Reporting

Senate Republicans shocked the Capitol with an apparent crackdown on media access that immediately drew criticism from reporters and lawmakers.

Reporters were told they would no longer be allowed to film or record audio of interviews in the Senate side hallways of the Capitol without special permission. And would need permission from senators, the Senate Rules Committee, the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms or the Senate Radio and TV Gallery, depending on location, before conducting an on-camera interview with a senator anywhere in the Capitol or in the Senate office buildings, according to a Senate official familiar with the matter. The new restrictions would break years of precedent, which previously set that “videotaping and audio recording are permitted in the public areas of the House and Senate office buildings,” according to the Radio and TV Gallery website.

A Senate Democratic aide said the decision to substantially curtail the access of television reporters was made unilaterally by Senate Rules Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). Chairman Shelby said "no additional restrictions have been put in place by the Rules Committee," adding that the committee "has been working with the various galleries to ensure compliance with existing rules."

Verizon officially closed its $4.5 billion agreement to purchase Yahoo. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced her resignation in a message to employees. “It’s an emotional time for all of us,” Mayer wrote in a blog post. “Given the inherent changes to my role, I’ll be leaving the company. However, I want all of you to know that I’m brimming with nostalgia, gratitude, and optimism.”

“Yahoo’s imprint and impact on the valley will long outlive its own history,” said Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino. “For so many years, (its) creative culture and the individual leaders left an indelible mark on the valley.”

Yahoo’s drawn-out, painful demise seemed as much about the laws of nature as the laws of business, as it struggled in vain to keep its strength while a wily predator gobbled up its sustenance. Once that upstart Google came onto the internet scene with a better algorithm for searching, Yahoo’s kicking and flailing at a digital advertising market that had left it behind provided drama that time after time captivated Silicon Valley. It made for an epic tale that showcased the power of rapidly changing technology to both create and destroy.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals has partially struck down a Federal Communications Commission rule that capped the rates for inmate phone calls. The court said in a 2-1 decision that the FCC overstepped its authority by trying to set limits on intrastate phone call rates. The court, though, found that an FCC rule capping interstate rates is permissible.

The FCC’s order was “legally infirm” because it was based on a “just, reasonable and fair test” that conflated the FCC’s different authorities to regulate interstate versus intrastate communications, and that misinterpreted court precedent and the FCC’s own previous orders, Judge Harry Edwards wrote in the majority opinion. DC Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman joined Edwards’ opinion. The majority also found that the FCC used flawed methodology in calculating the rate caps, but did uphold the FCC’s caps on other fees for interstate calls.
The rule was passed in 2015, when Democrats held the majority at the FCC. Prison phone service providers later sued to block the rule from going into place, and after Republican Ajit Pai took over as chairman in 2017, the agency mostly dropped its defense against the lawsuit.

“We lost badly. This will hurt a lot of family and loved ones, not to mention the prisoners themselves,” said Andrew Schwartzman, a lawyer at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation, who argued for the prisoner rights groups. DC Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard dissented from the majority’s decision, writing that the court should have found that federal law gave the FCC authority “not only to raise inadequate rates but also to reduce excessive, monopoly-driven rates.”

“The record shows that these high prices impair the ability of inmates, by definition isolated physically from the outside world, to sustain fragile filaments of connection to families and communities that they might hope to rejoin,” Pillard wrote. “The majority’s decision scuttles a long-term effort to rein in calling costs that are not meaningfully subject to competition and that profit off of inmates’ desperation for connection.”

The Federal Communications Commission is currently in the midst of efforts to streamline infrastructure siting requirements for telecommunications companies, having recently undertaken a review of how state and local processes affect the speed and cost of deployments. But FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn hinted the FCC’s plan to step in on the state and local levels and apply one cohesive framework for siting could be hampered by its separate attempts to roll back Title II regulation.

Speaking at the Southeastern Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners conference in Atlanta, Commissioner Clyburn said a reversal of Title II would do more than erase the foundation for net neutrality. It would also undermine the basis for universal service programs and streamlining pole attachment regulations. Without Title II, Commissioner Clyburn noted, broadband providers who do not also provide a cable or legacy voice service will not be able to take advantage of the rights granted to them under section 224 of the Communications Act of 1934. “There is a lot of talk in Washington right now about preempting states and localities in the context of both tower siting and rights-of-way,” Commissioner Clyburn observed. “But they propose to rely on section 253 of the Act to do so. That provision can only be used if the provider is offering a telecommunications service. I am not sure how a 5G deployment with a LTE and VoLTE fallback will qualify as telecommunications service within the meaning of the Act if the majority’s attempt at reclassification goes through.” Commissioner Clyburn indicated she disagreed with the blanket preemption of localities in the management of their rights-of-way, noting that this approach “ignores that some of the most interesting ideas in infrastructure deployment have come out of the states and municipalities.”

