Op-Ed

[Commentary] As the son of a broadcast pioneer who got his license from the Department of Commerce in 1923 and as a former broadcaster myself, I read with great sadness “FCC to Lift Limits on Media Deals.” Although Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai justifies his proposal by saying it will lead to more news gathering locally and more news for consumers, my experience tells me it will be the opposite. First, viewers and listeners don’t need more news, they need better news.

[Commentary] In a few weeks, it is widely expected that the Federal Communications Commission will release a draft order reversing the Obama Administration’s controversial 2015 decision to reclassify broadband internet access from a lightly-regulated “information” service under Title I of the Communications Act to a heavily-regulated common carrier “telecommunications” service under Title II of that same Act. As with the original 2015 decision, a court appeal of this policy change is a virtual certainty. Yet, even though the DC Circuit in USTelecom v.

[Commentary] Under the plain terms of the Communications Act, the Federal Communications Commission is obligated to review industry mergers and acquisitions to determine whether such transactions serve the public interest. Given that the FCC is “entrusted with the responsibility to determine when and to what extent the public interest would be served by competition in the industry," the commission’s merger review serves a useful and important function.

[Commentary] Can the media fight the prospect of cultural death through entertainment? It won’t be easy. Surely we need more reporting on the infrastructure bill, on the prospects for job retraining, on cyber-security and the chances that upcoming elections will actually render something like the will of the people. We could hear more about prisons, more about poverty, more about the environment. But as long as readers are clicking Dopey Donald stories, this will not be easy. Journalists will have to be willing, in effect, to fight their readers for control of the media.

[Commentary] Based on our research, we have identified key strategies local newsrooms should be considering to reinvigorate themselves.

[Commentary] As the House GOP released the first draft of the tax plan the week of Oct 30, rural broadband deployment, an issue that continues to receive bipartisan congressional attention, may find some helpful incentives. For telecommunications companies that are highly capital-intensive, the draft that the Senate eventually adopts could impact investments in new rural broadband facilities or the upkeep of existing network infrastructure in rural and urban areas.

[Commentary] Last week the Federal Communications Commission, led by Chairman Ajit Pai, announced two orders that will be voted on later in Nov, which would roll back hard fought civil rights advances — at a time when our educational and economic opportunities, as well as political participation, are increasingly dependent upon communications infrastructure and technology. 

[Commentary] We should ask ourselves if we can find a way to re-introduce serious competition in social networking. Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik of the University of Chicago have proposed an intriguing idea. They build on the concept of “number portability”, the principle that you own your own phone number, and you can take your number with you to a different phone provider. The idea has promise in retail banking. Zingales and Rolnik suggest an analogy: social graph portability. The idea is that I could take my Facebook contacts with me to another service — call it “ZingBook”.

[Commentary] The latest news in the saga of Steve Bannon is that the former White House senior adviser has reportedly been pushing President Donald Trump to be more forceful against special counsel Robert Mueller. Bannon’s ideas allegedly include urging President Trump to cut funding for the probe, telling Trump to withhold documents and pressing Trump to bring in more aggressive lawyers. These latest alleged Bannon-Trump communications come on top of other reported contacts between the two since Bannon left the White House.

[Commentary] Things have improved in the last 20-plus years: We’ve gone from 15 million people on the internet when I joined the Clinton Administration to 3.5 billion on the internet today worldwide and, in the U.S., we’re 80 to 85 percent connected. The numbers are moving in the right direction, but we won’t be done until there is no gap, until every person who wants access has access to the information and opportunities the internet provides. We’re still hammering away at the problem of the connectivity gap, but the face of the problem has changed as well.