Op-Ed

[Commentary] Politicians, in theory, are supposed to be responsive to public outcry. When faced with an avalanche of blast emails from angry constituents, therefore, legislators generally are moved to act. In contrast, independent regulatory agencies are supposed to be (but admittedly often are not) apolitical and immune from such pressure. While it is true that administrative agencies must subject their actions to “public notice and comment” under the Administrative Procedure Act, regulatory agencies should not promulgate rules and regulations based upon the vox populi; rather, these agencies are charged with dispassionately implementing their respective enabling statutes as delineated by Congress based upon the plain text of the statute, the case law interpreting that statute, the economics, and the substantive record before them. If they fail in that task, then administrative agencies can be reprimanded by an appellate court for engaging in arbitrary and capricious behavior or, in very rare cases, be subject to congressional rebuke via the Congressional Review Act. If you want to rant, then have at it on Twitter. But if you want to file something in an official record and meaningfully participate in the regulatory process, then perhaps a few guidelines should apply.

[Spiwak is the president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies]

[Commentary] For 23.4 million rural Americans – roughly the population of New York City and Los Angeles and Chicago and Houston and Philadelphia and Phoenix and San Antonio and San Diego, combined –access to quality broadband internet remains out of reach. We need innovative solutions to bridge this gap and bring broadband access to rural America.

Until now, the biggest hurdle to expanding rural broadband access has been the cost- and resource- prohibitive nature of building out wired connectivity in remote areas with small populations. However, attention has shifted to an innovative new concept that leverages a resource that we already have. A resource that has been patiently waiting to be used: TV white spaces (TVWS). These so-called white spaces are large blocks of spectrum that were designed as buffer spaces between television channels. Today, these spaces remain available and unused by traditional broadcast TV stations. Innovation and infrastructure are expensive. But innovation for the sake of rural broadband - through an available, unused resource that helps talented Americans fulfill their potential - is worth every penny.

[Yack is the Chief Operations Officer at Colorado Technology Consultants]

[Commentary] The more people learn about the frenzied Big Media-Wall Street rush to consolidate our communications ecosystem into a playground for monopolists-on-the-make, the more they dislike what they see. For example, a recent poll shows two-thirds of us are opposed to competition-busting transactions like AT&T and Time Warner, almost equally divided among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Less well-known until recently is the Sinclair-Tribune proposal currently pending at the Federal Communications Commission. Sinclair is already publicly bragging that it will get the FCC nod of approval in the months just ahead. I have called Sinclair “the most dangerous company most Americans have never heard of.” Already the country’s largest local TV station owner (173 stations now, 215 post-merger), Sinclair has an insatiable appetite for more.
[Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps joined Common Cause to lead its Media and Democracy Reform Initiative]

[Commentary] Current Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has recently proposed creating a Bureau of Economics and Data. I have no small amount of instinctive sympathy for his proposal, having myself been part of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division’s then-new Economic Policy Office, now called the Economic Analysis Group, at the beginning of my career. The Office’s goal was to preserve the ability of economists to make policy calls apart from pressures from the lawyers to evaluate cases on the basis of courtroom success.

Nevertheless, while Chairman Pai’s interest in forming a similar organization within the FCC is understandable, as is the support his proposal has received, I do not believe that a such an office of economics is the right fix for the FCC, and may do more harm than good.

[Tim Brennan is a professor of Public Policy and Economics and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He recently served as Chief Economist at the FCC.]

[Commentary] Every day a new front emerges in Big Tech’s battle against fake news. Signs of trouble reared their head during the election, when hyper-partisan misinformation began materializing on Facebook. Months later it became known that many of these sites had been weaponized in a larger misinformation campaign spearheaded by external players, including the Russian government.

While they make head nods toward trying to fix the misinformation problem, the tech giants refuse to own up to these issues–citing the privacy of their clients and their own proprietary ad systems. While it may seem noble that the big tech companies are taking up the charge, their current attempts will likely produce little effect. The problem rests in the very advertising systems these companies created. No amount of content tagging or ad category de-incentivizing is going to stop the beast unless a bigger upheaval begins to take root.

[Cale is a Brooklyn-based reporter.]

