Lauren Frayer

States have started writing their own legislation to protect broadband privacy after Congress voted to repeal regulations that would have required internet providers to obtain their customers' consent before collecting their personal information. On April 3, the Montana Senate approved a budget provision that would bar internet providers like Charter and Comcast from being awarded state contracts if they collect data from their customers without consent. That legislation is similar to a measure that is moving through the Minnesota Legislature.

Montana Sen Ryan Osmundson (R-Buffalo) said he introduced the measure as a response to Congress' vote to repeal the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission rules, which have not yet taken effect. "It has become apparent to us that they have the ability to use your information in ways to market to you, and, quite frankly, sell that information," Osmundson said of internet providers. "We're basically saying they cannot do business with the state if they're collecting personal information without the consent of the individual."

President Donald Trump recently signed a congressional resolution completing the repeal of broadband privacy rules announced by the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission. According to news reports, the purpose of the repeal was to allow broadband Internet service providers to conduct the same sort of monitoring of user online activities, such as Web-surfing habits, that companies like Google and Facebook can conduct. I don’t know much about communications law or the proposed regulations. But the description of what the repeal was designed to do made me wonder: Isn’t that kind of monitoring mostly illegal under the Wiretap Act?

As I see it, the Wiretap Act substantially limits what kinds of surveillance broadband providers can conduct even without the Obama-era rules. Given that, it’s not clear to me how much the repeal actually matters. I have been told that [the arguments I described] never entered the debate over the FCC regulations because communications lawyers just don’t think about the Wiretap Act. The Wiretap Act is a criminal statute in Title 18, and it’s just something off the radar screen of lawyers who practice communications law. If so, that should change. Depending on what the broadband providers want to do, the Wiretap Act may be a serious bar to the companies doing it legally. And given the hammer of statutory damages that the Wiretap Act allows, a mistake that implicates the Wiretap Act might end up as a very costly mistake.

Lost among the outrage over the Federal Communications Commission’s largely inconsequential decision to revoke Lifeline Broadband Provider status from nine carriers is the problem of the program’s economic costs. The FCC’s own estimates suggest it may cost between 25 and 41 cents to provide a dollar of subsidy. Another estimate done by four economists (this writer being one of them) found the cost might be closer to 65 cents per dollar.

These costs, ironically, are largely the result of the Commission’s well-intentioned effort to combat earlier fraud in the program. They tell a story of how poorly-designed rules can create a cycle of increasing costs as a patchwork of changes tries to fix problems as they are revealed.

[Olga Ukhaneva is a Research Assistant Professor at McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University]

Comcast leapt into the cutthroat market for cellphone service by unveiling Xfinity Mobile, a move that other cable companies are expected to follow as consumers' rising Internet consumption increasingly pits providers of home and mobile broadband against each other. The company will offer its Xfinity customers two wireless options: one for unlimited data that costs from $45 to $65 per line a month, and a pay-as-you-go plan for $12 per gigabyte. The service will be available to customers starting in the second quarter, Comcast said.

The new offering is aimed at helping Comcast compete outside the home as Americans' Internet usage increasingly shifts to mobile devices. The cable company's service relies primarily on Comcast's network of 16 million public Wi-Fi hotspots for connectivity, allowing users to surf the Web, watch video and listen to streaming music on their phones without paying for cellular data. Where the company's WiFi signals are unavailable, Xfinity Mobile will connect to the traditional cellular network owned by Verizon, which Comcast is using as a result of an airwaves agreement signed several years ago.

[Commentary] Anybody who works in Washington knows that think tanks play an important role in advising the government on policy. In the foreign policy community, think tanks are widely viewed as the traditional brokers in the marketplace of ideas. But this is changing. Whether based in investment banks like Goldman Sachs, management consultancies like McKinsey or political risk firms like the Eurasia Group, private-sector institutions have started to act like policy knowledge brokers. Consultants have been key advisers to the government for decades, but recent trends have caused their star to rise at the same time that traditional think tanks face new challenges. While for-profit intellectuals make valuable contributions, it would be problematic if they crowded out traditional think tanks.

[Daniel Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University]

FilmOn X on April 6 sought a full-court re-hearing in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals after a three-judge panel of that court in March reversed a lower court decision that FilmOn X was eligible for the same compulsory license to TV programming as cable operators have. The appeals court panel held that "a service that captures copyrighted works broadcast over the air, and then retransmits them to paying subscribers over the Internet without the consent of the copyright holders, is not a 'cable system' eligible for a compulsory license under the Copyright Act."

