Lauren Frayer

[Commentary] In the years ahead, the Federal Communications Commission will likely have to employ more rigorous analysis to meet its statutory mandate to act in the public interest. At the very least, it will have to evaluate whether its regulations do more good than harm. To this end, an Office of Economics and Data is welcome.

Though employing economic analysis will not always be simple, the FCC should meet these challenges by emulating agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, using Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) review, and encouraging independence and research. A genuine commitment to employing economic analysis without regard to particular policy preferences would yield better-informed decisions and better outcomes for the American people.

[Caroline Cecot is Affiliate Faculty at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and Legal Fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.]

[Commentary] In the wake of a growing conflict between President Trump and the news media, many have expressed concern about what this spells for the future of democracy in America. Although the president has not proposed formal legislation restricting the media, he has, for example, called media organizations “the enemy of the American people” and has excluded prominent organizations from news briefings. Although Trump’s conflict with the media has alarmed many in the United States, such a confrontation is not unusual when we look outside our borders. There have been many such conflicts in other countries.

Our study of dozens of these cases leads to a disturbing conclusion: Media restrictions abroad are a bellwether for declines in democracy and for periods of increased human rights abuse. Trump’s current and past behavior suggests that he would like to increase the social, economic and perhaps legal costs to the media for criticizing the government. Our analysis suggests that democratic institutions are more likely to weaken when the government restricts the media than when it does not. Democracy can often survive regardless, but there is still good reason to monitor the attacks on the institutions that sustain it.

[Daniel W. Hill Jr. is an assistant professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia. Yonatan Lupu is an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.]

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai faces a tough challenge in coming days: rolling back network neutrality rules that he regards as an overreach, without reaching too far himself.

In the highly charged legal and political debate over how the Trump administration and Republican Congress would reverse the Obama-era rules, almost any misstep could be fatal to the effort. Chairman Pai could announce his game plan as soon as this month to start acting at the commission’s May meeting, according to some people familiar with the matter. His timing will be crucial. If Chairman Pai moves too fast to kill the existing rules, he risks provoking a court fight he could lose, according to some experts. But if he goes too slowly—potentially, by starting over with the government’s full rule-making process—he and his GOP allies might suffer politically, as online activists’ protests multiply.

[Commentary] Comcast, Charter (now Spectrum), Verizon, CenturyLink and AT&T account for over 80 percent of wired subscriptions and have almost total power in their territories. According to the Federal Communications Commission, nearly 75 percent of Americans have at most one choice for high-speed data. It’s about to get worse: President Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, under the leadership of its fiercely deregulatory chairman, Ajit Pai, wants to let these companies become even more powerful by letting them do whatever they want and allowing them to merge with one another.

Chairman Pai has already pushed Congress to erase rules that would have constrained these companies from using and selling our sensitive online information. And he is getting ready to wipe out the classification of high-speed data services as a utility — even though, without this legal label, the FCC’s authority to require these five companies to treat their customers fairly will be fatally undermined. Combining untrammeled power over distribution with must-have content gives a network operator both the incentive and the ability to use its network to benefit itself, whether or not its actions are good for the public. This has been true of communications networks from the telegraph forward, and we’re seeing this same pattern play out with high-speed internet access.

[Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School]

[Commentary] Shares of broadband providers have run up since the election on the hope that the Trump administration will bring a lighter touch to telecom policy. But even with looser network neutrality rules on the horizon, little may actually change.

New rules are expected to end the policy of classifying broadband as a utility subject to price regulation and return providers to a more limited regulatory framework. That would remove a big long-term risk for cable and telecom companies. But it may not make much of a difference in the short term, raising the question of whether recent stock-price gains are fully justified. Critics of the current rules argue that the threat of price regulation has chilled investment. But cable capital expenditures at Comcast , the largest wired broadband provider, have continued to climb since the new rules and are expected to rise again in 2017, according to UBS. Any declines in capital spending at other companies could be chalked up to normal pauses between investment cycles.

Rep James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-WI) told a town hall attendee who was concerned about the elimination of online privacy protections that using the Internet is a choice — a statement that has since drawn criticism on social media. During the meeting in Wisconsin, the attendee asked about the recent decision by Congress to wipe away an Obama-era policy that sought to limit what Internet service providers, such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast, can do with customers’ Internet browsing history. The concern is similar to one raised by consumer activists: Not all Internet users have options to switch to a different company if they don’t agree with their current provider’s privacy practices. “Facebook is not comparable to an ISP. I do not have to go to Facebook,” the town hall attendee told Rep Sensenbrenner Jr. “I do have one provider. … I have one choice. I don’t have to go on Google. My ISP provider is different than those providers.”

