Lauren Frayer

Why is it that some of the largest communications providers in this country consistently rank among the lowest in consumer satisfaction? Could it possibly have anything to do with a lack of robust competition? Did you know that when it comes to broadband access at home, just 20 percent of Americans have a choice of two providers or more? Without real competition, are companies really incentivized to improve customer service, service quality, or pricing? And did you know that fewer than 40 percent of families regularly stay in touch with their incarcerated loved ones and one-third of families go bankrupt because of unjust and unreasonable phone rates? And while we are making progress when it comes to providing faster broadband service, including gigabit speeds in some communities, if it costs $80 or more a month for service, is broadband truly within reach?

Much of our focus has been on what is lacking in rural communities, but there are problems right here in LA and over in the Cleveland, Ohio area. I mention Cleveland because a recent study concluded that a major broadband provider had “systematically discriminated against lower-income neighborhoods, in its deployment of home Internet and video technologies, over the past decade.” So what that finding makes increasingly clear, is that the broadband availability and affordability gaps are not just in our rural towns and non-urban communities. Those gaps are wide, wherever there is an absence of rich people.

[Commentary] The details of the network neutrality rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in February 2015 were not important to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum, or CenturyLink. What was important was the idea that any part of the government might have enforceable oversight over their data transmission services or charges. That’s what they can’t stand; that’s what they would do anything to avoid. And that’s what they are working to undo: the FCC’s classification of them as “common carriers” under “Title II” of the Telecommunications Act. That classification gave the FCC the legal authority to say something to the carriers about treating internet traffic fairly. No classification, no “net neutrality” rule. The trouble for the carriers is that the classification carries with it the risk that their businesses will be treated, someday, as the utility services they are. Net neutrality: not risky. Classification: risky. If people begin noticing that there’s no competition, that Americans are paying too much for too little, and that the entire country is suffering as a result, that’s a big problem for Big Cable.

There's a huge court case you need to hear about. It might not be on your radar yet because, frankly, some of it gets pretty technical. But the outcome is likely to have enormous repercussions for online privacy, net neutrality and the economy. For months, policymakers have been struggling with the implications of this case, FTC v. AT&T, in part because it overturned about a century's worth of established legal practice and also, analysts say, because it appeared to open a wide loophole that businesses might use to evade most federal oversight. On May 9, the federal appeals court responsible for the ruling announced that it has agreed to rehear the case, potentially opening the door to a different result. Here's everything you need to know.

[Commentary] The DC Circuit denied a petition to rehear en banc its 2016 decision upholding the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order. The Supreme Court is not likely to hear the case, but while the Justices may not be listening, the telecom policy community should be. The concurrence and dissents engaged in a lengthy and scholarly discussion about broader constitutional and administrative law doctrines raised by the order.

In the process, the concurrence signaled that the DC Circuit may understand the order to apply far more narrowly than anyone expected. The DC Circuit appears to view the Open Internet Order primarily as a hyper-transparency rule: If the company claims to offer an unedited internet experience, then it is required to deliver on that promise. The DC Circuit suggests that a walled garden is fine as long as the provider “mak[es it] sufficiently clear to potential customers that it provides a filtered services involving the ISP’s exercise of ‘editorial intervention.’”

[Commentary] This is the most glaring and underappreciated fact of internet-age capitalism: We are, all of us, in inescapable thrall to one of the handful of American technology companies that now dominate much of the global economy. I speak, of course, of my old friends the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The five are among the most valuable companies on the planet, collectively worth trillions. (Apple reached $800 billion in market capitalization this week, the first of any public company to do so, and the others may not be far behind.) And despite the picture of Silicon Valley as a roiling sea of disruption, these five have gotten only stronger and richer over time.

Their growth has prompted calls for greater regulation and antitrust intervention. There’s rising worry, too, over their softer, noneconomic influence over culture and information — for instance, fears over how Facebook might affect democracies — as well as the implicit threat they pose to the jurisdictions of world governments. These are all worthy topics for discussion, but they are also fairly cold and abstract. So a better way to appreciate the power of these five might be to take the very small view instead of the very large — to examine the role each of them plays in your own day-to-day activities, and the particular grip each holds on your psyche.

