Lauren Frayer

A West Virginia Broadband Bill introduced in the state house of representatives aims to spur broadband competition and deployment by allowing local communities to form cooperatives to build broadband networks. House Bill 3093 also would re-establish a state broadband enhancement council charged with collecting data about internet speeds, seeking and dispensing non-state funding and grants, and making recommendations to the legislature. Additionally, the bill includes rules about the use of conduit, microtrenching and pole access, and would prevent broadband providers from making false claims about the speeds their broadband service is capable of delivering.

Importantly, the bill is designed to require no state funding. Nevertheless,a local media outlet expects the bill to face opposition in the state senate, considering that the senate president also works as sales director for Frontier Communications, which already has expressed concerns about whether the bill would achieve its intended goals.

The much-discussed President Donald Trump federal budget proposal zeros-out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts, both of which also support some public broadcast programming. What not everyone may realize is that the partisan threat to federal funding is at the core of public broadcasting’s origin story a half century ago—and that its first, and unlikely, prime-time stars won fame by allowing the most significant presidential scandal in our history to unfold right in America’s living rooms.

When it was proposed by the 1967 Carnegie Commission, an essential recommendation was that public broadcasting not be subject to the unpredictability and political pressures inherent in the annual congressional budget process. But President Lyndon Johnson'’s decision not to push for a dedicated, politically insulated funding source—like the kind of trust fund supported by an excise tax on television purchases that funded the BBC—meant the creation of a small but highly visible political football that has been kicked around Washington ever since. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established to provide a “heat shield” protecting stations and producers in the system from political pressures that could come with congressional appropriations—an approach that seemed especially wishful after President Richard Nixon took office.

[David M. Stone is executive vice president for communications at Columbia University.]

In January, a tech consultant from the broadband dead zone donned his pamphleteer's cap. In nine fiercely argued pages, Stephen E. Harris went hard after a multi-million dollar question: Why was the Massachusetts Broadband Institute holding back money for design and engineering services — originally $18 million for all unserved towns, or 45 percent of MBI's bond funding — from towns that want to build their own networks?

A kind of Tom Paine for the 21st century, Harris put his argument into his study's title. "Last Mile towns must control all of their broadband funds," he called it. He shipped copies to area lawmakers and to many of the town broadband committees trying to close the digital divide. Weeks later, when MBI officials convened a community forum in Worthington (MA) in Feb, they heard a common refrain. Towns desperate for last-mile broadband connections, speaker after speaker said, ought to get all available money from the state, including the "professional services" allocation. Harris stood nodding in the back of Worthington's Town Hall. "I was taken aback that all the towns were asking for the professional services money," Harris said later. His report wasn't even a month old.

The US (and the world) is in the midst of a sea change in how we spend our leisure time. Young people are less inclined to indulge in America's favorite pastime: zoning out in front of the TV. On average, people ages 18 to 24 spend half as much time watching live and recorded television as 35-to-49-year-old Americans, according to Nielsen.Young people are definitely watching video, but it's more likely something from YouTube or a friend's Snapchat story on their phone than the episode of "Grey's Anatomy" their parents are watching on the living room TV.

As TV changes accelerate, though, not enough people in the technology and entertainment industries are talking about a crucial issue: Can America’s expensive and inferior home and mobile internet networks handle it as more people shift from watching TV to having their entertainment delivered over the web? Even now, many home internet networks can't manage. Media and tech consulting firm Activate estimated only 12 percent of US households have fast enough internet speed to support multiple people watching TV online via services such as Sling TV. About 34 million Americans -- 10 percent of the population, and 39 percent in rural parts of the country -- have no access to fast home internet, according to an analysis by the Federal Communications Commissions.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission is finishing an “incentive auction” of broadcast spectrum by which it created a market to match the price at which broadcasters were willing to sell spectrum with the price mobile operators were willing to pay. A bipartisan group of House Commerce Committee members described the outcome this way: “The incentive auction’s conclusion with more than $19 billion in bids marks the end of the second-largest auction and years of successful work in bringing market forces to bear on spectrum use policy. … Not only did the auction successfully encourage investment and competition by bringing 70 MHz of licensed and 14 MHz of unlicensed spectrum to meet our nation’s wireless broadband needs, but it also generated $7 billion for deficit reduction.” How did such a success occur and what lessons does it bring to today’s environment? Three stand out.

