Lauren Frayer

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon have a committee to advise the agency on promoting diversity in the communications industry, Chairman Ajit Pai announced April 24. “Every American should have the opportunity to participate in the communications marketplace, no matter their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation,” Chairman Pai said. “This Committee will be charged with providing recommendations to the FCC on empowering all Americans,” Pai added. “For example, the Committee could help the FCC promote diversity in the communications industry by assisting in the establishment of an incubator program and could identify ways to combat digital redlining," the concern that minority or poorer communities are covered by worse telecommunication infrastructure.

The agency will solicit suggestions from the public on who should sit on the panel, which will be called the Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment. The FCC has implemented similar initiatives in the past, but they appear to have fizzled out. The agency’s Advisory Committee for Diversity in the Digital Age, for instance, has not had a meeting since 2013.

Verizon has launched a faster version of its FiOS Internet service that can reach download speeds of up to 940 Mbps per second. By taking the leap into “gigabit” service, Verizon is becoming the latest company to compete with Comcast, Google Fiber and others at that speed tier.

The product, known as FiOS Gigabit Connection, is available now in eight US markets on the east coast, including New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia (PA), Richmond (VA), Hampton Roads (VA), Boston (MA), Providence (RI), and Washington (DC). It costs $70 a month as a stand-alone product or $80 if purchased as part of a triple-play bundle, according to the company. Those prices are comparable to that of Google Fiber.

[Commentary] Could it be that large tech companies — and Google in particular — have become natural monopolies by supplying an entire market’s demand for a service, at a price lower than what would be offered by two competing firms? And if so, is it time to regulate them like public utilities? Consider a historical analogy: the early days of telecommunications....

We are going to have to decide fairly soon whether Google, Facebook and Amazon are the kinds of natural monopolies that need to be regulated, or whether we allow the status quo to continue, pretending that unfettered monoliths don’t inflict damage on our privacy and democracy.

[Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab ]

Fox News anchor Heather Nauert has been hired by the State Department to be its spokesperson. Nauert, 47, has been a news anchor on “Fox & Friends” since 2012 and has been with Fox News and local New York Fox affiliate Fox 5 for most of the past 20 years, save for a two-year stint at ABC News from 2005-2007. “The Department of State is pleased to welcome Heather Nauert as the new State Department spokesperson,” a State Department announcement said. “Nauert comes to the department with more than 15 years of experience as an anchor and correspondent covering both foreign and domestic news and events, including the 9/11 terror attacks, the war in Iraq, and the genocide in Darfur, Sudan."

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump called the press “dishonest” and “scum.” He defended Russian strongman Vladimir Putin against charges of murdering journalists and vowed to somehow “open up our libel laws” to weaken the First Amendment. Since taking office, he has dismissed unfavorable coverage as “fake news” and described the mainstream media as “the enemy of the American people.” But behind that theatrical assault, the Trump White House has turned into a kind of playground for the press.

We interviewed more than three dozen members of the White House press corps, along with White House staff and outside allies, about the first whirlwind weeks of Trump’s presidency. Rather than a historically toxic relationship, they described a historic gap between the public perception and the private reality. “He built his career by being media-friendly. The last 18 months have been something of an aberration in his approach,” said Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, a Trump confidant who has known the president for 20 years. “I’ve always said he’s just creating a negotiating position by calling the press the enemy of the people. I don’t think he believes that deep down.”

Months before Donald Trump blew up American politics with his surprise win in November, he did the same thing to the conservative media. Through much of the campaign, two very different media moguls with colliding visions for the Republican Party vied for Trump’s soul: Roger Ailes, the longtime president and CEO of Fox News, and Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of the populist online tabloid Breitbart...

In the Trump era, where the president has a media mogul by his side in the Oval Office and another on speed dial, the label of ["government affairs specialist"] might apply to much of the right-wing media. But the elite outlets of yore earned their status not just from their proximity to power, but also from the rigorous intellectual framework against which they measured the powerful. And the most significant implication of Bannon’s triumph may be the rise of a governing philosophy that shifts along with the unpredictable man at its center.