As the head of the Federal Communications Commission observed in a 1961 speech to broadcast executives, the industry’s revenue, more than $1 billion a year, was rising 9 percent annually, even in a recession. The problem, the FCC chairman told the group, was the way the business was making money: not by serving the public interest above all but by airing a lot of dumb shows and “cajoling and offending” commercials. “When television is bad, nothing is worse,” he said. That speech would become known for the pejorative that the FCC chairman, Newton Minow, used to describe TV: he called it “a vast wasteland.” It’s a great line, but there are other reasons to revisit the speech now, about 10 years after the emergence of another communications service—Facebook—that has become ubiquitous in American homes, a staggering financial success, and a transmitter of a lot of pernicious schlock. What’s striking today is why Minow said the vast-wasteland problem mattered—and what he wanted to do about it. As for why it mattered, Minow told the TV executives: “Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.” On that point in particular, Mark Zuckerberg apparently would agree.

Increasingly, the library is the place where people trust—and use—not just the librarian at the help desk, but also the search engine, online catalogs, digital archives, and electronic databases. So when patrons come into the library to find out about a sexually transmitted disease, for example, they will likely find themselves interacting with the online library—a messy mixture of library-specific digital tools and broader Internet resources that create all sorts of privacy risks for patrons.

Here’s how the library encounters privacy risks. Increasingly, the library contracts with a number of third parties to run various services, for example, OverDrive for e-book services, Bibliocommons for interactive catalogs, and ProQuest for electronic and magazine databases. Companies like these have the power to set their terms of service. That includes protecting the details of what patrons do when they use such tools or not. Not too long ago, library professionals caught Adobe Digital Editions transmitting patrons’ e-reading information in an unencrypted manner. Designed to seamlessly integrate with a library’s website, most services don’t make it obvious to a patron that a private company makes choices about her user data.

In the battle to deploy broadband, cooperatives (co-ops) can be a decisive force to cover the rural flanks in states with aggressive broadband adoption goals such as California, New York, and Minnesota. In the more rural states, or ones without stated commitments to broadband, co-ops may have to carry the lion’s share of responsibility if their rural communities are to have a hope for broadband. This report helps you make the business case for your local co-ops building broadband networks. It doesn’t give you all the answers but it does point you in the right directions with some questions you need to answer.

With global displacement at record levels, policymakers and humanitarian organizations increasingly recognize the role communications technology can play in facilitating protection solutions for refugees, both in transit and at destination. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has documented how mobile and Internet connectivity, specifically, enable refugees to remain safe, access health and educational services, build livelihoods, and keep in touch with families and communities. Yet significant gaps in broadband access, adoption, and usage mean that refugees are often less connected than host populations, many of which face their own connectivity challenges. Refugees living in rural areas, for example, are twice as likely as the global rural population to have no network coverage at all. And more than one-third of all refugees live in an area without the 3G network coverage needed to browse the Internet, use most apps, and conduct video calls.

This policy brief draws on its authors’ diverse experiences—working to assure refugee protection, developing the U.S. broadband plan, and analyzing the economics of broadband networks—to propose a framework for the creation of a global broadband plan for refugees. Through careful scoping of localized challenges and alignment of refugee connectivity efforts with host-country broadband strategies and market forces, such a plan holds the promise of improving the connectivity of the world’s more than 21 million refugees and the communities that host them.

Fight for the Future says the Federal Communications Commission is hiding something in regard to the cyberattacks that brought the agency's website down. “The public wants to know what the FCC is hiding,” said Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer. “They’ve been lying to us for weeks about net neutrality. It’s very difficult to accept their claims about [distributed denial of service] attacks when they have provided zero evidence to support them.” Groups like Fight For the Future and Color of Change, as well as Sens Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), called on the FCC to release proof of the attacks.