Broadcasters led by Fox had challenged the lower court ruling after US District Court judge George Wu sided with FilmOn X. The company argues that the Copyright Office has been inconsistent on the license, granting one to U-verse and FiOS as substantially similar to cable, for example, while denying ones to FilmOn X and others that also use IP technology. It also says Congress meant for the definition of cable to be able to encompass new technologies like FilmOn X.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced the appointment of 29 members to the FCC’s newly created Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC), which will meet for the first time on April 21, 2017. The BDAC’s inaugural meeting will focus on member introductions, directing initial assignments to committee members, and providing additional information about BDAC working groups. In addition, the group will begin initial discussions on strategies for accelerating the deployment of broadband.
Chairman Pai has named Elizabeth Pierce, CEO of Quintillion Subsea Operations and Quintillion Networks, to serve as Chair of the BDAC, and Kelleigh Cole, Director of the Utah Broadband Outreach Center in the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development, to serve as Vice Chair. As the BDAC gets underway, it will have five working groups tackling projects critical to promote broadband deployment.
Model Code for Municipalities.—Douglas Dimitroff of the New York State Wireless Association will serve as Chair of this working group, and the Honorable Sam Liccardo, Mayor of San Jose, California, will serve as Vice Chair.
Model Code for States.—Kelly McGriff of Southern Light will serve as Chair of this working group, and the Honorable Karen Charles Peterson, Commissioner, Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable, for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners will serve as Vice Chair.
Competitive Access to Broadband Infrastructure.—Ken Simon of Crown Castle will serve as Chair of this working group, and Brent Skorup of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University will serve as Vice Chair.
Removing State and Local Regulatory Barriers.—Robert DeBroux of TDS Telecom will serve as Chair of this working group, and Kim Keenan of the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council will serve as Vice Chair.
Streamlining Federal Siting.—Jonathan Adelstein of the Wireless Infrastructure Association will serve as Chair of this working group, and Valerie Fast Horse of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe will serve as Vice Chair.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai recently announced that he is forming the Office of Economics and Data (OED) at the FCC. This is a good first step. But what we need is a change that makes it nearly impossible for the agency to return to the situation of the past few years, where letters from senators and videos from the White House were the primary sources of economic analysis. This will require a deeper structural change.

To accomplish this, the commission will need to abolish its industry silos — the wireline, wireless and media bureaus — so that turf wars cannot crowd out economic work. It would also be valuable to establish a research fund so that young economists and engineers are excited to begin their careers at the agency and hopefully spend significant time there, perhaps their entire careers. Chairman Pai’s initiative and the deeper changes I identified are not permanent cures for the problems that plague the agency — bad leadership can destroy even the best organizations — but perhaps we can get the FCC back to being a world leader in rigorous thought. Pai has given the agency a start.

[Mark Jamison is the director and Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida]

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai recently announced that he is forming the Office of Economics and Data (OED) at the FCC. This is a good first step. But what we need is a change that makes it nearly impossible for the agency to return to the situation of the past few years, where letters from senators and videos from the White House were the primary sources of economic analysis. This will require a deeper structural change.

To accomplish this, the commission will need to abolish its industry silos — the wireline, wireless and media bureaus — so that turf wars cannot crowd out economic work. It would also be valuable to establish a research fund so that young economists and engineers are excited to begin their careers at the agency and hopefully spend significant time there, perhaps their entire careers. Chairman Pai’s initiative and the deeper changes I identified are not permanent cures for the problems that plague the agency — bad leadership can destroy even the best organizations — but perhaps we can get the FCC back to being a world leader in rigorous thought. Pai has given the agency a start.

[Mark Jamison is the director and Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida]

President Donald Trump removed Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist, from the National Security Council’s cabinet-level “principals committee.” The shift was orchestrated by Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, who insisted on purging a political adviser from the Situation Room where decisions about war and peace are made.

Bannon resisted the move, even threatening at one point to quit if it went forward, according to a White House official who, like others, insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Bannon’s camp denied that he had threatened to resign and spent the day spreading the word that the shift was a natural evolution, not a signal of any diminution of his outsize influence. His allies said privately that Bannon had been put on the principals committee to keep an eye on Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. With Flynn gone, these allies said, there was no need for Bannon to remain, but they noted that he had kept his security clearance.