Lauren Frayer

[Commentary] Google plans to introduce an ad-blocking feature in the mobile and desktop versions of its popular Chrome browser. Consider Google’s hypocrisy.

The company supported network neutrality, or the idea that Internet service providers should be prohibited from blocking content on the Internet. Google is now seeking to engage in exactly that activity, which it had claimed was among the worst sins possible. Maybe they rationalize that since Google’s heart is in the right place and their words on net neutrality are the correct ones, they can trust that Google would never discriminate against another edge provider or garage start-up by blocking or throttling their free and open choice of ad model. They reason that Google would never be like a big, bad Internet service provider.

This brings us to the second problem that is particular to Google, when it comes to ad blocking without accountability and legitimacy measures that ensure, and independently confirm, Google is are not being anti-competitive. It is more than ironic that Google has demonized ISPs for having the potential to block Internet traffic under the “principle” of net neutrality, and demonized copyright interests’ efforts to shut down notorious piracy websites as “censorship.”

[Scott Cleland is president of Precursor LLC and chairman of NetCompetition]

Trust in traditional media is at an all-time low, as many people prefer to get information from friends and social media contacts, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. Pew Research Center surveys show that ideological divisions have widened between Democrats and Republicans, more and less educated people, and older and younger adults.

Since Donald Trump’s election, several news organisations have set out to bridge the rift between liberals and conservatives who inhabit distinct ideological bubbles that determine the media they consume and fuel an increasingly uncivil public discourse. Diversifying media diets is also the goal of apps such as Read Across the Aisle, which notifies users when their news reading skews too far to the left or right. A browser extension called Escape Your Bubble slips stories into your Facebook feed that contain political views challenging your own.

Trump’s anti-media Twitter posts still serve as reminders of his campaign vows to “open” libel laws, his veiled threats to punish corporate owners of news organizations whose coverage he does not like and his occasional calls for leak investigations. They took on a more ominous tone as the Justice Department began considering whether to bring a case against WikiLeaks that the Obama administration decided against pursuing, fearing it would start a trend of prosecuting news organizations and criminalizing journalism.

If the Trump administration decides it has no such qualms, then the president’s tweets just might wind up being journalism’s great insurance policy. His Twitter trail could be a gift to lawyers for the news industry during leak investigations into articles that made the president mad enough to pick up his Android and tap, Tap, TAP! It could provide great grist for legal arguments that the investigations are less about prosecuting damaging leaks than they are about punishing journalists. That, at least, is the view of Floyd Abrams, the titan of free speech jurisprudence. Abrams is seeking to re-educate the public about the thing that stands between it and, say, becoming Russia: the First Amendment.

In Washington (DC), AT&T has painted itself as an underdog that needs to merge with Time Warner in a blockbuster $85 billion deal to compete with powerful cable companies. But in several cities and states, AT&T’s actions send a different message.

In Nashville and Louisville, AT&T has sued to make it harder for rival broadband providers to use utility poles. In Missouri, Tennessee and North Carolina, the company has pushed for laws that block municipal broadband providers. In San Francisco, AT&T has fought efforts to open up apartment buildings to more internet service providers. In other words, AT&T has positioned itself as the incumbent telecommunications juggernaut that has acted to hamper competitors locally. With its giant deal with Time Warner under review at the Justice Department, AT&T’s contrasting federal and local actions are glaring. While AT&T’s two-sided messaging follows a strategy used by many big companies, any evidence that the telecom company thwarts local rivals could make the deal review tougher and invite costly conditions, telecom antitrust experts said — even though they still expect the acquisition to be approved.

Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford University, is among the many — academics, political practitioners, journalists, law enforcement officials and others — who are attempting to understand better the consequences of conducting campaigns and governance here and around the world in the Internet age.

He has written about this in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Democracy in an article with a title that sums up his concerns: “Can Democracy Survive the Internet?” The provocative title isn’t simply the result of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, though that is obviously a front-and-center issue. “I think it’s the shiny object that everyone understandably pays attention to right now, but the problem is bigger than that,” Persily said. The campaign of 2016 highlighted the degree to which elections are carried out on terrain far different from when television and traditional print organizations were the dominant media.

