Editorial

[Commentary] The proposed witness list for a September network neutrality hearing at the House Commerce Committee betrays a dismaying ignorance about why net neutrality is an issue.

The committee set the hearing up as something of a clash of titans, inviting the chief executives of the largest broadband providers and the biggest Internet companies, such as Google, Facebook and Netflix. The only thing missing was a steel cage. The point of having net neutrality rules isn’t to protect multibillion-dollar Internet companies. It’s to give other companies a chance to join or topple them. The rapid pace of technological change makes even companies with enormous economies of scale vulnerable to disruption, especially when consumers can easily switch from one shiny online object to the next. Curiously, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and other Republicans have voiced less concern about the prospects of these smaller online businesses — the ones likely to inject a crucial dose of innovation into the 21st century economy — than the ability of giant, consolidating broadband providers to invest in faster, more widely available services. Better broadband connections in rural America, poverty-stricken inner cities and other underserved areas is a most worthy goal. But those connections shouldn’t come at the cost of net neutrality.

If Republican lawmakers don’t like applying decades-old utility-style regulation to broadband providers, they need to work with Democrats to give the commission explicit new authority to protect the open Internet from interference. Otherwise, the fight over how to do that will be always-on too.

[Commentary] Many business models have been disrupted by the internet. The next incumbent industry being challenged includes the old-style cable and telecom companies. They do everything they can to throw mud on the open-access fiber-optic infrastructure — including UTOPIA — that some of us enjoy along the Wasatch Front. Don’t fall for it. The future is brighter than the negativism of these companies and their allies in the Utah Taxpayers Association. That negativism leads to flawed studies like that from the University of Pennsylvania, which are easily rebutted by Next Century Cities and the Coalition for Local Internet Choice. But one has to take a moment to understand why Utahns, and everyone in the country, want the opportunity for gigabit broadband at better prices.

[Commentary] The Justice Department should be taking a hard look at leaks right now; that is a proper role and aim for the department, at least with respect to those leaks that are illegal and damaging to important government interests. Yet the press conference was disturbing nonetheless — less for the reasons so many media figures reached for the smelling salts than because of the not-so-subtle sheen of politics coloring the entire episode. There are big costs to certain types of leaks, and we are paying those costs every day. And for that reason, the current flood of leaks, whatever public purposes they might also be serving, is deeply disturbing and corrosive of important values we expect to presidency to protect.

[Commentary] When President Donald Trump attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a tweet July 25 for not aggressively investigating Hillary Clinton, most attention focused, understandably, on the implications for Sessions. Yet even more alarming than the president’s assault on his own attorney general is President Trump’s return to the “lock her up” theme of his 2016 campaign.

Members of Congress who are, properly, investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 race have not questioned President Trump’s legitimacy. Hillary Clinton herself graciously conceded. The FBI thoroughly investigated her e-mail practices and found no basis to prosecute. Yet President Trump now attacks Sessions for taking “a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes,” implying that a politically inspired re-investigation might help the attorney general keep his job. It is disgusting. What’s at stake is much more than the careers of any particular attorney general or special counsel. The United States has been a role model for the world, and a source of pride for Americans, because it has strived to implement the law fairly. When he attacks that process and seeks revenge on his opponents, President Trump betrays bedrock American values. It’s crucial that other political leaders say so.

[Commentary] Fakes in the world of print publishing are relatively easy to discredit if not always to spot. Inconsistencies, errors, and—perhaps most importantly—widely accessible originals, make the job of persuasively forging content a significant challenge. In digital publishing, however, even maintaining original content cannot be taken for granted.

Being able to identify genuine digital material is “a huge issue,” says David Schulz, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and director of the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. Given the increasing sophistication of fake digital content, Schulz asks, “How do you prove something was ‘out there’? How do you prove it’s authentic?” If reputable news organizations digitally sign their content, it would increase the difficulty of creating fake news by raising doubts about material that isn’t similarly authenticated. Likewise, developing such a standard would support archives that can withstand attempts to reauthor history. Although the technical challenge is substantial, it’s also one that is important to take on, as new organizations strive to rebuild public trust and set their work apart from that of content mills and fake news factories.

[Susan McGregor is Assistant Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Assistant Professor at Columbia School of Journalism.]

[Commentary] President Donald Trump’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, has repeatedly signaled that he wants to dismantle the net-neutrality protections that were put in place during the Obama years after a massive campaign by democracy advocates, consumer groups, and defenders of a free and open Internet. If Pai’s FCC votes later this summer for that dismantlement, the future of personal communications, education, commerce, economic arrangements, and democracy itself will be radically altered.

The fight over net neutrality is about much more than the fight over whether telecommunications companies will be able to create “fast lanes” for paying content from corporations and billionaire-funded politicians while relegating the essential informational sharing of civil society to “slow lanes” on the periphery of what was supposed to be “the information superhighway.” Because our lives are now so digital, and because they are becoming so automated, the fight over net neutrality is really the fight over the whole of the future. It comes down to a simple question: Will that future be defined by civic and democratic values? Or will it defined by commercial and entertainment values?

