Op-Ed

[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.

[Commentary] Does the elimination of network neutrality threaten religious speech? Should Congress cement into law the right to equal access on the World Wide Web?

[Commentary] Even among folks that support network neutrality, there's pretty clearly a contingent that still believes the damage caused by the repeal of the rules will somehow be subtle. Because the net neutrality debate in recent years wandered into more nuanced and quirky areas like interconnection and zero rating, they believe the ultimate impact of the repeal will likely be modest. 

[Commentary] My research suggests that managers of local television, the most popular news source in the US, recognize the competitive value of investigative reports (I measured competition as the degree of similarity between stations in Nielsen market “shares”).

[Commentary] With a 3-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission overturned a long tradition — one that had only culminated in 2015 in the formalizing of the principle of net neutrality, but that had been honored long before open internet rules became official. The old rules were easy for service providers to follow and their repeal creates incentives to slow down net services to extract premium prices.

[Commentary] We can’t trust that Comcast will protect our right to communicate without rules forcing them to do just that. So we’re back from Washington and ready to fight to keep the internet open for the poorest big city in America and beyond. Local communities have a big role to play. First, Congressional leaders have already moved to fully undo the horrible vote Ajit Pai’s Federal Communications Commission took on the 14th, with something called the Congressional Review Act.

[Commentary] Oregonians may recall that Portland was on the front lines of defending an open internet when cable companies first planned high-speed "broadband" in the late 1990s.