Research

Political divides in the American news landscape do not end with Americans’ preferences for different news sources; rather, they extend to how members of the U.S. Congress communicate with constituents in the digital age. Between January 2015 and July 2017, nearly half (48%) of the links to national news outlets that members of Congress shared on Facebook were to outlets predominantly linked to by members of just one party, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.

With a mean global speed of 20.28 Mbps, mobile downloads increased 30.1% over the last 12 months and mobile uploads increased 38.9%. A global average of 40.11 Mbps makes fixed broadband downloads 97.8% faster than mobile and this speed increased 31.6% during the same period. Uploads over fixed broadband showed the smallest increase of 25.9%. 

• Since November 28, cable news has given net neutrality minimal coverage: approximately four minutes each on CNN and Fox News and more than eight minutes on MSNBC.
• Since November 28, broadcast news networks have given net neutrality minimal coverage on their morning and evening news programs and Sunday political talk shows: more than eight minutes on NBC and a little more than two minutes on CBS. ABC did not cover net neutrality in this time period.

An open internet provides a bedrock on which local news providers can build stable, accessible, and independent structures. Net Neutrality will not solve the problems facing local news. Doing so will require hard work and ingenuity from journalists, community members, entrepreneurs, and local governments. But net neutrality gives those actors the space to try and solve these problems. In a world without net neutrality, that space will shrink. 

On Thursday, December 7th, five internet service providers alleged to Chairman Pai that the current legal framework for Open Internet rules had curtailed their investment and harmed their operations. While the presentations are rife with vague statements and outright errors, there is one thing notably absent from all of them: dollar signs, deployment data, and any other quantifiable metric demonstrating the supposed impact of Title II.

International flows of personal information are more significant than ever, but differences in transatlantic data privacy law imperil this data trade. The resulting policy debate has led the EU to set strict limits on transfers of personal data to any non-EU country—including the United States—that lacks sufficient privacy protections. Bridging the transatlantic data divide is therefore a matter of the greatest significance. 

By the time the Federal Communications Commission’s ferociously controversial net neutrality draft Order was released on November 22, 2017, more than 22 million comments were submitted to the FCC through its new application programming interface (API). This avalanche of public input is impossible to navigate and interpret using human labor alone. Machine learning tools are uniquely suited to navigating and interpreting such a large amount of information.

We agree that fake news and misinformation are real problems that deserve serious attention. We also agree that social media and other online technologies have contributed to deep-seated problems in democratic discourse such as increasing polarization and erosion of support for traditional sources of authority.

Broadband and the digital applications it makes possible are impacting residents, businesses, and governments alike.

Decades after internet access became widely available, Pew Research Center surveys show that about a tenth of American adults (12%) remain offline. But what happens when some of them take the plunge and connect?