[Commentary] We’re still picking ourselves off the floor from all the laughing we did when AT&T issued a press release announcing that it was joining the “Day of Action for preserving and advancing the open internet.” Here are some things AT&T could actually do to defend Net Neutrality and the open internet:

1) Quit trying to co-opt the terms “Net Neutrality” and “open internet.”
2) Actually support real Net Neutrality.
3) Get your CEO on the record in support of Title II.
4) Quit suing the FCC over the 2015 Open Internet Order.
5) Stop sending all your lobbyists to lobby against Net Neutrality.
6) In fact, leave Congress out of it altogether.
7) Stop lying.
8) Specifically stop lying about investment.
9) Abandon your merger with Time Warner.
10) If you won’t do that, can you at least pledge to extend John Oliver’s contract when you own HBO? That’s our guy.

[Commentary] Chattanooga (TN) had the right idea when it requested and received Federal Communications Commission approval to expand broadband service – offered through its municipal utility provider, EPB – into neighboring Bradley County, an area overlooked by commercial providers. Unfortunately, that plan was sidelined in 2016 when Tennessee turned it into a state’s rights issue and successfully contested the approval in federal court.

After the ruling, state attorney general Herbert Slatery reiterated the case “was not about access to broadband,” but rather about preventing the federal government from exercising power it didn’t have. Meanwhile, many rural communities continue to lose out, either unserved or underserved by broadband providers. During a stop in Memphis a year ago, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke outlined what the real goal here should be. “Broadband now is an essential part of people’s lives,” he said. “The highways and the roads that we drive on are what allow goods and services to transport at quick speed and grow the economy of our country. It’s the same thing with the internet. And everybody needs access to it.”

[Commentary] Remember when we used to obsess about every presidential tweet? When every story was about us? When Donald Trump’s war with the media was, really, the only thing that mattered? We need to stop. Stop reporting on every tweet with the volume of a declaration of war; stop letting the president and his staff frame every misstep and scandal as a media story; stop treating Trump’s war with the press as if it’s the most important thing happening in this country. It’s not. Our response to each of Trump’s media-bashing episodes comes off as if we’re hearing them for the first time. Can you believe he said that? Could this be the thing that finally does him in? Does he have no respect for the First Amendment? The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t respect the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech.

The media’s impulse, which is understandable, is to keep the focus on his threats to the press, and not to let them become normalized. But we have reached the point at which the media response has become counterproductive and even beneficial to the president and his lackeys in the White House, who have turned the West Wing into a megaphone for Trump’s faux media war and reporters in the White House briefing room into photo-op foils. It’s amazing, and absurd, that we turn over live television to the press secretary to air the administration’s latest broadside against the press, and let senior administration officials go off the record to attack our own outlets. Every time President Trump fires a shot in his war against the media, there’s an opportunity for a more serious, nuanced argument about why everyone benefits from a free and vigorous press: Airing a president and his policies to open discussion and scrutiny results in better government.

[Commentary] Telecommunications companies are preparing to roll out the next generation of wireless networks, dubbed “5G,” which promise an enormous increase in capacity and connectivity. These networks not only will increase competition in broadband, they are a key enabling technology for a host of advanced products and services. They also represent a gateway to better economic opportunities in inner-city areas that are underserved by broadband today.

But these new networks are different in structure and appearance too. Instead of high-powered antennas on tall towers, they rely on an array of lower-power transmitters closer to the ground that serve much smaller “cells.” That’s why mobile phone companies are concerned that cities and counties will throw up bureaucratic or financial roadblocks to 5G in their communities. It’s not a groundless worry; wireless companies already have encountered local resistance in places where they have introduced the new technology. It’s the look and the intrusiveness of the small cell networks that seems to spark the controversy. People are upset about the deployment of thousands of pieces of equipment the size of small appliances being placed strategically and liberally on publicly owned “vertical infrastructure” (that’s bureaucratese for municipal utility poles, street lights and even traffic lights). That means a lot of equipment in full view and in proximity — really close in some cases — to houses and people. The wireless industry has a solution to this potentially huge NIMBY headache: A bill in the California legislature (SB 649) that would “streamline” the approval process for putting small cell networking gear on public poles and lights. If it’s on property the government controls, approval would be automatic in most cases, so local governments couldn’t drag out the permitting process with public hearings and studies. The bill also would limit how much rent locals can charge the companies for space on their poles and lights.

The telecommunication industry has been pushing this “streamlining” strategy in other states, with various degrees of success. Eleven have adopted some sort of laws to limit the local permitting process and pole fees. Legislators in other states, like Washington, have been more skeptical. California’s lawmakers ought to be wary as well and show more interest in protecting the rights of communities to govern the use of their infrastructure, rather than letting telecommunication companies make those decisions for them.