Lauren Frayer

[Commentary] By some accounts, about 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through Loudoun County, Virginia daily. But if you happen to live in more rural western Loudoun, good luck getting decent Internet service. Courtney Shipe, according to the Times-Mirror, lives near Lovettsville and is hard-pressed to find an Internet provider. She has managed to get connected through Verizon through a DSL link but “almost daily, our phone line and internet service will randomly cut off for hours at a time,” she told the newspaper. It’s cold comfort when technicians tell her the problem isn’t on her end.

It’s seems bizarre that in 2017 parts of Northern Virginia are still stuck with pre-1990s modes of communications. But it’s something much of rural Virginia has been dealing with for years. The problem is simple economics. Big providers such as Verizon and Comcast favor densely populated suburban areas where their installation costs are low. They can boost their margins by bundling Internet with 300-plus channel cable television and phone service. President Donald Trump says he wants to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure but hasn’t come up with any solid details. Expanding broadband would be a win-win.

President-elect Donald Trump was very clear: “I will appoint a team to give me a plan within 90 days of taking office,” he said in January, after getting a US intelligence assessment of Russian interference in 2016’s elections and promising to address cybersecurity. April 20, President Trump hits his 90-day mark. There is no team, there is no plan, and there is no clear answer from the White House on who would even be working on what. It’s the latest deadline President Trump’s set and missed — from the press conference he said his wife would hold last fall to answer questions about her original immigration process to the plan to defeat ISIS that he’d said would come within his first 30 days in office.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is taking the next steps to unwind Obama-era rules and other regulatory efforts that had restricted the abilities of telecommunication companies and broadcasters. With two items up for vote on April 20 that are expected to pass, Chairman Pai is carrying forward a swift Republican attack on telecom rules. The rollback will empower big telecom and media firms that have lobbied aggressively for deregulation, but consumer groups say it may also eventually put consumers at risk of higher prices and fewer options for services and media.

The two specific items to be voted on include a plan to make it easier for broadband providers to charge other businesses higher prices to connect to the main arteries of their networks. The action would clear the way for internet service providers like AT&T and CenturyLink to raise connection fees charged to hospitals, small businesses and wireless carriers in many markets where there is little or no competition for so-called backhaul broadband service. The other item up for vote is a move to ease the limit on how many stations a broadcast television company can own. The action is expected to invite more consolidation in that sector.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) joined with Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) to try and head off the reinstating of the UHF discount, saying its return by the Federal Communications Commission would be using a "blunt, illogical and anti-consumer instrument" to re-open a loophole to further consolidation.

Before the FCC eliminated it under former chairman Tom Wheeler in 2016 on a party line vote, the FCC had counted only half of a UHF TV station's audience reach toward the 39% cap on national reach by a TV station group owner. New FCC chairman Ajit Pai has scheduled a vote April 20 on bringing the discount back until the FCC looks more holistically at media ownership regulations, including whether that 39% cap should be raised if the discount is eliminated, something the Wheeler FCC did not do. The item is expected to pass with the support of fellow Republican Michael O'Rielly. The legislators, in a letter to the chairman, told him he would be restoring a loophole that would allow further concentration. The discount dates from when UHFs were the weaker signal vis a vis VHF, a situation that was reversed with the transition to DTV given UHF's better propagation characteristics in digital.

Bill O’Reilly has been forced out of his position as a prime-time host on Fox News, the company said on April 19, after the disclosure of multiple settlements involving sexual harassment allegations against him. His ouster brings an abrupt and embarrassing end to his two-decade reign as one of the most popular and influential commentators in television. “After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel,” 21st Century Fox, Fox News’s parent company, said in a statement.

