Op-Ed

[Commentary] In a new project, we have been working to track and understand incivility by examining the extent to which users post offensive comments on Reddit. Reddit has received a great deal of attention from political analysts in recent years due to the fact that it has a robust offering of political discussion boards. In fact, Reddit has become an important enough player in online political discussions that President Obama and a host of 2016 presidential candidates took to the forum to engage with its users. Findings:
Posts became more offensive during the general election campaign
Offensive posts are more popular

What’s most telling is that our research shows that the tone of discussions on Reddit seems to respond to how our politicians are behaving.

[Rishab Nithyanand is a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Information and Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Brian Schaffner is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts. Phillipa Gill is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.]

[Commentary] The Washington Post made waves on Aug 3 when it published the full transcripts of President Donald Trump’s erratic phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia that occurred just after he was inaugurated. Despite their clear news value, some journalists and pundits questioned whether the leaked transcripts should be published.

Far from being criticized for publishing these leaked transcripts, The Washington Post should be commended. The Trump Administration has spent the last few months trying to cut off all avenues of transparency to the White House, refusing to release visitor logs, keeping Trump’s schedule opaque, limiting the information in readouts of calls to foreign leaders, refusing to hold a presidential press conference since February, and even demanding journalists do not record the administration’s daily press briefings. The Trump Administration may complain all day about leaks, but leaks are increasingly the only way the American public can learn what the administration is really doing. And the news value of these transcripts could not be more obvious: They showed Trump did not know basic facts, that he asked a foreign leader to lie to the press for him, that he knew from the start that his signature campaign promise to “make Mexico pay for the wall” was bogus, and that he has no sense for how allies should cooperate with each other.

[Trevor Timm is the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation.]

[Commentary] Broadband infrastructure can help plug some of the leaks in rural healthcare services. The result can be better healthcare access and an improved local economy. Arrowhead Electric Cooperative built a fiber network in Cook County (MN) a few years ago. “Our main healthcare facilities send patients home with medic alert-type devices and even tablets to monitor recovery and ensure communication thanks to fiber to home,” says Yusef Orest, head of membership services for the co-op. “Before the network, individuals had internet access but it wasn’t fast. Now, hospitals are increasing services at patients’ home and on-site. For example, they can perform ultrasounds and radiology scans and send results instantly to bigger hospitals for analysis.”

Rural communities can learn from small towns – some in metropolitan areas and some in less populated regions – that have made it their missions to use broadband to transform the nature of healthcare and telemedicine.

[Craig Settles is a broadband industry analyst and consultant to local governments.]

[Commentary] As wireless broadband carriers transition what was once referred to as “dumb pipes” to a richer content delivery system, the subject of net neutrality is becoming about as hot as the surface of the sun.

OTT or Over-the-Top content delivery will only continue to skyrocket through the carriers. Subscribers want their television, movies and music all on-the-go, and the continued marketing of unlimited data plans will continue that momentum. Instead of making thinly-veiled excuses or outright violation of net neutrality rules, the carriers will need to ensure network optimization for video consumption. 5G will help with lower latency and dramatically improved throughput but we are still 18 to 24 months away from a ubiquitous deployment. If the tier one global carriers don’t address it now, they will certainly suffer from subscriber loss, lower revenue and dwindling margins.

[Will Townsend is a Moor Insights & Strategy senior analyst covering wireless telecommunications and enterprise networking]

[Commentary] In his written testimony to Congress, Brendan Carr, who has been nominated to be the third Republican Commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, omitted the most important fact: He worked for AT&T, Verizon, Centurylink, as well as the CTIA, the wireless association, and the USTA, the telephone association. Moreover, much of this work has direct ties to his current work with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai (a former Verizon attorney). Together they have amassed a string of corporate-monopoly friendly, harmful consumer regulations that have passed or are percolating.

In the end, Carr and Pai clearly show that they are still working for the industry, not the public interest. On top of this, there are even holes in Carr’s work timeline, as told by his own LinkedIn bio. His resume shows he clerked for a judge in the 2008-2009 timeframe, while his bio shows him also working from 2005-2012 for Wiley Rein and the telecommunications companies and their associations. All of this should be a deal breaker. The Senate should not confirm Brendan Carr’s nomination as FCC Commissioner.

