Lauren Frayer

As members of the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, your mission is to give the Federal Communications Commission recommendations on ways to spur broadband deployment and reduce barriers to investment. One important part of this work, which I previewed last fall, is to develop model codes for state and municipal governments that want to encourage deployment and competitive entry in their jurisdictions. In fact, the BDAC is being asked to develop two model codes—one for municipalities and another for states. In developing each, the goal should be guidelines that are forward-looking and fair, and that balance legitimate interests of state and local governments with the ever-growing demands of the American public for better, faster, and cheaper broadband. I look forward to seeing how you approach this challenge.

The BDAC will also be asked to make recommendations on how to promote competitive access to broadband infrastructure, including utility poles. Another key issue is speeding up broadband deployment on Federal lands. The BDAC has a lot of work ahead of it. But I’m certain that this distinguished group is more than up to the task. And in the coming weeks, I expect to appoint more qualified nominees to round out the working groups, lending further support to the cause.

Federal prosecutors are weighing whether to bring criminal charges against members of the WikiLeaks organization, taking a second look at a 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and military documents and investigating whether the group bears criminal responsibility for the more recent revelation of sensitive CIA cyber-tools, apparently.

The Justice Department under President Barack Obama decided not to charge WikiLeaks for revealing some of the government’s most sensitive secrets — concluding that doing so would be akin to prosecuting a news organization for publishing classified information. Justice Department leadership under President Trump, though, has indicated to prosecutors that it is open to taking another look at the case, which the Obama administration did not formally close. It is not clear whether prosecutors are also looking at WikiLeaks’ role in 2016 in publishing e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John D. Podesta, which US officials have said were hacked by the Russian government.

President Donald Trump’s lawyers argued in an April 20 court filing that protesters “have no right” to “express dissenting views” at his campaign rallies because such protests infringed on his First Amendment rights. The filing comes in a case brought by three protesters who allege they were roughed up and ejected from a March 2016 Trump campaign rally in Louisville (KY) by Trump supporters who were incited by the then-candidate’s calls from the stage to “get 'em out of here!”

Lawyers for Trump’s campaign have argued that his calls to remove the protesters were protected by the First Amendment. But the federal district court judge hearing the case issued a ruling late in March questioning that argument, as well as the claim that Trump didn’t intend for his supporters to use force. The ruling cleared the case to proceed into discovery and towards a trial. April 20’s filing by Trump’s campaign lawyers asks the judge to pause the proceedings and allow Trump’s legal team to appeal the ruling to a higher court “before subjecting the President to ‘unique’ and extraordinary burdens of litigation.”

Large tech companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft focused some of their lobbying dollars in Washington over the past three months on combating President Donald Trump, as he eyed major changes to the US tax code and imposed new restrictions on foreign immigrants. Both issues feature prominently on many companies’ first-quarter lobbying reports. In total, five of the industry’s biggest names — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — spent a combined $13.3 million to influence regulators in the nation’s capital between Jan. 1 and March 31, records show.

Facebook specifically revealed it devoted a portion of its $3.2 million in spending during that period to fighting President Trump’s executive order limiting travelers and refugees from some Muslim-majority countries. The social giant, like many in Silicon Valley, has blasted the order publicly and signed onto legal briefs challenging the administration’s actions. Google, too, spent some of its $3.5 million in lobbying on “legislative responses” to Trump’s travel ban.

A new lawsuit claims that Confide, a privacy-focused messaging app reportedly used by several politicians including those in the Trump administration in February, may not be as secure as it has advertised. Filings from a proposed class-action lawsuit in New York say that Confide's contention that it does not allow its users to take screenshots of their messages isn't true. It specifically accuses Confide of breaching false advertising and deceptive business practices laws. The inability to keep a record of Confide messages is one of the product's most-touted features. If someone tries to take a picture of a conversation, Confide is supposed to kick out the person who took the screenshot and alert the other person in the conversation. It's also supposed to only let users see messages one line at a time, to prevent an entire message from ever being recorded, making it ideal for confidential messaging.