For President Donald Trump — a reality TV star who parlayed his blustery-yet-knowing on-air persona into a winning political brand — television is often the guiding force of his day, both weapon and scalpel, megaphone and news feed. And the president’s obsession with the tube — as a governing tool, a metric for staff evaluation, and a two-way conduit with lawmakers and aides — has upended the traditional rhythms of the White House, influencing many spheres, including policy, his burgeoning relationship with Congress, and whether he taps out a late-night or early-morning tweet. Those Trump tweet-storms, which contain some of his most controversial utterances, are usually prompted by something he has seen on television just moments before.

The president, advisers said, also uses details gleaned from cable news as a starting point for policy discussions or a request for more information, and appears on TV himself when he wants to appeal directly to the public.

[Commentary] For March 2017, we tallied 585 protests, demonstrations, marches, sit-ins and rallies in the United States, with at least one in every state and the District. Our conservative guess is that 79,389 to 89,585 people showed up at these political gatherings, although it is likely that there were far more participants. Because mainstream media often neglect to report nonviolent actions — especially small ones — it is probable that we did not record every event that occurred. This is particularly true of the “A Day Without a Woman” strikes on March 8. It’s virtually impossible to record an accurate tally of participants for strikes, in part because many people deliberately conceal their motivations for skipping out on work or school when they participate.

Nevertheless, we think our tally gives us a useful pool of information to better understand political mobilization in the United States — particularly how reports of crowds change from month to month. In this case, we note that March 2017 saw fewer people protesting than February 2017, during which we observed 233,021 to 373,089 people participating in crowds.

[Erica Chenoweth is a professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. David Prater is a program manager at the War Prevention Initiative. Jeremy Pressman is an associate professor of political science and director of Middle East Studies at the University of Connecticut. Ches Thurber is assistant professor of political science at Northern Illinois University. Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco.]

Just a few months after having its credentials for participation in the Federal Communications Commission’s low-income Lifeline program revoked, FreedomPop has found a new Lifeline-related revenue stream: The company is licensing a database system originally developed for its own use to service providers approved to offer Lifeline service. FreedomPop CEO Steve Stokols said the FreedomPop Lifeline database took about a year to develop and offers fraud prevention capabilities, as well as providing leads for service providers pursuing Lifeline business.

According to Stokols, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler encouraged FreedomPop to participate in the Lifeline program, which is what drove the company to develop a system that essentially provides the functionality that the FCC verification database was intended to provide. Current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has different views on Lifeline than his predecessor, however. Chairman Pai didn’t support 2016’s Lifeline reforms, and one of his first moves as chairman was to reject nine Lifeline service provider approvals made at the federal level under Wheeler’s chairmanship – including FreedomPop’s. Subsequently, Chairman Pai shifted responsibility for Lifeline service provider approvals back to the states. As a result, according to Stokols, “the approval process is basically shut down.” Stokols estimated that it would take five years and a lot of legal fees to get Lifeline approvals on a state-by-state basis.

If a recent House Communications Subcommittee hearing on broadband infrastructure is any measure, there appears to be growing consensus that any new infrastructure bill should include dollars for broadband – arguably the most essential infrastructure for American progress and productivity. But the hearing also made clear that Congress continues to have significant concerns around how to design such a program to ensure that any dollars designated for broadband are spent wisely.

We support an approach that places responsibility on the Federal Communications Commission to disperse any new broadband dollars through its Connect America Fund (CAF) and Mobility Fund (MF) programs. These two programs, as further refined in two orders adopted by the FCC in March, provide clear evidence that the Commission has the expertise and the tools to manage a data-driven process that will ensure that any incremental broadband funding is directed where broadband does not currently exist and is needed the most.