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The Verizon debacle joins a lengthy list of incidents where companies and government agencies have accidentally published people’s confidential information, a problem that experts say may be getting harder to fix as more companies their storage to the cloud. Chris Vickery, director of cyber-risk research at UpGuard, found the Verizon data trove sitting in a critical data repository managed by a third vendor based in Israel. The repository had been misconfigured—a human error—leaving it unprotected. Thanks to a chronic shortage of skilled tech workers, it’s hard to find employees with the necessary skills and training to consistently avoid such mistakes, Vickery says. Tech workers setting up cloud systems or in-house servers can misunderstand the settings on the software they’re setting up, or cut corners to make data more easily accessible within the organization.

As part of Federal Communications Commission Cgairman Ajit Pai's proposal to roll back Title II and review network neutrality regulations, the agency is proposing to use a "multiplier" to calculate the amount, if any, of lost investment from Title II, beyond the immediate investment to the total impact of that lost investment, say on construction workers not getting paid because of buildouts not being built out -- something like counting the number of other dominoes that fall rather than just counting the first one. The Free State Foundation, in comments to the FCC, submitted an assessment of such a cost-benefit analysis by senior fellow Theodore Bolema that suggested it would be reasonable to multiply lost investment assessments by between 1.25 and 1.75, which would mean Free State's own estimate of a $5.6 billion reduction in what would have been invested between 2015 and 2016 were Title II not in place would translate to more like between $7 billion and $9.8 billion. "If the current investment trend were to continue," said Free State president Randolph May in the FCC submission, "the negative economic impact resulting from the Open Internet Order regulatory regime will only become greater over time.”

Prominent technology-industry leaders and venture capitalists gathered in the White House’s state dining room in June 2017 to discuss tech policy with President Donald Trump in an event that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, helped organize. Seated at the rectangular table alongside the corporate luminaries, university presidents and senior White House officials was a less-prominent figure: Zachary Bookman, the 37-year-old CEO of a small startup called OpenGov. Kushner’s brother, through a venture-capital firm, is a part owner of OpenGov, according to government disclosures and data from Dow Jones VentureSource. Until earlier this year, Kushner owned stakes in the venture-capital firm that he sold to his brother, according to a person familiar with the matter. Kushner’s connection to OpenGov isn’t widely known. Many senior Trump administration officials hail from the business world, triggering concerns about potential conflicts between their private interests and public duties. The OpenGov situation—in which a top White House official helped organize a prestigious event where one of the participants was financially connected to his family—is an example of how such potential conflicts can play out.

Key tech industry leaders are expressing openness to having Congress step in to legislate net neutrality — putting pressure on Democrats who've been adamantly opposed to such a move. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg said they’re willing to work with lawmakers on the issue, and Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian expressed a similar view. That flies in the face of the resistance many Democrats and activists have shown to working with Republicans on enshrining open internet protections into law. Democrats have been focused on stopping the GOP-led FCC from rolling back the current net neutrality rules, and fear their Republican colleagues want to pass weaker standards than what the FCC has already put in place.

The Day of Action on network neutrality generated some 2 million comments to the Federal Communications Commission, according to Fight for the Future Campaign Director Evan Greer, who added that figure doesn’t include comments submitted via the Internet Association’s page, which was promoted by a host of tech companies. The comments are still being entered into the FCC’s docket, which at last check had more than 7 million filings. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the sheer number of comments won't dictate the outcome of the proceeding. “The raw number is not as important as the substantive comments that are in the record,” said Chairman Pai. “We want to weigh all comments and make sure that we take a full view of the record and again make the appropriate judgment based on those facts and the law as it applies.” But FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn cautioned against discounting comments simply because they aren’t written like legal briefs. “To ignore the voices of individuals who take the time in their own way to express their feelings about something that is so critical as an open internet … that’s short-sighted,” Commissioner Clyburn said. “There is a reason why people have a low opinion of government and government employees, because they think they ignore what they say.”

A Tribune Media shareholder has filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to halt the company's sale to Sinclair Broadcast Group. The shareholder, Sean McEntire, is seeking class-action status in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Chicago. McEntire accuses Chicago-based Tribune Media of giving stockholders incomplete and misleading information about the deal, including failing to provide portions of the companies' financial projections, the value of another bid for Tribune Media and other details of the process leading to the merger agreement. McEntire is asking the court to block Sinclair's purchase until Tribune Media shares the information he claims was withheld, or award damages if the deal goes through before the information is disclosed.

AT&T plans to separate its telecom operations from its media assets after clinching a takeover of Time Warner, putting veteran AT&T executive John Stankey in charge of the Time Warner business, according to people familiar with the matter. The reorganization would separate AT&T’s wireless business and its DirecTV satellite television business from the newly acquired Time Warner assets, including HBO, Warner Bros., and the Turner cable unit that houses CNN. The new structure would keep AT&T Chairman and Chief Executive Randall Stephenson atop the company with two top lieutenants, in an organization that would resemble Comcast Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chairman and chief executive, has two segment chiefs: one in charge of the cable business and the other heading NBCUniversal. Under the new structure, DirecTV would be combined with the company’s telecom operations, which are run out of AT&T’s Dallas headquarters and include both the wireless and landline business, the people familiar with the matter said. That segment would be run by John Donovan, another AT&T veteran who is currently chief strategy officer.

In a national poll of 1,500 voters, 70 percent of respondents — including Democrats, Republicans and Trump supporters — think the internet has improved while network neutrality rules have been in place.

86 percent of all voters say ISPs should treat all websites and content equally. 75 percent of Trump supporters said they agreed that ISPs should continue to follow net neutrality rules prohibiting slowing or blocking websites or video services. 58 percent of Republicans and Trump voters agreed with the statement, "Internet should be treated like any other utility such as gas or electric service." While it won't change Federal Communications Commission Chairman Pai's mind about reversing the rules, the high number of Trump voters who support net neutrality regulations could get some attention. Showing broad backing helps make the case that support for the net neutrality rules is an issue that resonates outside of the coastal bubbles most associated with tech. That's a message net neutrality advocates hope to send to conservatives as they fight an uphill battle to preserve the rules.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and other companies, activists and startups that rallied in support of net neutrality probably aren’t going to stop the Trump administration from killing the rules currently on the government’s books. But the organizers of the so-called “day of action” insist they reached more than 10 million users with their message, while generating at least 2.1 million comments urging the Federal Communications Commission to rethink its plans. That’s a drop in the bucket, seeing as the tech companies that took part in the protest reach billions of users every day — but the event’s planners stress that they’ve touched a nerve. Some of the web’s largest companies — including Amazon, Facebook and Google — took a more reserved approach. They didn’t darken their webpages, like some companies did during a massive online protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and their alerts to users weren’t always easy to find.

In April, 22 small cable providers signed a letter to the Federal Communications Commission asking for the end of network neutrality, writing that the policy imposed “onerous burdens” on their businesses. FCC chairman Ajit Pai has latched onto this. He’s been touting the damage net neutrality could do to regional and “mom and pop” internet providers, and he cited this letter as proof when announcing plans to reverse net neutrality and its classification of internet providers under a legal statute known as Title II. Quite a few of these smaller internet providers have taken issue with the FCC’s net neutrality rules. This is not just because of the rules’ core tenets — no blocking websites, no throttling internet speeds, no demanding payments for access — which many small providers say they support. Instead, they’re concerned about being forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars proving to the FCC that they’re actually following the rules. The Verge called eight smaller internet providers to find out whether they’d been impacted by net neutrality, and the answers were mixed. Multiple respondents, when asked if Title II was hurting them, gave an unqualified “no.”