When Pew Research Center surveyed 14 advanced economies in the spring of 2016, one thing was clear: In each of the countries surveyed, nearly all people reported owning a mobile phone. But the shares who own a smartphone vary considerably.

Among the countries surveyed, people in Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Australia reported the highest smartphone ownership rates, at roughly eight-in-ten in each country. Nearly as many Americans (77%) said they owned a smartphone, a number that more than doubled since 2011. Rates of smartphone ownership were considerably lower in some of the other countries surveyed. About half in Poland (52%) owned a smartphone, though that figure is up significantly since the question was first asked in 2013, when only 21% reported owning a smartphone. And while pluralities in 13 of the 14 countries surveyed reported owning a smartphone, regular mobile devices are still fairly common in Greece (43%), Hungary (41%), and Poland and Japan (both 37%).

Resistance begins at home. For Silicon Valley, that means transforming an unprecedented protest movement against US President Donald Trump’s young presidency into something more than signs and slogans. To do so, software engineers and executives in the Valley are writing a set of civic values they hope will become the minimum standard by which companies are judged as a place people want to work.

“It’s not about workplace rights as much as what are some shared values related to government that we want our companies to endorse,” says Sam Altman, president of the Y Combinator seed fund, who sponsored a Tech Workers’ Values meeting to launch the process. The April 9 meeting, held in a swank startup office in San Francisco’s SOMA district, was off-the-record, but the results are being shared as a Google document among attendees. When ready, it will be circulated in the larger tech community. Paralleling pledges such as Never.Again, Altman plans additional meetings to agree on shared values broad enough to unite software engineers—a disparate, libertarian-minded crew—and specific enough to extract real action from major technology companies.

[Commentary] The takeaway is that the public utility model sometimes works well to discipline natural monopolies in stodgy, unchanging fields such as water, where regulation is needed to displace dysfunctional market forces. In dynamic, competitive industries such as telecommunications, public utility regulation is not only misplaced but also affirmatively harmful to consumers. It is rigid and inflexible, precluding industry players from responding to new technological developments in ways that help consumers.

Perhaps more problematically, the public utility model allows politics to replace economics as the primary driver of decision-making, market development, and capital allocation. And this too often permits the process to be captured by incumbents that then insulate themselves from competition — something the electricity industry and old telecommunications hands, know all too well.

[Daniel Lyons is an associate professor at Boston College Law School]

Add the European Union (EU) to those raising red flags over the Federal Communications Commission's planned April 20 vote on a broadband business data services deregulation order proposed by new FCC chairman Ajit Pai. In a letter to the FCC from EU Ambassador to the David O'Sullivan, who oversees the bilateral relationship between the EU and US, said that the FCC's 20-day window between publishing the order and voting on it did not allow for a "full consultation" with EU stakeholders, but said that from what they could glean from the draft, it was a troubling change that the FCC should reconsider. O'Sullivan stopped short of saying the FCC should delay the vote, but did say that if the FCC proceeded it should provide a transition period. But he offered plenty of reasons why the EU thought the FCC should rethink the BDS order. He cited the FCC's extensive data collection and the rulemaking proposal based on that and voted under Pai's predecessor, Tom Wheeler, and over Pai's dissent, that the incumbent providers (former Bells) did not face effective competition in most markets.

Federal officials are considering major changes in how they ask Americans about their race and ethnicity, with the goal of producing more accurate and reliable data in the 2020 census and beyond. Recently released Census Bureau research underscores an important reason why: Many Hispanics, who are the nation’s largest minority group, do not identify with the current racial categories. Census officials say this is a problem because in order to obtain good data, they need to make sure people can match themselves to the choices they are offered. Census data on race and Hispanic origin are used to redraw congressional district boundaries and enforce voting and other civil rights laws, as well as in a wide variety of research, including Pew Research Center studies.