Reporting

President Donald Trump gave his first interview in more than a month on June 22, and the result — airing June 23 on Fox News — included President Trump congratulating himself for his suggestion that there might be tapes of his conversations with former FBI Director James B. Comey. What's interesting here is that this isn't the official White House position. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied June 22 that President Trump's six-week-old tweet about possible tapes was meant to threaten or influence Director Comey. But then President Trump just went out and basically said it himself.

Legal challenges to the Federal Communications Commission's business data services (BDS) reforms have been consolidated in the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Petitions to deny some or all of the FCC's BDS report and order updating the framework for regulating business data services had been filed in three separate federal appeals courts. Those appeals came from CenturyLink, Citizens Telecommunications Company of Minnesota and a consortium of telecoms including Sprint.

The DC Circuit is the one with primary jurisdiction over telecommunications, but in the case of multiple filings, the US Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation holds a lottery to determine the venue. CenturyLink told the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that the FCC's regulation of rates on DS1 and DS3 service in areas deemed noncompetitive was arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and otherwise illegal. It said the FCC forced those price caps on competitive carriers despite evidence the cost of service had actually gone down.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai was spotlighting the news that Sen Chris Coons (D-DE) has signed on as a cosponsor of the Gigabit Opportunity (GO) Act. The bill was introduced in May by Sen Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV). The bill would give tax breaks to companies for investing in gigabit-capable expansion into those communities; direct the FCC to release a framework that encourages states, counties and cities to voluntarily adopt streamlined broadband laws and be designated as a “Gigabit Opportunity Zone;" and defer capital gains for upgrades and allow companies to expense the cost of creating those zones, as well as allow states to more easily issue tax-exempt bonds.

In a statement released after the news of Sen Coons' support, Chairman Pai said: “Closing the digital divide is a top national priority. Gigabit Opportunity Zones would go a long way toward meeting that priority. By streamlining regulations to encourage broadband deployment and establishing targeted tax incentives for entrepreneurs to build those networks, we can empower millions of Americans, rural and urban alike. This is a common sense idea, and I’m excited to see it gaining bipartisan support."

Top AT&T DC executive Robert Quinn said his company is "very, very" supportive of a bill (The BROWSER Act) from House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) that would "harmonize" the enforcement of online privacy by Internet service providers and edge providers like Google and Facebook.

He said AT&T backed the bill for three main reasons. First, he said, it said everyone has to live under the same rules. Second, was putting all the regulation at the Federal Trade Commission, so it would be the same rules and the same regulator, rather than dividing it up between the FCC and FTC. Third, he said, the bill preempts state privacy laws, which means there aren't 50 different state regimes around privacy. "There is a rule that everyone has to live with" rather than a "patchwork" of rules.

White House Correspondents' Association President Jeff Mason said they are "not satisfied" with the White House putting a halt on their daily, on-camera briefings. In an e-mail to members of the association, Mason said he met with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to discuss the issues of the briefings.

"The WHCA’s position on this issue is clear: we believe strongly that Americans should be able to watch and listen to senior government officials face questions from an independent news media, in keeping with the principles of the First Amendment and the need for transparency at the highest levels of government," Mason wrote.

Nearly a quarter of the city-dwelling population in the US isn’t connected to broadband internet, according to a recent IHS Markit and Wireless Broadband Alliance study charted for us by Statista. To be clear, the US is doing a better job at making the internet available to its urban population than many other large nations. But the disconnect that does exist is what happens when you mix the relatively high costs of entry for broadband in America with the number of lower-income people living in cities in the first place. As the study notes, this simply makes it difficult for those people to participate in society at the same level.

The Department of Homeland Security is turning to data scientists to improve screening techniques at airports. On June 22, the department, working with Google, will introduce a $1.5 million contest to build computer algorithms that can automatically identify concealed items in images captured by checkpoint body scanners. The government is putting up the money, and the six-month contest will be run by Kaggle, a site that hosts more than a million data scientists that was recently acquired by Google. Although data scientists can apply any technique in building these algorithms, the contest is a way of capitalizing on the progress in a technology called deep neural networks, said the Kaggle founder and chief executive, Anthony Goldbloom. Neural networks are complex mathematical systems that can learn specific tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data.

President Donald Trump vowed to cut back on "job-killing" regulations on the tech industry in a meeting with business executives. President Trump met with leaders from the drone and broadband industries at the White House, the latest event in the administration's "tech week." “We want to remain number one in certain areas,” President Trump said. “We’re going to give you the competitive advantage that you need." “My administration has been laser focused on removing government barriers to job growth and prosperity. We’ve created a deregulation task force to find wasteful, intrusive and job-killing regulations, which there are many,” he continued.

Execs from AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and General Electric joined representatives from drone and venture capital firms attended the meeting, titled “American Leadership in Emerging Technology.” The administration has been soliciting recommendations on tech policy and modernizing government IT from industry CEOs. The execs discussed drones, 5G wireless broadband, the so-called Internet of Things and financing emerging technology in three breakout sessions prior to their meeting with the president in the East Room of the White House.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai says he did not discuss his proposal to roll back Title II classification of Internet service providers at a meeting at the White House but did talk about the building blocks of a wireless future—spectrum and infrastructure. Asked about the meeting by a reporter following the FCC's public meeting—particularly given Chairman Pai's criticism of what he thought as too close ties between the White House and Tom Wheeler on that issue—the chairman said they had an "excellent conversation" with tech and telecom leaders and his input was sought on the rollout of 5G and the Internet of Things.He called it a "very fruitful" conversation about spectrum and infrastructure and the like and that he looked forward to working with all interested parties.

As to FCC independence, he said the FCC was still an independent agency, but there were ways to collaborate with others in the Administration, before launching into a string of nautical references to make his point. He said he wanted to make sure "we are steering in the right direction," calling them "all sailors in the same boat" and saying that it was an "all hands on deck effort" to make sure wireless innovators have the necessary tools.

As he considers limiting White House news briefings to one per week and requiring journalists to submit written questions, President Donald Trump is listening to advisers outside his administration. Ironically, a couple of those advisers are members of the media — Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity and former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), a Fox News contributor.

Consulting people without formal roles in his administration is not unusual for Trump, and several of these people are media figures. I have compiled a list of unofficial advisers (and possible advisers) from the media, along with what we know about their relationships with the president.