Op-Ed

A legend is leaving the Federal Communications Commission as the new year begins. Her name is Karen Peltz Strauss. Some of you may not have heard of her, but to the nation’s disabilities communities, she is a hero. She achieved this status the old-fashioned way. She earned it. In over 40 years in Washington, I have been privileged to work with many brilliant public servants. Karen Peltz Strauss is in the top-most tier of these incredibly able people.  Her star shines brightly in the public service firmament. She came to the agency with a goal, she never wavered from that goal, and she achie

The Federal Communications Commission’s 2018 Restoring Internet Freedom (RIF) Order reclassified broadband Internet access service from a telecommunications service to an information service, largely on the basis of an interpretation of broadband service that is fundamentally incorrect.  This reclassification gave the FCC the license not only to repeal the 2015 net neutrality rules, but to abdicate its role overseeing the broadband market.

Big Tech is violating the Sherman Act of 1890. Why, then, isn't anything being done about Big Tech violating the Sherman Act? In recent decades, corporate defendants have persuaded judges to narrow the law, by requiring, for instance, evidence of price increases to prove a case. But consumers pay for tech platforms' services with data, not dollars. The Sherman Act makes no mention of prices, and low prices should not be the only goal. Competition should be the goal.

To accommodate a 21st-century workforce, we need to make sure we have 21st-century infrastructure. No serious infrastructure plan is complete without addressing broadband expansion. There is strong bipartisan support for including broadband funding in any infrastructure package, and that's good news. As we expand access to broadband, we must also do more to protect people's data online.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.” 

Most Americans do not have much of a choice in Internet service providers, even in big cities. But for a lucky few, they have not only a robust gigabit connection but also a choice of many providers. This is most common in an arrangement called “open access.” Some 30 communities spread across the United States have embraced this model — where the local government builds a fiber-optic infrastructure and acts as a wholesaler, allowing independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to offer the actual service to households and businesses.

Today, Americans can choose between four nationwide wireless carriers – but that choice is now threatened by the proposed merger of Sprint and T-Mobile. If allowed to proceed as proposed, this merger will condense the market to just three national carriers, leading to higher prices, foreclosing the entrance of new competitors and eliminating jobs. And while the companies have promised that this deal would speed the roll out of 5G and improve rural service, the facts belie these claims. This deal offers no meaningful public benefit and threatens vast consumer harms.

That Facebook can’t stay out of the headlines is not just a crisis for Facebook. It’s also a crisis for the Federal Trade Commission—indeed, it’s a “credibility-check moment.” Every day that passes in which the consent order is not enforced against Facebook adds to speculation that something is deeply broken at the agency. Moreover, the tech firms want the FTC to be named as their sole regulator, pre-empting stronger action by states and their attorneys general to protect privacy.

Dear Chairman Pai,

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai would have you believe that the network neutrality repeal was of no consequence — the Internet wasn’t destroyed, cute pictures of cats and dogs are still in abundance, Google and Netflix are alive and well. But even in the short 6 months since the Dec 14, 2017 repeal of the net neutrality rules became effective, we have seen how consumers and competitors lose when broadband providers are given license to self-regulate and the FCC discards its responsibility to oversee the market.