Daily Digest 7/02/2018 (NSA Purge)

Facebook shared user information with 52 hardware and software makers, including some based in China, under agreements designed to make its social media platform work more effectively on smartphones and other devices. The list of these partners includes major American tech brands such as Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, along with South Korean tech giant Samsung and China-based companies Huawei and Alibaba. Not all of the companies are device makers; some make operating systems or other software. Facebook has ended 38 of the 52 partnerships and plans to soon end seven more. The acknowledgment, which came in more than 700 pages of replies to the House Commerce Committee, is the fullest to date regarding reports that Facebook shared user data with some companies for years after it stopped doing so with most app makers.

Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples, and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns. “The libertarian position has become dominant on the right on First Amendment issues,” said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the Cato Institute. “It simply means that we should be skeptical of government attempts to regulate speech. That used to be an uncontroversial and nonideological point. What’s now being called the libertarian position on speech was in the 1960s the liberal position on speech.” And an increasingly conservative judiciary has been more than a little receptive to this argument. A new analysis prepared for The New York Times found that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been far more likely to embrace free-speech arguments concerning conservative speech than liberal speech. That is a sharp break from earlier eras. As a result, liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them.

[Commentary] It is heartbreaking, but necessary, to recognize that the openness that defines local news likely carries too high a risk; local newsrooms, at least for now, may have no choice but to fortify themselves. Since Donald Trump chose, in the very earliest days of his presidential campaign, to make attacks on a free press in the United States one of his signature themes, many of us have thought it inevitable that his dangerous rhetoric would one day be a trigger for tragedy. Our focus this long two years has been on the big, high-profile news organizations that most occupy Trump’s obsessions and his Twitter feed. They are what we think about when we worry about threats to the press, and they have become stand-ins for those, inside the government and out, who rail against fake news. But what we missed is that for most Americans, the media is not some big-city skyscraper or national TV network with layers of security, where everybody needs a badge to get in. It’s our local newsroom down the street, staffed by professionals reporting on what matters most to people where they live. We’re reminded this week that in the war against the press, they may well be the journalists in America who are most at risk.

[Commentary] The attack on the Capital Gazette in Annapolis (MD) horrified the nation, but especially those of us in journalism. On a personal level, we mourn the loss of five devoted colleagues who were working tirelessly, at modest wages, to provide a vital service to their community. More broadly, though, this attack is merely the latest blow inflicted on local journalism — an institution that, despite its fundamental importance to our democracy, has been experiencing serious decline. There are several ways we might reverse the decline of local news. Philanthropy can play a role. So, too, can the federal government, which can take actions to make local news broadly profitable again — such as forcing social media platforms to distribute a much bigger share of ad revenue they make on news stories to the organizations that originally gathered the news. It’s bad enough that reporters at local papers such as the Capital Gazette already have to endure low pay and long hours. That they now have to worry about being targeted for violence is just another ominous sign of the decline of our democracy.

[Paul Glastris is editor in chief of the Washington Monthly.]

The Senate has passed a Farm Bill whose broadband section reins in potential overbuilding of commercial broadband operators with government broadband subsidies. The bill, which passed overwhelmingly (86 to 11), "establishes new broadband standards for projects financed through USDA." That translates to reforms to the USDA's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) broadband funding program to better target the funds to unserved areas where there is no high-speed broadband, rather than to underserved areas where the money could be used to overbuild existing commercial providers. ISPs have long argued that government broadband funds should go to build out broadband, not overbuild it, and pushed the agriculture committees to square the RUS funds with that philosophy. Fans of the program argued that some overbuilding was necessary to make the more expensive unserved buildout portions sustainable. The Senate Farm Bill must still be reconciled with a House-passed version, which won't happen until after the July 4 break.

AT&T’s wireless customers are expected to pay almost $1 billion in new fees every year to the company after it increased a monthly “administrative fee” this spring in a move that went largely unnoticed, according to an industry analyst. The analyst, Walt Piecyk of BTIG, initially estimated that AT&T could pocket roughly $800 million more annually from the higher fee, before revising that figure upward to $970 million once he learned that the fee hike will also affect tablets and smartwatches on AT&T’s network, not just cellphones. “Some people might not get hit 'til next cycle,” Piecyk said. The higher fee reflects a 58 percent increase over its previous level of $1.26 per line. The fee is now more than three times what it was when AT&T first introduced it in 2013. It does not apply to prepaid customers, but affects the vast majority of AT&T’s roughly 65 million postpaid subscribers, Piecyk said. “Presumably the Administrative Fee is another way to help AT&T fund its network build and Time Warner acquisition going forward,” wrote Piecyk in his note airing the discovery. AT&T declined to say whether the fee would be allocated toward defraying its merger costs. The company said in a statement that the fee is a standard practice across the industry, and that it “helps cover costs we incur for items like cell site maintenance and interconnection between carriers.”

T-Mobile and Sprint are small players in a wireless market where being small makes it hard to survive. One expert told me that if the deal is framed as a pairing of two of the four national wireless carriers, it has little chance of making it past the regulators. That’s why T-Mobile CEO John Legere and Sprint executive chairman Marcelo Claure have been trying to describe the combined company as a new kind of entity that sells not only wireless service, but potentially home broadband service and a host of media in the future. A combined T-Mobile and Sprint will very likely aspire to sell new kinds of broadband service like fixed wireless service for the home. Sprint owns a treasure trove of 5G wireless spectrum. That combined with T-Mobile’s considerable 5G spectrum holdings will pave the way for those. Which view will more closely match reality a year or two after a merger? In reality both will likely prove true. The merger will likely degrade competition in the wireless space over time, but it will also likely create a stronger single company with a much better chance of survival. The new company would instantly be roughly the size of Verizon and AT&T, with a subscriber share of about 29%. A period of “rationalizing” the two companies’ redundant people, facilities, and technology (the companies have said that $40 billion in “efficiencies”) could result in a more efficient and competitive company. What we don’t know is the balance of the two effects. Moreover, the new company will not just be competing with the other national wireless companies (AT&T and Verizon), but rather with any company that sells wired or wireless broadband and, increasingly, internet TV service over the top. This could mean Comcast, Charter, Frontier, and Century Link–companies that are increasingly making a living by selling broadband service.

Limited-government groups want the Federal Communications Commission to limit the mandates in its enforcement of children's programming legislation dating from the early 1990s, while a prominent kids TV group sees it slightly differently, while agreeing changes are needed. The FCC is tentatively proposing to eliminate a number of children's TV rules, and is seeking comment on changing others, concluding that educational and informational programming does not have to be at least a half-hour in length and regularly scheduled.  The agency also proposes cutting the frequency of kids TV reports to the FCC from quarterly to annually. In comments this week on the FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, over two dozen groups including Americans for Tax Reform, Citizens Against Government Waste, and the American Conservative Union, said that was the right way to go. In its comments on the proposal, the Parents Television Council said that while it agrees the rules need to be modernized, the proposal reads like a broadcaster wish list. instead, it suggested, the FCC should employ some of the data-driven processes the new chairman has espoused to identify and define what the programming needs of children and families are, then seek input from parents, and get testimony from the scientific and education communities.

California’s major internet service providers and their trade association have contributed more than $1 million to members of the California Assembly since January 2017.