[Bruce Kushnick is the executive director of New Networks Institute]

[Commentary] Legislation or regulations requiring companies to remove content pose a range of risks, including potentially legitimizing repressive measures from authoritarian regimes. Hate speech, political propaganda, and extremist content are subjective, and interpretations vary widely among different governments. Relying on governments to create and enforce regulations online affords them the opportunity to define these terms as they see fit. Placing the power in the hands of governments also increases the likelihood that authoritarian regimes that lack Germany's liberal democratic tradition will criminalize online content critical of those governments and, ultimately, create another mechanism for oppressing their own citizens.

Instead of government intervention, civil society should recognize and build upon the efforts of platforms that address these issues, while also pressing companies to step up to do even more.

[Tara Wadhwa is the associate director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. Gabriel Ng is a fellow at the Center]

[Commentary] The American people are far greater than the sum of our political parties. It is time for us to rise above our broken politics and renew the spirit that enabled us to achieve the seemingly impossible. This is why I am running for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

Our government is hamstrung by excessive partisanship. We are letting critical opportunities to improve the country pass us by. And we are not even talking about the most important thing: the future. The victims of this leadership failure are the good people we are sworn to serve, and we are leaving our country ill-prepared for dramatic changes ahead. The current administration is making us less prosperous and less secure. I’m running because I have an original approach to governing and economic policy that can put us on a different course.

[Commentary] The current network neutrality regulations set forth in the 2015 Open Internet Order (2015 OIO) prohibit Internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or throttling lawful content or engaging in paid prioritization of Internet traffic. These three “bright line rules” cover a wide swath of ISP practices and are intended to promote competition and ensure quality service transmission for content providers and end users. At the same time, however, they fail to consider more nuanced issues that complicate achieving these outcomes.

Christopher Yoo, Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and founding director of the Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, makes the case for one such issue in his recent work, “.” This post is the sixth in a series featuring the contents of a recent special issue of the Review of Industrial Organization, organized by the Technology Policy Institute and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition. Yoo argues that, contrary to the FCC’s claim in the Order, practices like zero rating can stimulate competition among infrastructure providers and edge services. He contends that zero rating should not be prohibited but rather handled on a case-by-case basis. He supports these claims with economic theory, competition theory, and a number of case studies featuring zero rating.

[Romzek is a 2017 Google Policy Fellow and Research Associate at the Technology Policy Institute. Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at TPI]

[Commentary] Microsoft recently made a Very Serious Announcement about deploying unused television airwaves to solve the digital divide in America. News outlets ate it up. Here's what's really going on: Microsoft is aiming to be the soup-to-nuts provider of Internet of Things devices, software, and consulting services to zillions of local and national governments around the world.

Microsoft doesn't want to have to rely on existing mobile data carriers to execute those plans. Why? Because the carriers will want a pound of flesh—a percentage—in exchange for shipping data generated by Microsoft devices from Point A to Point B. These costs can become very substantial over zillions of devices in zillions of cities. The carriers have power because, in many places, they are the only ones allowed to use airwave frequencies—spectrum—under licenses from local governments for which they have paid hundreds of millions of dollars. To eliminate that bottleneck, it will be good to have
unlicensed spectrum available everywhere, and cheap chipsets and devices available that can opportunistically take advantage of that spectrum.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.]

[Commentary] For more than a year now, Donald Trump — first as a candidate, then as president — has made a war against the press a central plank of his public persona. He has singled out individual journalists for ad hominem attacks and declared entire news organizations to be working against America’s interests.

The lack of trust that now exists between the press and the public didn’t start with Trump, though he certainly has done his part to exacerbate it. It has been building slowly for decades, to the point that the conversation between the media and its readers is broken. Many Americans no longer think the press listens to or understands them, and they long ago started tuning us out. We became part of the establishment that had turned its back on them. These are our failings, and they need to be fixed. Reporters should be focused on the president’s team and his policies, examining his remaking of American government. These are the stories that resonate with Americans, not his views about what’s airing on MSNBC or CNN some Monday morning. We are already seeing some excellent reporting in this vein. We need more.

[Kyle Pope is editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review.]