In response, Sensenbrenner, who voted to scrap the Federal Communications Commission’s privacy rules that were set to take effect at the end of this year, said: “Nobody’s got to use the Internet. … And the thing is that if you start regulating the Internet like a utility, if we did that right at the beginning, we would have no Internet. … Internet companies have invested an awful lot of money in having almost universal service now. The fact is is that, you know, I don’t think it’s my job to tell you that you cannot get advertising for your information being sold. My job, I think, is to tell you that you have the opportunity to do it, and then you take it upon yourself to make that choice. … That’s what the law has been, and I think we ought to have more choices rather than fewer choices with the government controlling our everyday lives.” The congressman then moved on to the next question.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is just getting started. Here are five regulations or policies he's working to roll back.

1. Net neutrality: When the FCC adopted its landmark net neutrality rules in 2015, requiring internet providers to treat all web traffic equally, then-Commissioner Pai issued a 67-page statement blasting the order as regulatory overreach that would stifle the internet economy.
2. Business data service: On April 20, the FCC will vote on more deregulation of the market.
3. Lifeline: Chairman Pai was quick to take on the FCC's Lifeline program, which provides broadband subsidies to low-income households.
4. Media ownership limits: FCC commissioners will also be voting on a proposal to undo an Obama-era change to media ownership rules, which made it harder for major TV broadcasters to buy up local stations. Broadcasters are currently limited to serving 39 percent of the country’s households. In August of 2016, the FCC voted to do away with the "UHF discount "— which let broadcasting companies count just half of the audiences of certain channels they owned toward the 39 percent limit. Chairman Pai is now proposing to bring it back, and the proposal is expected to pass.
5. Set-top box reform: Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed reforming the set-top box market, allowing consumers to buy them from third parties and breaking what critics call a cable company monopoly. One of Pai’s first actions as chairman was to withdraw the proposal, prompting an angry response from his predecessor.

[Commentary] Google and Facebook are facing new competition to their online business models after President Trump signed a bill putting Internet service providers on a path to being able to monetize online users the same way these technology giants do. Next up is the threatened unwinding of the Obama administration’s “net neutrality” rules, which could put these companies in a double bind, because they could soon have to pay Internet service providers a metered rate to move their content to customers’ screens. Google and Facebook will argue — as they did during our fight on net neutrality in 2015 — that ISPs should not be able to prioritize and price the flow of online content. The problem is that they make the exact opposite argument in their role as distributors of news content crucial to our democracy. The two digital giants increase or reduce users’ exposure to news content based on whether publishers — such as the Wall Street Journal or the Indianapolis Star — agree to play by their rules. Those rules are crafted to maximize the flow of advertising revenue, not quality content.

[Chavern is president and chief executive of the News Media Alliance, a trade association representing about 2,000 newspapers in the United States and Canada]

As students across the United States are handed school-issued laptops and signed up for educational cloud services, the way the educational system treats the privacy of students is undergoing profound changes—often without their parents’ notice or consent, and usually without a real choice to opt out of privacy-invading technology. Students are using technology in the classroom at an unprecedented rate. One-third of all K-12 students in US schools use school-issued devices. Google Chromebooks account for about half of those machines. Across the US, more than 30 million students, teachers, and administrators use Google’s G Suite for Education (formerly known as Google Apps for Education), and that number is rapidly growing. Student laptops and educational services are often available for a steeply reduced price, and are sometimes even free. However, they come with real costs and unresolved ethical questions. In short, technology providers are spying on students—and school districts, which often provide inadequate privacy policies or no privacy policy at all, are unwittingly helping them do it.

[Commentary] Local elected leaders, administrators, public utility managers and community stakeholders are stepping up their advocacy game in response to recent legislative losses. Whether or not a state has municipal network restrictions, any city that has even small aspirations for building a network should have a 12-month public relations plan. In addition to the threat of prohibitions, many state legislatures are pursuing an array of broadband policies, so cities should get in front of these discussions. PR is broadly defined as actions taken to influence a group of people with whom you do business. State legislatures influence cities’ ability to access money, resources and permissions. Subsequently, design a PR plan with the goal of influencing legislators’ hearts and minds regarding community broadband.

[Settles assists communities with developing their broadband business and marketing plans, and help communities raise money for broadband projects]