Op-Ed

[Commentary] If some areas end up with no winning bidder, does that mean the Federal Communications Commission's Connect America Fund Phase II auction is a failure? The answer is “No!” The FCC will need to look at the results of the Phase II auction to evaluate how universal service auctions are different in practice from spectrum auctions, and adjust accordingly, as necessary.

[Commentary] For the better part of 20 years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has engaged in a relentless assault against democratic institutions abroad, universal values and the rule of law.

[Commentary] A task force created by President Donald Trump has developed many recommendations for addressing this issue, but it has found one overarching challenge that we must overcome to ensure future rural prosperity. We must deploy high-speed internet access to rural America. E-connectivity is a tool that enables increased productivity for farms, factories, forests, and small businesses, and is fundamental for economic development and an improved quality of life.

[Commentary] If there was one bright spot in all this darkness—one series of moments when the web actually did live up to the most optimistic expectations—it was that in the year 2017, women took back the very platforms that have been used to torment and troll them for so long, and built a new-wave women’s movement on top of them. The fundamental issues with social media—the divisiveness, the echo chambers, the lack of nuance, the bots—still plague it, in many cases more than ever. But in 2017, women also reminded us all of the upside of connecting online.

Public entities like the Federal Communications Commission and state legislatures are supposed to look after the common good. Instead, their policies are making things tougher for small towns and rural areas anxious to improve their connectivity.

[Commentary] Platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas. It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic...I realized that the problems I had been seeing couldn’t be solved simply by, say, Facebook hiring staff to monitor the content on the site. The problems were inherent in the attention-based, algorithm-driven business model. And what I suspected was Russia’s meddling in 2016 was only a prelude to what we’d see in 2018 and beyond.

[Commentary]  Bill Gates is setting aside $80 million and over 24,000 acres to build one. Over in India, they’re planning to construct over 100 of them. They’re smart cities (SC), and they’ve been in development longer than you might think. This landscape of the future is gaining momentum as it enters the third stage of its evolution: the “city as a service.” The United Nations predicts a world population of 9.7 billion by 2050, leading to an urban population boom of 63%.

[Commentary] The so-called social media revolution isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Sites like Twitter and Facebook exacerbate emotions like outrage and fear—and don’t help democracy flourish. Social media too easily bypasses the rational or at least reasonable parts of our minds, on which a democratic public sphere depends. It speaks instead to the emotional, reactive, quick-fix parts of us, that are satisfied by images and clicks that look pleasing, that feed our egos, and that make us think we are heroic.

[Commentary] After comparing President Donald Trump's tweets with Fox's coverage every day since October, I can tell you that the Fox-Trump feedback loop is happening far more often than you think. There is no strategy to President Trump’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted. He darts with quark-like speed from topic to topic in his tweets because that’s how cable news works.

[Commentary] This blog reviews some specious claims made in Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Mignon Clyburn's statement on network neutrality.