Op-Ed

[Commentary] Congress is considering sensible reforms to ensure that Fourth Amendment warrant requirements apply to incidental and “about” collection. We believe that Section 702 authorities are important to our national security. But the unanimous opinion of the Review Group stands since 2013: Judges should approve Fourth Amendment search warrants before searching the communications of Americans.

[Peter Swire is the Elizabeth and Tommy Holder Chair of Law and Ethics at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business, and served as one of five members of President Obama's Review Group on Intelligence and Communication Technology. Dick Clarke is CEO of Good Harbor]

[Commentary] The European Union’s law “laying down measures concerning open internet access” came into force in 2016. After a year with the law on the books, telecom regulators across Europe have submitted compliance reports to the supervisory Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) and the European Commission. While no bad internet service providers (ISPs) or violations have emerged, a regulatory bureaucracy is growing because of the law.

[Roslyn Layton was a member of the Trump FCC transition team, and is a visiting researcher at Aalborg University Center for Communication, Media, and Information Technologies and a vice president at Strand Consult, both in Denmark.]

[Commentary] There is one aspect of criminal justice reform that the current administration has tragically ignored: the broken market for inmate calling services.

Inmate calling is a horribly malfunctioning system that not only adversely impacts inmates and their families, but our society as a whole. Providers of inmate calling services compete and win business not based on being the lowest-cost bidder, as is customary for most requests for proposals to governmental agencies. Rather, they win contracts based on which of them is willing to pay the most in kickbacks (they call them “commissions”) to those correctional facilities. The result is not the lowest cost service for inmates and their families, but instead, rates for phone calls that have been as high as $14 per minute.

The FCC should end the practice of picking and choosing, ignoring and punting, while an unarguably dysfunctional market regime preys on the most vulnerable. The FCC can and should adopt targeted rules to address the costs of interstate calls. States and localities can and should reform their practices to cap rates and eliminate kickbacks. And Congress can and should enact a legislative solution that provides a firm legal foundation for further inmate calling reforms. Private litigation could also attack these practices, and some lawsuits have already been filed. But policymakers should also work to help new services and technologies enter the marketplace, to increase competition and lower prices. There is no good policy reason why an inmate’s family should have to use the most antiquated and expensive systems to communicate with loved ones when viable alternatives exist. The time to act is now.

[Commentary] If we cannot get net neutrality right, we can forget about the transformative democratic potential of the net. Network neutrality is the necessary, but not the sufficient, foundation of an open internet. And anything less than a truly open internet would be a tragic denial of the awesome potential of digital technology to transform our lives.

We should be in a golden age of media. We might have gotten to such a golden age had we not allowed the consolidators to kill independent media, not encouraged Wall Street expectations to smother Main Street needs, not permitted commercialization to supersede real news and information, and not let our US government default on its public interest responsibilities. I believe more and more people in your country and mine, regardless of party persuasions, are becoming concerned about this. You and I in both our great nations must harness this concern and turn it into policy. No one is going to do this for us. We can have that golden age, we need that golden age, and we will get there not separately, but together. It will be a tough climb, but a climb worth making. Let’s put on our mountain-climbing boots and get on with it.

[Former-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps joined Common Cause to lead its Media and Democracy Reform Initiative.]

[Commentary] Anchor institutions like schools, libraries and health care providers play an important role in bringing connectivity to their local communities. But advances in telemedicine and education will not be fully realized if rural consumers do not have adequate broadband service at home. School aged children will struggle if they cannot do their homework. Individuals with medical conditions that require active monitoring – diabetes, congestive heart failure and more – need broadband at home to transmit critical medical data in real time to medical professionals.

That is why local government officials and anchor institutions should be paying attention to the implementation of the Connect America Fund, now and in the years ahead. The FCC is working to hold an auction in 2018 to award nearly $2 billion in funding over the next decade from Phase II of the Connect America Fund to service providers to extend fixed broadband to unserved residential and small business locations, and a separate auction to award $4.53 billion in funding over a decade from Phase II of the Mobility Fund to mobile wireless providers to extend LTE service to rural America. Any entity willing to provide the requisite level of service set by the FCC and meet other requirements can bid in those auctions for the subsidy.

