Lauren Frayer

Since its 2005 debut with the slogan “Broadcast Yourself,” YouTube has positioned itself as a place where any people with camera phones can make a career of their creativity and thrive free of the grip of corporate media gatekeepers. But in order to share in the advertising wealth a user base of more than a billion can provide, independent producers must satisfy the demands of YouTube’s unfeeling, opaque and shifting algorithms.

YouTube’s process for mechanically pulling ads from videos is particularly concerning, because it takes aim at whole topics of conversation that could be perceived as potentially offensive to advertisers, and because it so often misfires. It risks suppressing political commentary and jokes. It puts the wild, independent internet in danger of becoming more boring than TV. If YouTube wants to fulfill its promise of an online environment where independent creators can make interesting work, it will find a way to scrub ads from truly vile content without penalizing the merely controversial.

President Barack Obama did not release the names of every visitor to his White House, so President Donald Trump will not release any at all. White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that President Donald Trump’s predecessor “scrubbed” the logs of names they did not want to be made public, and therefore that there was no reason to release any list of visitor names. Publicly posted Obama White House logs were indeed missing the names of thousands of visitors, including a number of lobbyists and campaign donors. But they did include the names of tens of thousands of guests in entries that informed a number of critical stories about the administration, including some by the most vocal Trump supporters in media. “This is the policy that’s existed from the beginning of time since [logs] were kept through the last [administration], and that last one was a faux attempt,” Spicer said. “They would scrub whoever they didn’t want to put out.” Spicer told reporters that Americans have a right to make their voice heard at the White House without their identities, or the names of officials hearing their concerns, being publicly listed. “We recognized that there’s a privacy aspect to allowing citizens to come and express their views,” Spicer said. “There’s an opportunity for the American people who want to have a conversation and be able to share their view” to do so without being publicly identified.

Former Gov Mike Huckabee (R-AR) vented frustration about his Comcast service in a series of tweets April 17, with the former Republican presidential hopeful saying that he would prefer to have President Obama back in office than continue to deal with the company. Huckabee blasted the cable company to his more than 600,000 followers. "How bad is @comcast service? I'd rather have Obama back as President than have Comcast,” he tweeted.

Tom Price, Georgia's 6th congressional district’s longtime Republican US House member, stepped down earlier in 2017 to join President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. That sparked April 18’s special election to fill his seat, which has suddenly made the district the unlikely focus of national political interests willing to spend unprecedented amounts of money.

The barrage of TV ads, e-mail messages and robo-calls, often from organizations headquartered hundreds of miles away, have left some district residents feeling like pawns, not players, in their own congressional election — and some candidates as if they’ve lost control of the race. Through April 16, super PACs, nonprofits and other groups independent of any candidate’s campaign have spent $9 million on the Georgia 6th race. Just one of these outside groups spending money to influence the Georgia 6th election — Athens (GA)-based Better Georgia Inc. — is headquartered within state lines. When the candidates’ own campaign money is excluded, the Georgia 6th special election has attracted about one Georgia penny for every $10 in national cash.

Google Fiber and other Internet service providers that want to build new networks might get good news from the Federal Communications Commission, which is considering rules that would speed up the process of attaching wires to utility poles. Current FCC rules allow for up to a five-month waiting period before new ISPs can install wires on utility poles that already hold the wires of incumbent providers. This is a problem for Internet users, who often don't have any choice of high-speed providers. The new FCC proposal from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai could shave a couple of months off the maximum waiting periods. The rules wouldn't eliminate all the problems that recently caused Google Fiber to cut its staff and pause fiber operations in 11 cities while it pursues wireless networking technology. But Google Fiber said the initial FCC proposal is a good step.

Google is paying a $7.8 million fine and agreeing to open up its Android mobile operating system to competitors' search engines in Russia. The settlement ends a two-year fight with Russian antitrust regulators.

The Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia (FAS) in 2015 found Google was violating competition laws by including its own search tool on the operating system. Google would preload its own apps, including the search engine, on phones running Android. Russian users didn't have the option of changing to a different search engine on those phones. Now, under the terms of the settlement, the Android operating system will no longer exclusively have Google apps preinstalled in Russia, and users will be able to pick their default search engines, according to the FAS. The $7.8 million fine is roughly 9 percent of Google's 2014 revenue in Russia. The decision will give an opportunity for the Russian search engine Yandex NV to increase its own market share in mobile search. Yandex had originally brought the complaint against Google.

This report proposes principles to guide contemporary media and communications policymaking in democratic countries seeking to improve the contributions those operations and systems make to society. It articulates statements of principles to inform the development of policy objectives and policy mechanisms and to provide consistency across varying issues, technologies, and actions by defining fundamental criteria that can be used to inform discussion and guide policy decisions.

This report steps back from specific policy measures to articulate principles that are relevant and applicable to a wide range of media and communications platforms, infrastructures, and activities addressed at the local, national, regional, and global levels. The purpose is to help policymakers and policy advocates think initially at a more principled level and then link policy objectives and tools to these normative foundations rather than merely seeking immediate problem solutions.

[Prof Robert G. Picard is a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at University of Oxford. Dr Victor Pickard is an associate professor at the Annenberg School forCommunication, University of Pennsylvania.]

Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA), a congressman in his first term representing California’s 17th district, is quick to denounce President Donald Trump. But he also doesn’t mince words about President Trump’s FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai. “I think he’s one of the worst picks possible in government,” Rep Khanna said of Chairman Pai. “Did you see the Charter decision? It’s appalling.” The “Charter decision” refers to a recent unanimous FCC vote ruling that Charter Communications would not have to expand high-speed internet access into areas already covered by competitors like Comcast.

“I don’t know as much about technology as some of the people I represent, but I know this: We invented the internet, we invented a lot of broadband,” Rep Khanna said. “Why are we paying five times more than people in Europe? The reason is, it’s basically a monopoly here.” “[Pai] is carving up the map, no competition,” he added. “And the people who suffer the most are — actually — Trump voters, in rural America! They’re the ones whose prices go up. They’re the ones who have to think, ‘Do I subscribe to the internet or not? Do I get fast service?’ He has been a mouthpiece for telecom companies in one of the most economically concentrated industries in the country.”

An interview with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai.

The way many of the headlines about Internet privacy rules are written, Chairman Pai's stance on letting Internet service providers market your usage data doesn't make sense. Why would you want to let Comcast (the parent company of CNBC) or AT&T, or Verizon, for example, sell that information? Chairman Pai argued that's not the point. Companies like Google and Facebook already have access to tons of information on us, Chairman Pai said. Unless we set a level playing field, we let them off the hook. "We just want every company that is handling consumers' data to handle it in the same way. I think that's something that would give consumers a much better sense of confidence when they go online," Chairman Pai said. In other words, if you're outraged about Comcast selling your browsing habits, you should be just as outraged about Silicon Valley doing it. First level the playing field, Chairman Pai suggested, then make rules that apply to everyone. He has a lot of skeptics to win over, especially in the tech world.

Let's be honest here — most of us don’t read the privacy policies for smart televisions. And even if we try to, it’s often difficult to read them, particularly on a television screen. So we asked a few legal experts who specialize in privacy — Christopher Dore of the Chicago-based law firm Edelson, Danielle Citron of the University of Maryland, William McGeveran of the University of Minnesota and Bradley Shear of Maryland-based Shear Law — to explain what we're really getting into when we hit the “I agree” button.