Several organizations representing or serving rural telco and electric/utility providers have launched a campaign aimed at facilitating rural broadband deployment partnerships between telecommunications, municipals and electrics/utilities in unserved or underserved communities. The campaign, dubbed Partners in Broadband, comes from NTCA – The Rural Broadband Association and several key rural broadband supplier organizations, including National Information Solutions Cooperative, NRTC and National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance.

Russia’s cyberattack on the US electoral system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported.

The scope and sophistication so concerned Obama administration officials that they took an unprecedented step -- complaining directly to Moscow over a modern-day “red phone.” In October, the White House contacted the Kremlin on the back channel to offer detailed documents of what it said was Russia’s role in election meddling and to warn that the attacks risked setting off a broader conflict. The new details, buttressed by a classified National Security Agency document recently disclosed by the Intercept, show the scope of alleged hacking that federal investigators are scrutinizing as they look into whether Trump campaign officials may have colluded in the efforts. But they also paint a worrisome picture for future elections: The newest portrayal of potentially deep vulnerabilities in the US’s patchwork of voting technologies comes less than a week after former FBI Director James Comey warned Congress that Moscow isn’t done meddling.

In places like Albemarle County, where school officials estimate up to 20 percent of students lack home broadband, all the latest education-technology tools meant to narrow opportunity and achievement gaps can widen them instead. So, rather than wait for reluctant commercial internet providers to expand their reach, the district is trying an audacious solution. They’re building their own countywide broadband network. Still in its early stages, this ambitious project relies on a little-known public resource — a slice of electromagnetic spectrum the federal government long ago set aside for schools — called the Educational Broadband Service (EBS). Some internet-access advocates say EBS is underutilized at best, and wasted at worst, because loose regulatory oversight by the FCC has allowed most of the spectrum to fall into the hands of commercial internet companies. The resulting spectrum scarcity may be the most daunting of the legal, technical and monetary challenges faced by any district hoping to create its own broadband network. But a few pioneering districts have shown that it’s possible, and Albemarle County has joined a nascent trend of districts trying to build their own bridges across the digital divide.

These days, it’s uncommon to see a Republican arguing in favor of the Federal Communications Commission’s open internet rules, more commonly known as net neutrality, a set of regulations passed during the Obama administration that are now on the chopping block in the new Republican-controlled FCC. Chip Pickering, CEO of the telecommunications trade group Incompas and a former GOP congressman from Mississippi, who still considers himself a fiscal conservative, sees net neutrality as the “last great battle” in competition policy. “I think the open internet has been the most successful expansion of free-market capitalism in world history,” he said. You would be hard pressed to find a sitting Republican who shares his view on the FCC rules. In the past 10 years, his party has become all but united in its opposition to what it sees as Obama-era regulatory overreach. “He’s maintained those principles,” said Gigi Sohn, who was an adviser to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, the architect of the current net neutrality rules. “He hasn’t sold out like many of his colleagues.”

Rep Doug Collins (R-GA) has introduced a bill that would provide a tax incentive to companies to build out rural broadband, providing a House version of a Senate bill, with both backing up a proposal long-advocated by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. The Gigabit Opportunity (GO) Act would allow companies to defer capital gains taxes when they converted those gains into "long-time" investments into designated Gigabit Opportunity Zones. That means expensing investments on rural broadband buildouts on the "front end." The goal is to boost competition and speed investment, something Chairman Pai has said is an FCC priority for rural areas. Rep Collins said his bill would "dovetail" with the FCC's proposal to streamline broadband regulations, both wired and wireless. The bill is actually dovetailing with another dovetail, as it is a companion to one introduced in the Senate in May by Sen Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV).

A Q&A with Mark Lloyd, professor of communications at USC’s Annenberg School and former associate general counsel and chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission from 2009-2012.

In the interview, Lloyd discusses media consolidation, saying, "The big challenge is that we have an FCC that is not really even looking at the impact of media consolidation on what it means to local communities, on what it means to whether or not folks in those local communities actually get the service that they need. So one of the things that I wrote about before, which is sort of obscure and sort of hard to figure out, is that there is this rule that local radio stations actually have to be in the local radio stations that they operate; it’s called the main control room....what’s happening now is not only that these rules are sort of vague and not really particularly well enforced; it’s that we have an administration that has sent signals to the broadcasters, to the telecommunications companies that provide Internet service, that these rules will not be enforced. They’ve been sent a very clear signal: you can do what it is that you want to do if you have a license to operate, if you are a broad band provider, you can do whatever you want, we’re not going to enforce net neutrality, whether it’s determined to be legal or not legal. This FCC is not going to enforce it."