Op-Ed

[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]

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 open internet order has long been a posterchild for bad law and worse economics. It has been labeled an “economics-free zone” by the FCC’s own chief economist. The data on the results of its fool hard decision to proceed with Title II despite reams of expert warnings bears this out. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai deserves credit for revisiting the issue in an economically serious way and attempting to restore some semblance of order to a renegade regulatory agency.

[George S. Ford, Ph.D., is an economist specializing in technology issues at the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies.]

[Commentary] Right now, a bill is being rushed through the California state Legislature using the highly suspect “gut and amend” process. It would reorganize the Internet app and data ecosystem – which has created hundreds of thousands of jobs – without a single public hearing. At first glance, AB 375 seems reasonable. The author claims the bill is needed to restore President Obama era privacy protections repealed by President Trump. However, and this is a critical point, AB 375 does not “restore” President Obama’s longstanding privacy policy. It actually reverses that policy.

[Nancy Libin is co-chair of the Privacy and Information Governance Practice at Jenner & Block LLP and the former chief privacy officer at the U.S. Department of Justice.]

[Commentary] Congress must decide by the end of 2017 whether to renew the National Security Agency’s power to engage in surveillance of communications that transit switches and servers inside the United States using a secret court order. The intelligence community has revealed that over 100,000 targets were under such surveillance in 2016, for reasons well beyond terrorism. While the government may not single out Americans as targets, it may search the database for information about Americans who may be communication with foreigners. It did so more than 30,000 times in 2016.

While Congress should reform this “backdoor search” practice, it should not make the same mistake I made by focusing only on protecting the privacy of Americans. If it does, businesses may face a rude awakening when European courts again strike down transfers of personal data to the United States, threatening a half-trillion dollar transatlantic trading relationship. Reforming the NSA’s mass surveillance programs to focus more narrowly on terrorism and other security threats would do much to address these concerns. Protecting the privacy of foreign users of American internet services is not just good for business, it is good for everyone’s privacy – including Americans. The digital data, communications, and personal lives of Americans now transcend national boundaries. It turns out we are all in this together. In the digital age, the only way to protect the privacy of Americans is to protect the privacy of everyone.

[Tim Edgar was the first privacy officer for the White House, former ACLU attorney and current Professor at Brown University.]

[Commentary] It’s time to stop the regulatory foot-dragging and require the mobile phone industry to use its technology’s capabilities to deliver safety alerts with the same accuracy that delivers a taxi and the same functionality that delivers video. Immediately after the installation of the Trump Federal Communications Commission, the mobile carriers filed a petition to stop the implementation of the earlier decision on Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) improvements that were strongly advocated by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children as well as public safety managers across the country. The Trump FCC magnified the failure of the current system by not acting on the WEA improvements proposed last September. The new FCC majority even removed wireless alerts form the charter of the public safety and industry working group that made the original recommendations.

If the Obama FCC regulations and recommendations were in effect, geo-targeting could deliver the precise message to specific audiences; those messages could contain links to maps and other important information; and the ability to link with users would allow the collection of information from victims, providing a rapid triage among survivors and targeting the delivery of rescue and other services. Instead, in Houston, victims overloaded the 911 system and public safety officials had to resort to social media. The FCC must learn from what happened in Hurricane Harvey.

[Tom Wheeler is a visiting fellow with the Governance Studies, Center for Technology Innovation, and former Chairman to the FCC.]

[Commentary] Network neutrality is having a Gilda Radner moment. After years of debate, protests, name calling, and the like, technology is leaving net neutrality behind. Here are at least three indicators that technology is outsmarting net neutrality:

1. 5G will use network slicing, which enables multiple virtual networks on a common physical infrastructure. Each slice can be customized for specific applications, services, customers, etc. Network slicing means the end of treating all internet traffic the same — if that ever really happened — which was supposed be a core principle of net neutrality. 5G explicitly customizes the network to different types of traffic.
2. Netflix and other large edge providers are bypassing the internet. More specifically, they are building or leasing their own networks designed to their specific needs and leaving the public internet — the system of networks that only promise best efforts to deliver content — to their lesser rivals.
3. Mobile internet is leaving wireline internet in its dust in numbers of users and traffic. Mobile internet increasingly bypasses the World Wide Web because about 90% of customers’ mobile time is spent in apps, not the web. Apps are gatekeepers that direct customers only to resources that the app makers choose.

[Mark Jamison is the director and Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business. He served on the Trump FCC Transition Team.]

[Commentary] As one of the few remaining members of the Kennedy administration who participated in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, I was an eyewitness to the crucial role that telecommunications played in averting nuclear disaster.

As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission at that time, we created a “hotline” with the Soviet Union in the belief that improved communications would help avoid conflicts between nations in the nuclear era. Today, telecommunications have improved in ways we could not have imagined. They are faster, stronger, clearer, more accessible and higher resolution. News on television, radio and the internet is far more comprehensive, multisourced and instantaneous. Some of those new technologies have undermined the very tools President John F. Kennedy needed to avert war. President Kennedy once gave me a top-secret assignment. The Russians had jammed the Voice of America. My job was to enlist eight American commercial radio stations whose signals reached Cuba to carry key messages from Voice of America to the Cuban people. Before confiding in the stations, I asked each station owner to swear that they would not share the information with their news division until the embargo was lifted. Every one of them agreed and kept their word, ultimately playing a useful role in averting nuclear war. Would broadcasters today be willing to do the same?

[Chicago attorney Newton N. Minow was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1961 to 1963]

(Aug 27)