Lauren Frayer

[Commentary] Consumer privacy has been the biggest loser from network neutrality proponents’ politicization of privacy. Congress was right to rescind the Title II broadband privacy order passed by the Federal Communications Commission in October. The order took a nonpartisan public policy issue substantively unrelated to net neutrality, consumer privacy, and unnecessarily turning it into a partisan issue. Essentially, the House and Senate’s rescissions of the unimplemented rules restored the privacy status quo. It also creates the opportunity to free consumer privacy interests from the unproductive clutches of the Title II net neutrality or nothing, hyper-politicization of communications issues, going forward.

[Scott Cleland is president of Precursor LLC and Chairman of NetCompetition, a pro-competition e-forum supported by broadband interests]

Nearly nine months after Roger Ailes was ousted from his position as chairman of Fox News Channel, another woman has come forward with allegations of sexual harassment against him and the network. On April 3, Julie Roginsky, a current Fox News contributor, filed a 17-page suit in New York State Supreme Court against Ailes, Fox News and Bill Shine, the network’s co-president, asserting that she faced retaliation for rebuffing Ailes’s sexual advances and for refusing to disparage Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News host who sued Ailes summer 2016.

The new suit adds to Fox News’s woes at a time when it is trying to move past the sexual harassment crisis that engulfed the network in 2016. The network recently reached a settlement valued at more than $2.5 million, according to people briefed on the agreement, with a former contributor named Tamara Holder, who said she was sexually assaulted by a senior manager in his office. Also, the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan is looking into how Fox News structures its settlements, an inquiry disclosed in a court hearing in February by the lawyer for a former Fox employee suing the company.

The Federal Communications Commission has voted to modify the Charter-Time Warner Cable deal conditions by removing the requirement that Charter overbuild a million internet access customers who could already get high-speed access from another provider, apparently. The idea of the condition, imposed under former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, was to promote price and speed competition.

New FCC chairman Ajit Pai circulated the item in March, after which it was widely expected to be approved. The buildout requirement remains, but according to the item that could now all be buildouts to currently unserved homes, with no overbuilding. However, Charter could still choose to overbuild those one million, they are just no longer required to do so. Charter in 2016 said it intended to focus its overbuild activity against teleommunication broadband providers, not other cable companies.

[Commentary] In the days ahead, The Los Angeles Times editorial board will look more closely at President Donald Trump, with a special attention to three troubling traits:

1) Trump’s shocking lack of respect for those fundamental rules and institutions on which our government is based. He has lashed out at journalists, declaring them “enemies of the people,” rather than defending the importance of a critical, independent free press. His contempt for the rule of law and the norms of government are palpable.
2) His utter lack of regard for truth.
3) His scary willingness to repeat alt-right conspiracy theories.

[Commentary] If Americans are unsure which President Donald Trump they have — the Machiavellian negotiator who lies to manipulate simpler minds, or one of those simpler minds himself — does it really matter? In either case he puts the nation in danger by undermining the role of truth in public discourse and policymaking, as well as the notion of truth being verifiable and mutually intelligible. Our civilization is defined in part by the disciplines — science, law, journalism — that have developed systematic methods to arrive at the truth. Citizenship brings with it the obligation to engage in a similar process. Good citizens test assumptions, question leaders, argue details, research claims. Investigate. Read. Write. Listen. Speak. Think. Be wary of those who disparage the investigators, the readers, the writers, the listeners, the speakers and the thinkers. Be suspicious of those who confuse reality with reality TV, and those who repeat falsehoods while insisting, against all evidence, that they are true. To defend freedom, demand fact.

Protecting Internet privacy should be a bipartisan issue, right? After all, Americans seem united in their dislike of the phone and cable behemoths that dominate internet service in the US. “At the end of the day, it’s your data,” says Rep Warren Davidson (R-OH), who voted against the repeal. “I don’t see how it could be anyone else’s.”For most Republicans, it seems, someone else’s private property rights took precedence: the cable and phone companies themselves.

Rep Davidson says he believes most of his colleagues subscribed to the free-market reasoning that because the ISPs built the networks, they could do with them what they pleased. But many people don’t have access to more than one home broadband provider–particularly in many of the rural districts that Republicans represent. And, if money can’t really explain the polarization on internet privacy, then what? Republicans traditionally recoil from government regulation—but the FCC’s regulations carried a special taint: the agency passed them under the Obama administration.

While the US government is giving Internet service providers free rein to track their customers’ Internet usage for purposes of serving personalized advertisements, some Internet users are determined to fill their browsing history with junk so ISPs can’t discover their real browsing habits. Scripts and browser extensions might be able to fill your Web history with random searches and site visits. But will this actually fool an ISP that scans your Web traffic and shares it with advertising networks?

The digital divide is the number-one threat to community and economic development in the 21st century. Public policy 101 argues that, first and foremost, the problem needs to be defined and agreed upon in order to explore potential solutions. This report introduces a county-level digital divide index (DDI). The DDI ranges in value from 0 to 100, where 100 indicates the highest digital divide. This report presents findings for the 2014 updated version as well as the 2015 version. Some key findings include:

The percent of people without access to fixed broadband 25/3 decreased significantly between 2014 and 2015. However, this decrease took place mainly among counties with an already low digital divide. The number of people living in counties where the digital divide was higher (two higher quartiles) had a slight increase from 39.3 million in 2014 versus 39.5 million in 2015.

Efforts to reduce the digital divide will require public–private partnerships that deal with broadband infrastructure and digital literacy at the same time. Otherwise, residents may not subscribe to recently upgraded broadband connectivity, or those who increased their digital skills may run into lack of connectivity, expensive plans, and/or inadequate speeds.

On March 20, 2017, pursuant to an Agreement and Plan of Merger dated February 2, 2017, Entercom Communications Corp. (Entercom) and CBS Corporation (CBS), and its wholly-owned subsidiary CBS Radio, Inc. (CBSR), jointly submitted applications to the Commission seeking consent to the transfer of control and assignment of certain licenses pursuant to Section 310(d) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended.

The proposed transfer of control and assignment of these licenses is part of a larger transaction whereby: (1) CBSR will be separated from CBS pursuant to a Master Separations Agreement dated February 2, 2017; and (2) a wholly-owned subsidiary of Entercom (Constitution Merger Sub Corp.) will merge with CBSR, with the merged CBSR surviving as a whollyowned subsidiary of Entercom. Contemporaneously, Entercom will contribute all of the issued and outstanding equity interests of its direct subsidiary, Entercom Radio, LLC, to CBSR, resulting in a substantial change in control of Entercom from the current ownership. The jointly filed applications are listed in the Appendix to this Public Notice.

Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon published statements responding to the backlash they’ve been receiving since Congress voted to revoke a strong set of internet privacy rules that would have prevented internet providers from using or sharing their customers’ web browsing history without permission. The companies take different approaches when responding, but the takeaway from all three is that they think customers should stop worrying.

• Comcast takes a friendlier approach and actually makes some basic commitments to customers. “We do not sell our broadband customers’ individual web browsing history,” writes Gerard Lewis, Comcast’s chief privacy officer. “We did not do it before the FCC’s rules were adopted, and we have no plans to do so.”
• Verizon’s approach is similar. The company’s chief privacy officer, Karen Zacharia, offers a fairly clear statement: “Verizon does not sell the personal web browsing history of our customers,” she writes. “We don’t do it and that’s the bottom line.”
• AT&T’s response has the same message at its core, but the tone couldn’t be more different: it’s standoffish and argumentative, with AT&T’s public policy chief, Bob Quinn, trying to explain why nothing has changed and the FCC was wrong in the first place.