President Donald Trump's reelection team is backing a controversial plan to give the government a role in managing America's next-generation 5G wireless networks — bucking the free market consensus view of his own administration and sparking wireless industry fears of nationalization. The plan — embraced by Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale and adviser Newt Gingrich — would involve the government taking 5G airwaves and designing a system to allow for sharing them on a wholesale basis with wireless providers. The idea is also being pushed by a politically connected wireless company backed by venture capitalist Peter Thiel that could stand to benefit. It's already getting pushback from industry, which dismisses the concept as untested and unworkable. But the Trump campaign is now fully embracing the model in a bid to woo rural voters who have long lacked decent internet service because wireless companies don't have a financial incentive to offer affordable broadband to all Americans, including those outside the biggest cities. “A 5G wholesale market would drive down costs and provide access to millions of Americans who are currently underserved,” said Kayleigh McEnany, national press secretary for Trump’s 2020 campaign. “This is in line with President Trump’s agenda to benefit all Americans, regardless of geography. Trump campaign advisers aren't offering an explanation for why their position is so different from the one embraced by the Trump administration, and they say they have no financial motivations for their stance.

When it comes to figuring out how Facebook actually works—how it decides what content is allowed, and what isn’t—the most important person in the company isn’t Mark Zuckerberg. It’s Monika Bickert, a former federal prosecutor and Harvard Law School graduate. At 42, Bickert is currently one of only a handful of people, along with her counterparts at Google, with real power to dictate free-speech norms for the entire world. In a meeting room called "Oh, Semantics", she sits at the head of a long table, joined by several dozen deputies in their 30s and 40s. Among them are engineers, lawyers, and PR people. But mostly they are policymakers, the people who write Facebook’s laws. Like Bickert, a number are veterans of the public sector, Obama-administration refugees eager to maintain some semblance of the pragmatism that has lost favor in Washington.

Governing, by its nature, demands trade-offs. But much of the world right now is not in the mood for trade-offs. People gravitate to Facebook, in part, to live in cocoons of their own making. If Facebook has created a parallel online society for a quarter of the world to live in, the question facing Monika Bickert and her team is: What kind of society is it going to be?