Lauren Frayer

[Commentary] In today’s economy, it is equally important that access to the backbone of twenty-first century infrastructure, the Internet, be similarly unfettered. That is why it is critical that we maintain the net neutrality protections and clear oversight authority that the Federal Communications Commission put in place in 2015 through the Open Internet Order. The Open Internet order is working well as it is and should remain undisturbed.

To prohibit ideological political appointees from unilaterally dismantling the order, we would welcome the partnership of our Republican colleagues to codify into statute the full protections of net neutrality, including the authority and ability of the FCC to adapt regulations to changing conditions. If President Trump and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai want to demonstrate that they indeed serve the American people rather than a few corporate friends, they should make clear immediately that they do not support any undoing of the protections of net neutrality. If not, they can expect a wall of resistance from Senate Democrats, who will continue fighting tooth and nail to protect fair and equal Internet access for all Americans.

[Sen Chuck Schumer is the Senate Minority Leader]

[Commentary] Let’s put the scare tactics and apocalyptic rhetoric aside. The Internet worked great in 2014 when there were no net neutrality rules. And it still works great today after the Federal Communications Commission applied Ma Bell regulations from 1934 to broadband. The Internet’s future, however, is uncertain because of ideological bureaucrats at the FCC who adopted a misguided regulatory approach that has chilled investment and offers no protections against excessive bureaucratic interference in the years ahead.

While the FCC’s 2015 rules may soon be consigned to the dustbin of history, the last few months have shown us all that political winds can and often do shift suddenly. The only way to truly provide certainty for open Internet protections is for Congress to pass bipartisan legislation. The certainty of bipartisan law transcends administrations. Over the past few months, many of my Democrat colleagues have grown to appreciate this more. Regardless of what happens at the FCC with the 2015 rules, I again stand ready to work on legislation protecting the open Internet that sets forth clear digital rules of the road for both the Internet community and government regulators. Rather than heavy-handed and open-ended regulations that stifle the Internet, we need a statute offering clear and enduring rules that balance innovation and investment for all parts of the Internet ecosystem.

[Sen Thune is the Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee]

[Commentary] As the forces of reaction outpace movements predicated on the ideal of progress, and as traditional norms of political competition are tossed aside, it’s clear that the internet and social media have succeeded in doing what many feared and some hoped they would. They have disrupted and destroyed institutional constraints on what can be said, when and where it can be said and who can say it. Even though in one sense President Trump’s victory in 2016 fulfilled conventional expectations — because it prevented a third straight Democratic term in the White House — it also revealed that the internet and its offspring have overridden the traditional American political system of alternating left-right advantage. They are contributing — perhaps irreversibly — to the decay of traditional moral and ethical constraints in American politics.

The influence of the internet is the latest manifestation of the weakening of the two major American political parties over the past century, with the Civil Service undermining patronage, the rise of mass media altering communication, campaign finance law empowering donors independent of the parties, and the ascendance of direct primaries gutting the power of party bosses to pick nominees. Two developments in the 2016 campaign provided strong evidence of the vulnerability of democracies in the age of the internet: the alleged effort of the Russian government to secretly intervene on behalf of Trump, and the discovery by internet profiteers of how to monetize the distribution of fake news stories, especially stories damaging to Hillary Clinton.

[Tom Edsall teaches political journalism at Columbia University]

[Commentary] The 2016 Presidential Election shook the foundations of American politics. Media reports immediately looked for external disruption to explain the unanticipated victory—with theories ranging from Russian hacking to “fake news.” We have a less exotic, but perhaps more disconcerting explanation: Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.

This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.

[Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman are the authors. Benkler is a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard; Faris is research director at BKC; Roberts is a fellow at BKC and technical lead of Media Cloud; and Zuckerman is director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.]

The National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), along with more than 80 other organizations committed to the First Amendment right of freedom of speech and the press, are condemning efforts by the Trump administration to demonize the media and undermine its ability to inform the public about official actions and policies.

In a joint statement released on March 2, the groups stress that the administration’s attacks on the press pose a threat to American democracy. The statement cites numerous attempts by the administration to penalize and intimidate the press for coverage the President dislikes, including refusing to answer questions from certain reporters, falsely charging the media with cover-ups and manipulation of news, and denying certain media outlets access to press briefings. Official designation of the media as “the opposition party” escalated when the President described the New York Times, CBS, CNN, ABC, and NBC News as “the enemy of the American people!” The statement emphasizes that an independent and free press is the Constitution’s safeguard against tyranny. Its job is not to please the President but to report accurately on the actions of public officials so the public has the information to hold power accountable. Efforts to undermine the legitimacy or independence of the press, the statement reads, “betray the country’s most cherished values and undercut one of its most significant strengths.”