[Commentary] During her news briefings the week of Sept 11, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has repeatedly suggested that former FBI director James B. Comey may have broken the law and should be investigated. To be clear, this “prosecution from the lectern” is not illegal. It’s probably a sign of the times that it doesn’t even seem particularly surprising. But it should be deeply disturbing.

The president, of course, is the head of the executive branch and the attorney general’s boss. But when it comes to criminal prosecution, there is a long-standing norm of Justice Department independence. Presidents typically don’t interfere with or comment on criminal investigations. This norm is central to our commitment to the rule of law. It reduces the danger that criminal prosecution may be used for political ends. Presidents typically avoid even the appearance of using the justice system to punish political foes or help political allies. That’s banana-republic stuff — it’s not supposed to happen here. Sanders’s accusations from the lectern are simply one symptom of a much larger problem. Anyone who cares about the integrity of the criminal justice system has reason to be concerned by the behavior of this administration.

[Randall D. Eliason teaches white-collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School.]

[Commentary] Rural areas don’t need to wait on expensive and hard-to-build fiber-to-the-home networks to start using broadband. In many cases, fixed wireless can provide a fast and affordable last-mile connection in underserved areas. And some communities are building the system themselves.

WISPs – Wireless Internet Service Providers – are the un-song heroes closing the digital divide in rural communities. New technology makes WISPs faster than ever, much more affordable than fiber, and a great option in areas where terrain and population density make wired systems problematic.

[Craig Settles is a broadband industry analyst and consultant]

[Commentary] The problem is that the Federal Communications Commission’s annual broadband report, by law, demands both a factual conclusion and a regulatory call to action. Depending on its findings, the agency is required to increase or decrease regulation. As a result, the temptation to slant the report’s findings to support a broader agenda has proven difficult to resist.

The FCC should create an interactive broadband dashboard, one that can be continually updated with the most current information on broadband technologies, speeds, performance and coverage. The dashboard should provide, to paraphrase the old Dragnet TV show, “just the facts.” No opinions about adequacy, timeliness, or what constitutes “reasonable.” The FCC could present the data it collects in ways that enable broadband stakeholders to improve their solutions to deployment issues. The FCC could do the country a huge favor by making sure it gets the facts right and letting stakeholders interpret their meaning — before the commission develops its own policy agenda.

[Larry Downes is project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.]

[Commentary] The Sept. 9 Digest item “Ex-IRS official won’t be charged in scandal” noted that the ex-Internal Revenue Service official will not be charged in the “mistreatment of conservative groups during the 2010 and 2012 elections.” However, the real big scandal here is the undermining of our democratic process by the IRS fostering a tsunami of “dark money” in our elections.

With the decision in Citizens United, our elections have been swamped by an increased flood of money, but the Supreme Court’s decision was based on the premise that the electorate would be informed as to who was trying to influence it and could then make its own decision. That is not the case with the IRS procedure here, which does not require any transparency as to the identity of the true donors. The names given, such as Crossroads GPS and Organizing for Action, lack such transparency. While the Communications Act and long- established Federal Communications Commission rules require disclosure of the identity of the sponsors in political or controversial-issue ads, the FCC has failed to enforce the act or rules. That is the scandal, and it applies to the FCC under its present chairman and his predecessor.

[Commentary] Promoting universal access to modern communication services and the internet, especially for low-income and disadvantaged Americans, is a noble cause and a pragmatic objective worthy of government support, but the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Lifeline program is not an effective or efficient means of achieving these goals. We need a better approach to open the doors of digital opportunity to low-income and disadvantaged Americans. Here are four principles for replacing the program with a more effective approach to advancing digital opportunity:

First, federal and state governments should work to reduce barriers to broadband deployment and adoption, and to the efficient functioning of the broadband marketplace, so as to lower prices and increase the availability of affordable broadband services.
Second, regardless of whether Lifeline is replaced or reformed, support should be targeted to those who do not already have service.
Third, the replacement for Lifeline should reflect an assessment of who needs help and of what sort.
Fourth, and finally, it is time to consider a new delivery mechanism, one that involves neither the federal regulatory agency which has so grossly mismanaged the Lifeline program nor the telephone companies that have profited so handsomely from that mismanagement.

[Jeffrey Eisenach was on the Trump FCC Transition team, and is a managing director at NERA Economic Consulting.]