Local leaders should ask: is it possible to utilize funding in a more coordinated way from E-rate, the Rural Healthcare program, and the Connect America Fund to build a business case to serve the entire community? What efficiencies might be gained from building an integrated broadband network for the entire community? Are the service providers that currently participate in any of these FCC’s universal service programs planning to bid in these upcoming Connect America Fund auctions? Who else might bid?

[Carol Mattey is the principal of Mattey Consulting LLC, which provides strategic and public policy advisory services to broadband providers, governmental agencies, non-profit organizations, and other entities active in the telecommunications arena]

[Commentary] Internet’s unique ability to personalize and to create virtual communities of interest accelerated the decline of newspapers and television business models and altered the flow of information in ways that we are still uncovering. “Media” now means digital and cable, cool mediums that require hot performance. Trust in all media, including traditional media, is at an all-time low, and we’re just now beginning to grapple with the threat to democracy posed by this erosion of trust.

At Knight Foundation, we have long supported efforts to strengthen trust in news. Given the heightened challenge we face, Knight is ramping up our funding of these efforts, and we recently formed a new panel, the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy, to explore the broader challenges facing journalism and its role in civic life.

[Alberto Ibargüen is the CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation]

[Commentary] Wikipedia, one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web, is in existential crisis. This has nothing to do with money. A couple of years ago, the site launched a panicky fundraising campaign, but ironically thanks to Donald Trump, Wikipedia has never been as wealthy or well-organized. American liberals, worried that Trump’s rise threatened the country’s foundational Enlightenment ideals, kicked in a significant flow of funds that has stabilized the nonprofit’s balance sheet.

That happy news masks a more concerning problem—a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website. It is another troubling sign of a general trend around the world: The very idea of knowledge itself is in danger.

[Hossein Derakhshan is an Iranian-Canadian media analyst who was imprisoned in Iran from 2008 to 2014.]

[Commentary] The tools of technology should strengthen, not weaken, democracy. To that end, we should require greater disclosure of the funders of online political advertisements. Tech firms also need to make heavy investments into weeding out fake accounts and false news. Even if tech companies do not adopt the journalistic standards of newspapers, they must offer readers, particularly students, some way of distinguishing fact from opinion. It’s heartening to see companies already making efforts to take some of these steps. Admitting their own shortcomings without delay and showing measurable progress will be key to earning the public’s trust.

Technology offers us hope for a new prosperity and understanding for this century. But it will take enlightened leadership. More than stock prices or product launches, Silicon Valley’s legacy will be defined by whether tech leaders step up to contribute to the larger American experiment.

[Commentary] As nearly all usable radio spectrum has been allocated to particular uses and assigned to particular users, shifting spectrum toward modern uses almost certainly requires taking from one use or user to give to other uses and users. Such spectrum repurposing need not be contentious and is often successful. The recent $41 billion AWS-3 spectrum auction, the largest-grossing auction in history, involved spectrum repurposed from Federal government incumbents to mobile wireless providers. Yet, success is not guaranteed.

Spectrum, like land, is typically “zoned” to particular uses that play nice together. For instance, a relatively low-powered satellite signal might be drowned in a sea of high-powered, land-based cellular signals. Like small and big dogs being kept separate at a dog park, different types of radio signals are managed to mitigate conflict using technical means such as power limitations and boundaries between interfering frequencies or assigning users and uses varying degrees of priority. Before one can reassign satellite spectrum to terrestrial wireless broadband use, therefore, one must seek permission from the FCC: terrestrial services are prone to interfering with satellite signals, so an approval requires a demonstration that interference with others is not a problem.

[Dr. George S. Ford is Chief Economist of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies]

[Commentary] The president’s use of a public platform like Twitter to talk directly with the American people is unprecedented for the presidency, and it raises legal, ethical, and cultural issues that have never been tackled in American politics. The more outrageous President Donald Trump’s online comments have become, the more coverage they’ve received, creating a symbiotic relationship that has come to define Trump’s relationship with the media that covers him. But it has also boxed in a press corps that has come to simultaneously depend on and benefit from Trump’s Twitter torrent. Just because it’s being tweeted by the president, is it news?

In effect, Twitter has given Trump the illusion of transparency and accessibility without his having to actually provide them—or the accountability that usually comes with a two-way conversation with the press. It allows him to state untruths with impunity, knowing that his tweets will be widely redistributed by his followers and the media, and to dodge follow-up questions or criticism.

[Mathew Ingram is a former senior writer with Fortune magazine]