Reporting

A change in leadership at the Federal Communications Commission has led to rising uncertainty about the future of efforts to boost broadband access, preserve an open internet, and protect online privacy—all issues affecting the K-12 sector. Atop education leaders' list of concerns is the E-rate, a $3.9 billion federal program that helps schools and libraries pay for telecommunications services. A wide cross-section of experts credits the FCC's 2014 overhaul of the program for helping.

A kid who grew up listening to radio is now in control of it. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai was the child of immigrants from India who arrived in the United States with nothing but a transistor radio and $10. FCC Chairman Pai grew up in Parsons (KS) and told us, “I still remember on summer nights tuning into KLKC 1540 am and hearing the Royals game, especially during that magical season of ’85. I remember also driving to school my parents would have on Paul Harvey. There’s something about his voice that I just found so appealing — it almost felt like he was speaking to me, as silly as that sounds. Even now when I hear his voice on some of the clips that remain online, it’s a familiar voice that really was a presence in my life for a long time. And so Paul Harvey and Dr. Demento — as odd as that combination is — would probably be the things that stick out to me.”

In what appears to be an unprecedented move, former Democratic Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel will also be future Democratic FCC commissioner if the Senate confirms her as expected. Shortly before midnight Tuesday, June 13, President Donald Trump signaled his intention to nominate Jessica Rosenworcel to a five-year term and a return engagement as a FCC commissioner.

The office of press secretary Sean Spicer announced the news in an email advisory. Rosenworcel, who served on the commission between 2012 and the end of 2016, was forced to exit at the end of 2016 after Congress failed to bring her renomination to a vote despite unanimous approval by the Senate Commerce Committee and support from both Democratic and Republican legislative leaders after Senate Republican leadership would not schedule a vote. President Trump withdrew Obama's renomination of Rosenworcel, which if she had been seated would have left the FCC at a 2-2 political divide once FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler exited.

Currently the FCC is down to only three members, two Republicans and a Democrat. The FCC can still render decisions on issues the lone Democrat disagrees with, and has on numerous occasions, most notably the decision to roll back Title II. But if Democrat Mignon Clyburn exits—her term is up at the end of June but she could serve until the end of 2018, the FCC will lack a quorum to vote on items. Rosenworcel would likely need to be paired with a nominee for the Republican seat—the Administration would not want to create a 2-2 tie, which would be the case unless Commissioner Mignon Clyburn exited. In that event, the Clyburn seat could be paired with the new Republican and Rosenworcel paired with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, whose term also ends in June. One name being floated for the third Republican seat is Brendan Carr, currently the acting FCC General Counsel and a former-staffer in the office of Chairman Pai.

US District Judge Robert Scola ruled that grocery chain Winn-Dixie Stores must make its website accessible to the blind, following an unprecedented trial over a gray area of accessibility law.

The decision adds momentum to a push by plaintiffs’ lawyers and disability-rights groups to make all consumer websites accessible to the blind and hearing-impaired. Uncertainty in the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and a lack of Justice Department guidance has created widespread confusion over whether websites must meet the same stringent accessibility standards as stores do. Plaintiffs’ lawyers have latched on to the ambiguity to launch hundreds of website accessibility lawsuits, most of which privately settle. The latest ruling “is definitely a game-changer,” said Minh Vu, a partner at Seyfarth Shaw LLP who represents companies facing accessibility claims and is not involved in the case. While the decision is only immediately applicable to Winn-Dixie, Ms. Vu said, it sends a signal to other companies that “there’s a very real possibility a judge could find this way.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to answer repeated questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee June 13 about his private conversations with President Donald Trump, including whether he spoke to Trump about former FBI Director James B. Comey’s handling of the investigation into coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential race.

In a number of testy exchanges with members of the panel, AG Sessions said he would not discuss his conversations with President Trump because of long-standing Justice Department policy that protected private conversations between cabinet secretaries and the president. “I am not able to discuss with you or confirm or deny the nature of private conversations that I may have had with the president on this subject or others,” Sessions said. Sessions opened his testimony to the panel with a fiery assertion that he never had any conversations with Russians about “any type of interference” in the 2016 presidential election. “The suggestion that I participated in any collusion … is an appalling and detestable lie,” he said.

President Donald Trump’s key advisers appear to be deeply involved in government technology teams founded under Barack Obama. When Trump dedicated a new White House team to modernizing government IT in March, it wasn’t immediately clear how the Office of American Innovation's mission differed from the US Digital Service, a troubleshooting task force for high-profile technology projects. But senior Trump advisers are regularly attending USDS meetings, signaling their interest in large-scale government technology projects, USDS Acting Administrator Matt Cutts said. Cutts joined the federal government in 2016 from Google, where he ran the Webspam team and created a safety filter for the search engine.

Top Democratic Sens on the Homeland Security Committee are asking inspectors general at 24 federal agencies to investigate whether Trump Administration officials are skirting federal records laws by using encrypted and vanishing messaging apps. The committee’s current and former ranking members, Sens Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Tom Carper (D-DE) also want the IGs to investigate whether top agency officials are barring staffers from responding to information requests from congressional Democrats.

That request follows a report that Trump Administration lawyers advised agencies to ignore Democratic requests. The senators collected the requests into a single, alphabetically arranged document that runs to 120 pages, beginning with the Agriculture Department IG and ending with Veterans Affairs.

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.”