Matthew Yglesias

President Donald Trump and the broader Republican Party are moving forward on an agenda of business deregulation with a lack of concern for public opinion that, depending on how you look at it, could be seen as reckless, courageous, or horrifying. The latest and clearest example is the bill rolling back Obama-era efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to prevent cable and telecom companies from secretly selling users’ data. This was, obviously, not a major Trump campaign pledge or a headline feature of any GOP House or Senate candidate’s campaign. And a March 31 YouGov poll shows the public overwhelmingly wanted Trump to veto the bill — 80 percent of Democrats favored a veto, but so did 69 percent of independents and 75 percent of Republicans.

As President Donald Trump continues to build out his administration, many of his officials are having trouble filling vacancies in their departments because of questions about the loyalty of the people they want to select — questions that include scrutiny of old social media posts. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is sufficiently frustrated about the situation that “people familiar with the matter” leaked about his frustration to Bloomberg: "The White House’s reasons for the holdups vary, but questions about loyalty to Trump played a role in at least two cases, some of the people said. Mnuchin’s pick for the Treasury’s top lawyer, Brent McIntosh, got an especially tough vetting by the White House personnel office after his Twitter feed was flagged as potentially critical of Trump." Apparently, candidates for jobs have been asked to hand over their Facebook passwords so that old posts can be scrutinized for criticism of Trump.

It was real news from establishment outlets that made the difference in this campaign. The sum total of this media coverage — real stories based on editorial decisions about how to weight and present real facts — was to give the public the impression that two similarly ethically flawed candidates were running against each other in an election with low policy stakes. The reporters and editors responsible for that coverage can reasonably (if a bit absurdly) consider themselves proud of the work that led the public to that conclusion, or they can consider themselves ashamed of it. But the idea that voters were moved by fake stories about the pope rather than all-too-real ones about email servers is a preposterous evasion.

Beneath the din of e-mail coverage and the mountains of clichés about populism, the mass-market media has simply failed to convey what’s actually at stake in the election. Regardless of which candidate the policy-light tone of coverage helps at any given moment, it represents a fundamental abdication of responsibility to explain to people what is going on.

The two candidates are running on very different policy agendas, agendas that in some ways contradict the media narratives about downscale “populists” versus cosmopolitan elites. And because House Republicans are both unified on policy and entrenched in safely drawn districts, there is a sharp asymmetry in terms of the direction of change. Donald Trump is nobody’s idea of a policy wonk, but he has signed on to a real agenda, and if he wins he’ll probably implement it. The public should hear about its contents before they decide whether to make him president.

[Commentary] The good news for AT&T/Time Warner is that antitrust enforcement is not, in practice, as politicized as many people seem to think. In the past, regulators have allowed broadly similar mergers to go forward, albeit with conditions attached that undermine their main business rationale. But one reason antitrust enforcement has not been particularly politicized is that it hasn’t been a major point of political emphasis. That’s been changing rather rapidly in 2016. Here’s a look at some of the hurdles ahead:
Conduct remedies are going out of style
Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has made antitrust enforcement a priority
The timing of the deal makes this a key test

New Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon and new campaign adviser Roger Ailes aren’t business titans who are promising to help Trump come to Washington, roll up his sleeves, and solve problems with some good old-fashioned private sector knowhow. Indeed, more and more American business leaders are coming out against Trump. Instead, as Trump aims to become the Trumpiest Trump that he can be, he’s increasingly surrounding himself with media figures.

It’s hard to imagine today, but thinking back to a year ago you might have thought an outsider Trump campaign would feature an all-star group of business leaders promising to put their heads together to fix what’s ailing America. Tom Barrack and Peter Thiel in roles more substantive than convention speaker. Turnaround artists Carl Icahn and Sam Zell. Brash outsider Mark Cuban. Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina from the technology world. It might have been a total disaster, but it would have been something. But instead of a business all-star team, Trump is giving us retreats from far-right media. It all comes as a reminder of a fundamental truth of this campaign: Trump isn’t really a businessman in the conventional sense anymore, and hasn’t been for some time. He’s a television star.

[Commentary] On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled against a company called Aereo in a case that while not super-important on its face has potentially significant implications for the entire cloud storage industry.

Back on June 19, in another ruling, the Court substantially restricted the eligibility of software innovations for patent monopolies. And on June 23, it made it harder for the Environmental Protection Agency to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.

These three rulings have two things in common. They're all very consequential for American public policy, and they all have nothing to do with the United States Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

Reactions to the Aereo ruling were varied, but absolutely nobody said "regardless of what the courts decide, Congress can always rewrite the relevant laws to sort out any problems." Because everyone takes for granted that in this day and age Congress can't rewrite the relevant laws. It can't clarify the legality of Aereo's repacking of over-the-air television broadcasts, it can't clarify the patent status of software, and it certainly can't clarify the scope of the EPA's authority over climate pollution. Congress can name post offices and not much more.

The judicial branch is simply not properly equipped to make broad evaluations of the policy merits of different approaches.

[Commentary] Americans really dislike their pay-television and broadband Internet providers, according to a new report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

And the biggest companies, like Comcast, have the least-happy customers. Overall, pay television and Internet companies rank last in satisfaction out of forty industries. And it's no coincidence.

Market competition has its problems, but it is a relentless driver of customer satisfaction. Yet ISPs and cable companies operate in industries where market competition doesn't really work. That means profit-maximizing strategies don't require satisfied customers and it leaves policymakers with really tough problems. What happens to markets with weak competition? Three things:

• High prices
• Price discrimination
• Bad customer service

Prices are high in uncompetitive markets because they are constrained by your willingness to pay rather than by your ability to get a better deal from another provider. Because prices are driven by willingness to pay, sellers in uncompetitiveness markets try to charge different amounts to different people through complicated and non-transparent pricing schemes -- this is economically efficient but annoying and violates people's sense of fair play. Last but by no means least in an uncompetitive market there is little reason to invest in customer service. If you're calling to schedule an appointment with the cable guy, you by definition want cable so delivering it to you quickly and efficiently isn't a priority.

[Commentary] Concurrent to the dramatic firing of top editor Jill Abramson, the New York Times has been in the news thanks to the leaking of a 96-page Innovation Report that offers a scathing internal assessment of the paper's digital strategy.

It is the most thorough look at the insides of the most important newspaper in the country that we have ever seen. What's more, in keeping with the high standards of the New York Times it's simply an excellent piece of reporting and analysis.

Managing disruptive technological change is really hard. Not only -- or even mostly or even partially -- because the people in charge don't "get it."

As the Innovation Report notes, the Times currently derives 75 percent of its revenue from its print operation. Under the circumstances, shifting to a digital-first mentality is genuinely difficult.

The good news for the Times is that in addition to its extraordinarily strong brand and currently profitable business it has an extremely clear-eyed look at the nature of that challenge.

[Commentary] The broadband industry does not like the idea of government regulations that would make it less profitable. In search of a more persuasive argument than that, Tom Downey, a lobbyist for the National Cable Telecommunications Association, is circulating a letter to members of congress arguing that "in the years that broadband service has been subjected to relatively little regulation, investment and deployment have flourished and broadband competition has increased, all to the benefit of consumers and the American economy." So is broadband investment flourishing? Not according to the NCTA's own data which shows investment booming in the years before the Great Recession and declining more recently. They looked at cumulative gross investment so that literally any possible state of the world will show an upward slope. Even if all the broadband industry did was repair lines that were downed in storms, cumulative investment would go up over time. But they threw in a bonus trick of using four-year periods (1996, 2000, 2004, 2008) and then switching to a five-year period for the last one.