Op-Ed

[Commentary] Generally speaking, there are two kinds of corporate players on the internet: companies that build infrastructure through which content flows, and companies that seek to curate content and create a community. Internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast, domain name servers, web hosts and security services providers like Cloudflare are all the former — or the “pipe.” They typically don’t look at the content their clients and customers are putting up, they just give them the means to do it and let it flow.

Because of the precise nature of Cloudflare’s business, and the scarcity of competitors, its role censoring internet speech is not just new, it’s terrifying. What makes Cloudflare an essential part of the internet is its ability to block malicious traffic from barraging clients’ websites with requests that take them offline. Cloudflare is one of the few companies in the world that provide this kind of reliable protection. If you don’t want your website to get taken down by extortionists, jokers, political opposition or hackers, you have to hire Cloudflare or one of its very few competitors. Social media platforms like Facebook are the latter. They encourage their users to create, share and engage with content — so they look at content all the time and decide whether they want to allow hateful material like that of neo-Nazis to stay up. While there have long been worries about internet service providers favoring access to some content over others, there has been less concern about companies further along the pipeline holding an internet on/off switch. In large part, this is because at other points in the pipeline, users have choice.

Private companies can make their own rules, and consumers can choose among them. If GoDaddy won’t register your domain, you can go to Bluehost or thousands of other companies. But the fewer choices you have for the infrastructure you need to stay online, the more serious the consequences when companies refuse service.

[Kate Klonick is a lawyer and doctoral candidate at Yale Law School who studies law and technology.]

[Commentary] President Donald Trump’s recent Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) decision is a case study in the consequences of writing law through executive order. If congressional leadership does not take action, then network neutrality will meet DACA’s same fate.

Americans must demand that Congress provide pragmatic, bipartisan and sustainable solutions for DACA, net neutrality, and many other pressing issues confronting our country.

[Garrett Johnson is co-founder of Lincoln Network, a national community of technology professionals]

[Commentary] Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should publicly testify under oath before Congress on his company’s capabilities to influence the political process, be it Russian meddling or anything else. If the company is as powerful as it promises advertisers, it should be held accountable. And if it’s not, then we need to stop fretting so much about it. Either way, threats to entire societies should be reckoned with publicly by those very societies and not confined to R&D labs and closed-door briefings. If democracy can be gamed from a laptop, that shouldn’t be considered a trade secret.

[Commentary] All across America, I’ve spoken with journalists who are committed, working their butts off and forever looking for new ways to keep their organizations going financially. There’s no shortage of the will to do solid journalism, to help people better understand what’s happening in their towns and cities. But with the death of traditional newspaper funding and the ongoing corporate consolidation of American local press, the situation can seem grim.

[Commentary] Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality — to the empowerment of the “user” — but their worldview rolls over it. Even the ubiquitous invocation of users is telling, a passive, bureaucratic description of us. The big tech companies (the Europeans have lumped them together as GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) are shredding the principles that protect individuality. Their devices and sites have collapsed privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship, with their hostility toward intellectual property.

In the realm of economics, they justify monopoly by suggesting that competition merely distracts from the important problems like erasing language barriers and building artificial brains. Over time, the long merger of man and machine has worked out pretty well for man. But we’re drifting into a new era, when that merger threatens the individual. We’re drifting toward monopoly, conformism, their machines. Perhaps it’s time we steer our course.

[Franklin Foer is the author of "World Without Mind"]

[Commentary] The three of us investigated several of the most promising efforts to “re-decentralize” the web, to better understand their potential to shake up the dominance of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The projects we examined are pursuing deeply exciting new ideas. However, we doubt that decentralized systems alone will address the threats to free expression caused by today’s mega-platforms, for several key reasons. First, these tools will face challenges acquiring users and gaining the attention of developers. These platforms also pose new security threats. Social media platforms are curators, not just publishers. Finally, platforms benefit from economies of scale — it’s cheaper to acquire resources like storage and bandwidth in bulk. And with network effects, which make larger platforms more useful, you have a recipe for consolidation.

[Chelsea Barabas is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Neha Narula directs the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. Ethan Zuckerman is the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT.]

[Commentary] Many in the craft are fond of saying something like “the presidency is broken,” “the president’s conduct is unprecedented” or that we face a “constitutional crisis.” . At a moment of peril on many fronts, the craft is collapsing into rote condemnation of a president who won a large majority of electoral college votes. Probably because of the deep and wide contempt for the media elites who have appointed themselves the guardians of a tradition they know little of and respect less: liberty.

[Commentary] As the Federal Communications Commission repeals Title II and embarks on an uncertain new process, everyone has something to lose — which also means everyone has something to gain. Fertile ground for Congress to step in and solve the problem once and for all. An open internet statute would permanently lock in a signature achievement of the Obama years for progressives, while giving business the certainty and predictability conservatives have championed. It’s a moment of truth for the activists and meme brokers and even the late-night comics who say they care about the issues — not just ratings and clicks. Will they seize the moment and support forward looking action? Or will they burn down net neutrality just to have someone to blame when the next election rolls around?

[Lindsay Lewis is the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Progressive Policy Institute.]

[Commentary] European law allows the transfer of personal data to non-European countries only if they “ensure an adequate level of protection.” The U.S.-EU Safe Harbor framework was believed to provide such adequate safeguards, but, in its October 2015 decision in Maximillian Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner, the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated the framework. In the background were Edward Snowden’s revelations about the prevalence of access to private communications data by the U.S. government, particularly the NSA....

In the next few years, the debate will continue to rage. As the U.K. breaks ranks with its EU partners, its laws too could be deemed “inadequate.” In fact, while not subject to the jurisdiction of the European Commission, national security regimes of European Member States are drawing wide criticism for being overly lenient, cryptic and opaque. To perhaps avoid widely divergent opinion on the relative beauty or ugliness of U.S. surveillance law, this collection will help inform the conversation and ground it in solid facts.

[Omer Tene is Vice President of Research and Education at the International Association of Privacy Professionals. He is an Affiliate Scholar at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and a Senior Fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum. ]

[Commentary] Sinclair’s merger with Tribune would give them stations reaching 72 percent of the country. However, the Federal Communications Commission says that a single company, like the one that would be created after a Sinclair-Tribune merger, cannot exceed a reach of 39 percent. The FCC and Chairman Pai say it isn’t true that the rule was reinstated specifically for Sinclair. “Still,” Politico noted in early August, “the FCC action removed the most serious obstacle for Sinclair… While Sinclair doesn’t spend much on traditional lobbying, it has donated generously over the years to congressional Republicans, who have shown little inclination to throw up any roadblocks to the deal…”

Money and influence, the same old story. In a word, this deal stinks, and there’s nothing fair about it.

[Michael Winship is a senior writer with BillMoyers.com and president of Writers Guild of America, East]