O’Reilly’s departure comes two and a half weeks after an investigation by The New York Times revealed how Fox News and 21st Century Fox had repeatedly stood by O’Reilly even as sexual harassment allegations piled up against him. The Times found that the company and O’Reilly reached settlements with five women who had complained about sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior by him. The agreements totaled about $13 million. Since then, more than 50 advertisers had abandoned his show, and women’s rights groups called for his ouster. Inside the company, women expressed outrage and questioned whether top executives were serious about maintaining a culture based on “trust and respect,” as they had promised last summer when another sexual harassment scandal forced the ouster of Fox News’s chairman, Roger Ailes.

Earnings at The Associated Press shrank substantially last year compared with 2015, when the news organization enjoyed a large tax benefit that skewed its results. Revenue also edged downward, reflecting continued contraction in the newspaper industry and a stronger U.S. dollar that reduced the value of overseas sales. Net income in 2016 shrank to $1.6 million from $183.6 million in 2015, a 99 percent decline. The 2015 profit figure was bolstered by a one-time, $165 million tax benefit. AP's 2014 net income of $140.9 million was also boosted by a large non-recurring gain from the sale of a stake in a sports data company. In 2013, net income at the AP - a nonprofit news cooperative - was $3.3 million.

Telecommunication lawyers have petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to eliminate the rule that broadcasters have a main studio located in their community of license. The FCC initially adopted the in-market requirement to make sure viewers had easy access to their local station and its management. But the commission loosened the rule in 1987 during its Reagan-era broad deregulation of the industry, eliminating a related requirement that a station originated a minimum number of programming hours from such a studio, and further loosened it in 1998, allowing stations still more facilities flexibility.

Then at the first meeting of FCC chairman Ajit Pai, the FCC eliminated the requirement that public files be physically housed in a main office—they can now be made available online only—by dropping the "last vestige" of that rule in January, the requirement that commercial broadcast stations retain copies of letters and emails from the public in their public inspection file. Given those decisions and the changes in technology, said the Media, Telecom and Technology Group in a filing at the FCC, adopting their proposal to eliminate the so-called "main studio rule," would not affect the "bedrock obligation" to serve their communities but would be a recognition of the technological and economic reality "that stations can serve their communities while realizing substantial and necessary cost savings by maintaining fewer offices and smaller staff.

With the close of the Federal Communications Commission broadcast incentive auction the week of April 10, FCC Incentive Auction Task Force chairman Gary Epstein will be exiting at the end of April. Epstein, a prominent telecommunications attorney, joined the FCC in April 2012 as co-lead on the incentive auction. Epstein retired from private practice in 2009 as a partner in Latham & Watkins and head of its communications group before being wooed to the FCC by then-FCC chairman Julius Genachowski to tackle the incentive auction.

Facebook announced what it’s calling “Tether-tenna technology,” essentially a small, unmanned helicopter that will provide Wi-Fi access to crisis zones when existing Wi-Fi towers are down or damaged. The helicopter-drone, which is roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, is literally tethered to a fiber line and a power source on the ground, which enables the chopper to stay airborne for days at a time. (Facebook says its goal is to keep it up for weeks or months.)

The Tether-tenna technology is still in early testing, which means it isn’t being deployed to actual disaster areas just yet, said Yael Maguire, head of Facebook’s connectivity lab. Maguire — whose team also built Facebook’s internet-beaming drone, Aquila, and is laying hundreds of miles of fiber cable in Africa to increase access to the internet there — estimates that one helicopter could connect “in the neighborhood of thousands to tens of thousands of people.” The Aquila drone hasn’t been deployed yet either; the aircraft was damaged after it crashed upon landing during a test flight last summer.

US media outlets in Russia will face investigations into whether they illegally influenced the country's parliamentary elections in 2016. Outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe (RL/RFE) and CNN will all fall under the spotlight, said Leonid Levin, the head of the State Duma Committee on Information and Communication. He said that journalists' work could have affected Russian elections. Levin also pointed to similar investigations on Russian state media in the United States. “The US Senate is considering a bill which grants the US Justice Ministry — including the FBI — additional powers to investigate potential violations of US law by RT America. Similar claims have been leveled at [state-funded English-language news website] Sputnik and other Russian media," he said.