Op-Ed

[Commentary] Anyone who doubts the value of local newspapers in the 21st century should consider this: They may be the only institution capable of stopping the spread of fake news online. That’s because fake news is a local phenomenon, or rather, a rootless digital scourge masquerading as a homegrown local product. It then gets repackaged and distributed on the national level — ironically (but not coincidentally) replicating the lifecycle of real news.
[Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily]

[Commentary] Combine broadband with a 3-D printer, and you transform data into objects that can fix a tractor or help a child thrive. Rural communities are showing that high-speed access isn’t just a theoretical benefit – it has measurable results in the physical world.

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

[Commentary] Is the President an enemy of free speech or merely exercising it in a way that liberals dislike? Personal experience has taught me that the line between these two things is vanishingly thin. Horrible things have been said about President Trump, true. He could argue that he's simply fighting back, yes. But fighting fire with fire inevitably leads to more fire, and while I'm sympathetic towards some of Trump's agenda, I look upon the state of politics in this era with despair. It is not unreasonable for journalists to say "enough is enough."

[Timothy Stanley is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph.]

[Commentary] News organizations are still struggling to diversify their ranks. Minority groups only accounted for about 13 percent of newspaper jobs in 2015, according to one industry survey. Tied into that equation is a socioeconomic component that anyone who works in today’s precarious news industry is well aware of: holding a newspaper job often means coming from an affluent household, especially as both undergraduate and graduate degrees, along with a slew of prestigious internships, become the price of admission for scant openings.

Despite all the upheaval over the past year, the unchanging nature of newspaper op-ed pages doesn’t surprise Jack Shafer, a Politico media columnist. “A newspaper is not a Twitter feed. It’s not skywriting,” Shafer says. The editorial status quo will remain as long as the people who control the pages hail from the same classes and ideological backgrounds they’ve always known. “We can argue whether Bret Stephens or Paul Krugman’s ideas are worthy of placement in The New York Times,” Shafer says. “but [A.J.] Liebling said it best. The freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

[Commentary] Journalism has a class problem. We know this. The best internships are for students with the resources to work unpaid or with low pay in some of the most expensive cities in the country. Conferences are expensive and often hosted in expensive cities making it difficult for smaller newsrooms to send reporters. The bulk of the jobs are clustered in major metropolitan areas. That’s not to say people without means don’t make it into journalism. They do. But it’s a longer, rougher road with far fewer people making it to the end....

Our industry needs to think hard about the worlds we’re living in, the kinds we’re building with each hire we make and ones that we want to reach with our reporting.

[Heather Bryant is the founder and director of Project Facet, an open source software project to help manage the editorial process and facilitate collaboration between newsrooms. ]

[Commentary] On Election Night 2016, a few hours before the results were fully in, I wrote a blog post titled “Why I’m staying at 18F”. I felt it was important, to me, to make a decision based on principle before I knew the outcome. Earlier in July, I decided to leave government service.

They may seem completely unrelated to most, but I’ll try to explain why to me they were evidence of the same dangerous “denormalization” of our government. The first thing that happened was the release of the written testimony of the former FBI Director, James Comey. For anyone in public service to ask for the personal loyalty of anyone else in government is an affront to our core values. For the President to ask it of the FBI Director is beyond “not normal." The second thing that occurred that very same day is that the technology and design organization I have worked for since before its public launch, 18F (and the larger service we created for it and its sibling organizations, the Technology Transformation Service), is being reorganized via administrative order into the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service.

[Commentary] The Government Accountability Office issued a blistering report on the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to assist low-income families. The report criticized the agency for spending $1.7 billion annually without knowing — or caring — whether any of this money actually helps narrow the digital divide. I advocated that Congress eliminate the Universal Service Fund’s shady, self-funding off-budget funding mechanism and instead make it a line item in the federal budget. This would make the program more transparent and subject to greater congressional oversight, which would help reduce fraud and abuse and keep program expenses tied to a fixed budget. Overall, the GAO report points to the difficulties that the FCC has, and will continue to have, by deciding simply to extend a Reagan-era telephone subsidy to cover broadband access. Unquestionably, the government should offer assistance to low-income consumers at risk of falling on the wrong end of the digital divide. But that assistance should be designed from the ground up, tailored to the needs of the population it seeks to serve, with controls to protect against fraud and abuse. As we have argued before, Lifeline needs revolutionary, not evolutionary, change.

[Lyon is an associate professor at Boston College Law School]

[Commentary] I left the White House that day with dramatically mixed emotions. I remain convinced that we should help a government initiative that can do real good, despite my deep concerns about the current administration’s policies. I saw only a sliver of all that went on that day, given the many concurrent sessions, but I wish I’d seen more evidence that the leadership of the tech industry can actually help government do a better job, given that so many of those who seem to be engaging have a lot invested in the status quo. I guess in some way that means that I leave this event not that far from where I started, remembering that “No one is coming. It is up to us.”

[Jennifer Pahlka is Founder and Executive Director of Code for America]

[Commentary] The tremor in Silicon Valley emerged from Brussels, not the San Andreas Fault. The European Union’s decision on Google’s search practices makes clear the absence of domestic regulation has opened the door for policies to be decided by foreign governments. It should be a worry – and a wake-up – for all the companies whose platforms drive internet services. The EU has leveled a record-breaking $2.7 billion fine against Google for its search practices. But that’s just money (albeit lots of money).

A more pervasive consequence is the EU mandate that Google alter the manner in which its search results are presented. Domestic internet programs might want to consider their own corporate interest in embracing domestic policy regulatory oversight. The decision of the EU is a wake-up call that perhaps having policies established by the US government isn’t such a bad idea after all.

[Tom Wheeler is a former Chairman to the Federal Communications Commission]

[Commentary] It’s clear that most US consumers depend upon a few big players in order to access the internet. Therefore, the critical question is whether these companies have the incentive and ability to harm consumers and competition. That is, are they motivated to control what kinds of innovations come to consumers? And do they have the tools to do so? Both the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice have recognized in recent proceedings that the answers are yes and yes.

In 1776, Thomas Paine didn’t need the permission of any other content creator or distributor to circulate Common Sense. But without rules prohibiting blocking, throttling, and the like, broadband providers would gain the power to limit what unpopular content flows over their networks—to the detriment of consumers and democracy. One challenger to the 2015 Open Internet Order argued exactly this to the DC Circuit: that the rules violated its right to block legal but unpopular content. An Open Internet has worked for America, creating a virtuous circle of innovation, trust, adoption, and further innovation. That circle should not be broken.

[Terrell McSweeny is a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Jon Sallet is the former general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission. Both are alumni of the antitrust division of the Department of Justice]