The White House said it’s unfair to compare Vice President Pence’s use of a private e-mail address to conduct state business as Indiana governor to Hillary Clinton’s home e-mail server setup. “It was an apples to oranges comparison,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. "He was a governor, not a federal employee, which means the laws are different,” she continued. “He did everything to the letter of the law in Indiana, turned all his emails over unlike Hillary Clinton, at least 30,000 on her private server and classified information was found.”

There are numerous differences between the two situations. Indiana law does not bar public officials from using private email accounts, but they are expected to retain those communications for public records requests. Federal employees, on the other hand, are strongly discouraged from using personal accounts for work purposes. Pence spokesman Marc Lotter said he directed his lawyers “to review all of his communications to ensure that state-related emails are being transferred and properly archived by the state, in accordance with the law.” Clinton deleted almost half of her private email archive, claiming they were personal in nature. But an FBI investigation later turned up thousands of work-related emails that were not turned over to the State Department.

Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) has introduced a bill to boost the Barack Obama Administration era Global Connect Initiative, including through additional funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and with the goal of boosting access to broadband in developing countries. The DIGITAL AGE (Driving Innovation and Growth in Internet Technology And Launching Universal Access to the Global Economy) Act would include encouraging global "dig once" policies, spectrum re-use and promoting various internet values like lower costs, a free and open internet and nondiscriminatory access. The bill would direct the State Department, USAID and other relevant agencies—that would include the Federal Communications Commission—to work with other government, financial institutions and private industry to expand broadband development.

The 2016 Presidential election, which upended voters, journalists, politicians, and special-interest groups, was remarkable for a number of reasons—not least Trump’s unconcealed contempt for the press, whose role was challenged again and again on the campaign trail.

The New York Times went further in a December 13 story detailing Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, describing “every major publication, including The Times,” as “a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.” Running more than 7,000 words, the story broke down how, in 2015, hackers linked to the Russian government compromised at least one Democratic National Committee computer system; how those hackers later accessed the DNC’s main network and targeted people outside the DNC, most famously Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta; and how “by last summer . . . Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day—procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media.”

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has been an outspoken foe of network neutrality, the first amendment of the internet that guarantees the free flow of information without censorship or corporate favoritism. With President Trump’s backing, and that of a Congress whose Republican leaders never say no to telecom giants, Pai will have an FCC majority and plenty of leeway to go after net neutrality. Its “days are numbered,” he says.

Activists predict that he won’t stop there. Through formal actions by what will be a Republican-controlled FCC and by granting of waivers that allow corporations to get around cross-ownership and joint-sales rules that were designed to maintain competition in local television markets, the FCC could end up facilitating media mergers and monopolies at the national and local levels that will be devastating to competition and to the democratic discourse. At a time when the United States should be supercharging public and community media to prevent development of news deserts where the only “information” comes from partisan corporate outlets, Trump and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon are dusting off the playbooks of the 1990s. Schemes to weaken competition and diversity, to create one-size-fits-all “newsrooms,” to set-up digital fast lanes for subsidized content and slow lanes for democratic discourse—all were proposed back then.  “They’re coming for all of it,” Free Press president Craig Aaron says of the Trump administration’s agenda. “They’re coming for net neutrality. They’re coming for every protection for citizens and consumers. Our movements have to be bigger now. But if we could get four million for net neutrality under Obama, just imagine what we can get under Trump.”

[Commentary] Everyone in this country passionately supports an open internet. In many respects, the so-called Title II debate reflects everything voters most resent about Washington: Fear-mongering, Armageddon-style arguments with a dubious connection to the facts. The central fact of this debate is its true subject: This policy battle is not about whether we safeguard an open internet. It's about how we go about doing so.

The application of these retro rules to our modern internet is the policy equivalent of using a sledgehammer to deal with a mosquito on your arm. Technically, it may get the job done. But everything breaks in the process. If we don't want to continue what our nation has long enjoyed — an open, innovating, strong, dynamic, pro-consumer internet, then by all means let's keep Title II. But if we do want to advance the opportunities the internet brings to our economy, nation and consumers — and keep the progress and investment coming—then it's high time we embrace a more constructive path forward.

[Jonathan Spalter is President and CEO of USTelecom.]