Op-Ed

[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.]

[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.]