technology and operations, explained that AT&T is testing a total of five different network technologies: G.Fast, AirGig, 5G, WLL and fiber to the premises (FTTP). To be clear, some of those efforts are further along than others; for example, AT&T has already deployed FTTP to roughly 4 million locations, a number AT&T’s CTO Andre Fuetsch said would triple during the next 36 months. “That’s obviously matured” as a technology, Fuetsch said. But some of AT&T’s other efforts are very much in the testing phase. For example, AirGig is AT&T’s new take on broadband over powerline (BPL) technology, which promises to transmit internet communications over power grids. AT&T announced its AirGig effort last year, and is now entering advanced discussions with a number of electric utilities and other companies about trialing AirGig in up to two locations this fall. And of course AT&T made waves last month when it announced it would launch its first “5G Evolution Markets” in the coming months in Austin (TX) and Indianapolis (IN) and it will build two new 5G test beds set to go on air this spring at the AT&T Labs in Austin.

President Donald Trump met with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. “Chairman Pai had a warm meeting with President Trump this afternoon, in which they reconnected for the first time since Chairman Pai was elevated to head the FCC," an agency spokesman said. "No proceedings pending at the FCC were discussed.” Chairman Pai is set to appear before the Senate Commerce Committee on March 8 for an oversight hearing.

Consumer Reports is launching a new initiative to develop a digital standard to measure the privacy and security of products, apps, and services with the goal of helping companies prioritize consumers’ data security and privacy needs. The standard was developed in partnership with leading privacy, security, and consumer rights organizations.

Ranking Digital Rights, a non-profit research initiative housed at New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI), was a partner in the collaborative effort. Ranking Digital Rights works with an international network of partners to set global standards for how companies in the information and communications technology sector should respect freedom of expression and privacy, and will be launching their 2017 Corporate Accountability Index on March 23. The Index evaluates 22 of the world’s most powerful telecommunications, internet and mobile companies on disclosed commitments and policies affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy. The digital standard draws from the Ranking Digital Rights research methodology along with other technical testing and research methodologies developed by other coalition partners.

[Commentary] While no one is predicting car bombings or poisonings of American journalists, it’s not much of a stretch to see similarities between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attitude. Both leaders want a compliant press and are willing to take action toward getting it — some, of course, more extreme than others.

Russians, overwhelmingly, get their news from TV. “Imagine you have two dozen TV channels and it is all Fox News,” said former deputy energy minister Vladi­mir Milov, now a Putin critic. The tight control is effective: Putin has approval ratings of over 80 percent — ratings that Trump would, metaphorically speaking, kill for. Russia may not be the worst place in the world for journalists, but it is very bad nonetheless. Trump’s admiration for Putin becomes even more troubling when paired with his own moves to stamp out independent journalism through disparagement, denial of access, favoritism and blacklisting. “For Putin, there has been no greater obsession in controlling the culture than in controlling the media,” said Joel Simon, author and executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. For America under Trump, that’s a cautionary tale.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Pai sent letters to 30 senators on February 21, 2017, in response to their February 2, 2017 letter, which urged continued focus on ensuring access to mobile broadband services in rural America and closing the digital divide as a top priority for the FCC. Chairman Pai said closing the digital divide is his top priority, and that is why he scheduled a vote on the second phase of the Mobility Fund for the FCC’s February meeting. Chairman Pai also sent similar letters to Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Reps. Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) and Ann McLane Kuster (D-NH) on February 21, 2017, in response to their January 25, 2017 letter, which urged the FCC to move forward with the Mobility Fund Phase II auction.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer defended the administration’s unconventional briefing methods at an off-camera gaggle with reporters who expressed frustration over a lack of access to the president. Rather than hold a traditional televised Q&A with reporters, Spicer briefed the media off-camera at the White House. That angered some in the press, who also expressed frustration that there had been no sightings of the president on a day when he had signed a highly anticipated executive order.

“Will we be hearing from the president this week since we didn’t today?” one reporter asked. “I’m sure at some point we’ll do something ... a photo spray,” Spicer responded. “We have a pretty good track record of making the president available to folks.” “It’s unusual,” the reporter shot back. “Everything is closed. Normally they have a photo spray or something,” American Urban Radio Networks reporter April Ryan said. “Don’t give me this ‘normally we do,’” Spicer shot back. “I made it very clear at the beginning of this April that we’d have some things on camera, some things off. Last week, the president traveled two days, he had the [speech before the] joint session [of Congress]. We briefed every day.” "It’s not about us; it’s about the American public seeing their president,” Ryan responded.

President Donald Trump has attempted to undercut the US media in a number of ways — by calling them the “enemy”; by denying coverage credentials to certain outlets during his campaign; by telling falsehoods and lying; by siccing his aides on reporters. As we close in on two months of the Trump White House, however, another strategy may be emerging: Outlast the media.

The frenetic nature of the Trump White House was apparent to those who’d watched the frenetic nature of the Trump campaign. “We’re used to Donald Trump as a a candidate making wild accusations at the spur of the moment and that becoming the dominant news story immediately,” says Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Philip Rucker. “So we’re all trained.” And staffed up. Outlets such as Politico — with seven White House reporters — and The Post and the New York Times — six apiece — upped their White House staffing to historic levels. The early weeks raise questions as to whether those deployments will be sufficient.

[Commentary] When it comes to using your data from Web browsing and app usage, the Federal Trade Commission has been the regulatory cop on the beat. Determined to be relevant in the digital economy, the Federal Communications Commission created its own, radically different set of privacy regulations targeting just Internet service providers. By requiring an Internet service provider’s customers to give permission for their data to be used, the FCC’s new privacy rules subject ISPs to a different and more restrictive set of regulations than their online advertising rivals.

If and when the FCC’s new privacy rules are overruled, the statute that empowers the agency to police privacy abuses by ISPs will still apply. And nothing prevents the FCC from designing a different (and more symmetric) regulatory standard. Repeal of the FCC’s new rules will simply restore the regulatory environment that existed for more than 18 months between its reclassification decision and its privacy rules. Given the myriad layers of protections and regulatory options, the notion that repeal would leave the ISPs without any privacy regulator is patently false.

[Hal Singer is a principal at Economists Incorporated and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.]

The world’s largest technology investor is preparing to ramp up his bet on the Trump economy. Masayoshi Son, the billionaire technology entrepreneur from Japan, promised President Trump late in 2016 that he would create 50,000 new jobs in the United States through a $100 billion technology fund. Now, Son and his financial advisers are weighing several major possible deals for Sprint, the struggling American wireless operator controlled by Son’s SoftBank.

Be it a tie-up with T-Mobile US, Sprint’s closest competitor, or a more ambitious marriage with the cable colossus Comcast, a transaction would allow Son to fulfill a long-held ambition to invest aggressively in wireless networks in the United States and enable next-generation mobile technology. In Feb, several executives from SoftBank spent a day in Washington talking to senior members of Trump’s economic team, according to bankers briefed on these meetings. The talks and the rush to assess potential deals for Sprint, the country’s fourth-largest mobile operator, highlight how the Trump administration’s push for lighter regulation and lower taxes has been a powerful lure for cash-rich investors the world over.