First, begin with a clear problem statement and generate bipartisan support for solving the problem.
Second, the solution should flow from a process that is transparent, fair, invites all to share credit and incorporates insights from a spectrum of stakeholders.
There’s one more lesson that might prove more controversial, though it shouldn’t. That is that smart, data-driven economic policy will create far more jobs and economic growth than ad hoc, stunt-driven events.

[Blair Levin is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Project]

The future looks grim for digital privacy and the open Internet in the United States. Here are six ways you can get involved:
1. Call or e-mail your congressional representatives
2. Contact Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai
3. Check out digital-rights groups
4. Pressure tech companies to do the right thing
5. Know your rights and protect your communications
6. Stay engaged with cyber security developments

[Commentary] New Jersey auctioned off a public treasure - several of its public TV stations - for possibly hundreds of millions of dollars with little public debate or any idea what the governor plans to do with the money. This windfall has received shockingly little public attention. But here's the good news: It's not too late to seize this moment and use this money to transform New Jersey into the national leader in digital public media, local journalism, and civic technology.

Gov Chris Christie (R-NJ) isn't sharing his plans thus far, but the short-sighted solution is use it to plug some of the holes in the lame-duck governor's final budget. The much better idea is to take the revenue from selling off the remnants of 20th-century public media and invest it in building innovative 21st-century public-interest media that meets New Jersey residents' information needs.

[Craig Aaron is the president and CEO of Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund.]

Not surprisingly, Dish blamed Hearst for the ongoing retransmission consent impasse that kept Hearst stations of the satellite operator. That came in response to a letter from Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA) late last week. Rep Eshoo, whose constituents are affected by the impasse, said the failure to reach a new deal--Hearst stations in 26 markets have been off Dish for the past two-plus weeks--was harming viewers. She said she was unhappy that the companies did not take steps to keep Hearst stations on Dish during the impasse.

Rep Eshoo pointed out that the station in her market KSBW, was also off during a Hearst-DirecTV impasse earlier this year. She said she hoped they would resolve the dispute ASAP, and said she would continue to push for making retrans "blackouts" illegal, saying consumers should not be pawns in such disputes.

[Commentary] I often run across the belief, expressed in print or in person, that Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows for bulk collection of information and that it offers no protections whatsoever for non-US persons. Both of these are urban legends; neither of them is factually correct. 702 does not allow collection of bulk data, and 702 does not allow indiscriminate collection of non-US-person communication.

As I testified to Congress, it’s my belief, based on my personal experience and professional judgment, that Congress drew the balance of authority and restrictions in the right place when it enacted FAA 702 in 2008 and when it reauthorized it in 2012. This year provides an important opportunity to FISA Amendments Act to be carefully scrutinized once again. But as Congress continues its work, it’s worth remembering that things that aren’t broke don’t need fixing. Sometimes they just need to be extended as-is.

[April Doss is a partner and chair of the Cybersecurity and Privacy practice group at Saul Ewing. Prior to that, she spent over a decade at the National Security Agency, where she was the Associate General Counsel for Intelligence Law. ]

In a list of technical requirements for a smartphone recording app, the FBI says it doesn't need to use encryption. Encryption can protect data from all sorts of threats: it can stop sensitive information from being read after it is intercepted, or may thwart attackers from getting at data stored on a device. But according to a procurement document published by the FBI, the agency says it doesn't need to use encryption for protecting unclassified audio or video evidence. The snippet is included in a 2016 document laying out the technical requirements for a smartphone recording app that the FBI requested be developed. According to the document, the app would allow both overt and covert recording and streaming.