Recent studies have confirmed that broadband adoption (as opposed to simply having access to broadband infrastructure) is positively linked with economic growth. In light of this, federal policy efforts have switched from focusing mainly on the provision of infrastructure to more explicit adoption-oriented efforts. One of those efforts was the Federal Communications Commission's Low-income Broadband Lifeline Pilot Projects, which ran from 2013 to 2014. The program worked with 14 private telecommunications firms to subsidize household broadband adoption for low-income households by providing discounted monthly and equipment costs. Low-income households are an important component of the broadband adoption puzzle: between 2003 and 2013, the adoption gap between low-income and high-income households actually increased by 5% points. This paper focuses on two specific FCC Broadband Lifeline Pilot projects that allowed consumers to make choices among different options, such as data allowance, speed, and wireless vs. wired connections. Conditional logit models are used to develop estimates of consumer's willingness-to-pay for specific broadband attributes. The results indicate that low-income consumers have a preference for smartphone connections (versus aircards) – and that this effect is even more pronounced for those households earning less than $20,000; that low-income consumers have a preference for wired connections (versus wireless); and that there is evidence that low-income consumers are willing to pay for an extra GB of data each month – but not for the speed of their connection.

Major internet service providers spent more than $11 million on lobbying amid fights over privacy rules and a coming showdown over net neutrality. Three of the largest telecom companies — AT&T, Verizon and Comcast — collectively spent a total of $11.2 million during the first three months of the year, according to disclosure forms filed to Congress on Thursday.

Of the three telecom giants, AT&T spent the most during the period, dishing out $4.6 million on lobbying. Its first-quarter spending was the sixth highest among all entities that filed disclosures. Comcast and Verizon spent $3.7 million and $2.9 million respectively. The sum total isn’t especially high for the companies for a three-month period, as they spent slightly more during the first quarter of 2016. The companies all lobbied on a wide variety of issues, and the filings do not break down how much was spent on each topic.

The federal government’s effort to root out an anonymous critic of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies has sparked an investigation into whether officials abused their authority by demanding that Twitter reveal the identity of one of its users, according to a letter released April 21. The Twitter account was part of an explosion of anonymous online criticism of Trump that began shortly after his inauguration in January and appeared to emanate from within many federal agencies. The Department of Homeland Security’s effort to identify the user behind one of these accounts — @ALT_uscis, which uses the acronym for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — prompted a summons to Twitter demanding that the company reveal the identity of the user, who was thought to be a federal employee.

The March 14 summons provoked a lawsuit from Twitter and sharp criticism from privacy advocates. Amid this backlash, federal officials rescinded the summons, and the company dropped its suit, appearing to resolve the case. But DHS Inspector General John Roth decided to investigate possible abuse of authority in this case, as well as “potential broader misuse of summons authority” within the department, he wrote in a letter to Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), who had called the effort to unmask the Twitter user a “witch hunt.”

Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) said Massachusetts tech leaders, including Microsoft, were pledging to join his fight to protect network neutrality. Sen Markey's definition of that is to prevent Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai from reversing his predecessor's reclassification of Internet service providers as Title II common carriers under the Open Internet order.

Sen Markey's office said April 21 he had met with the following, who had joined his defense of net neutrality: Mark Kidd, senior VP of Iron Mountain; Jody Rose, executive director of New England Venture Capital Association; Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot; Mohamad Ali, CEO of Carbonite; Steve Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor; Enrique Colbert, general counsel of Wayfair; Cathy Wissink, director of technology and civic engagement, Microsoft New England.

[Commentary] There is unlikely to be another presidential campaign like the one that made Donald Trump our 45th president last year. But there are lasting lessons for local broadcasters to be derived from it: 1) their lock on the presidential spend may not be as strong as they might think; and 2) as sellers they have to get as smart about Big Data and targeted advertising as the buyers.