A Q&A with Gigi Sohn, Benton Senior Fellow and a distinguished fellow at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy.

Sohn: "When the Trump Federal Communications Commission repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order it didn’t just eliminate the prohibitions against blocking and throttling and pay prioritization. These were things that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and Charter were not allowed to do. They were not allowed to control your internet experience, but it also gave away oversight over the broadband industry. The FCC abdicated its responsibility to protect consumers and competition in the broadband market. That is the most important thing that happened on Dec 14th, 2017 when the FCC repealed the Open Internet Order. But let me explain three things that have happened in the last year and a couple of months that clearly demonstrate that what the FCC did is really terrible for consumers terrible for competition and frankly terrible for public safety." Sohn demonstrated the harms by discussing: 1) the issue of Verizon throttling the Santa Clara County (CA) Fire Department; 2) Mobile carriers selling precise geo location data of their customers, and; 3) Frontier charging rental fees to a customer who was not renting a router, with the FCC effectively delegating their oversight of the broadband industry to the broadband industry. "When I say they’ve abdicated their responsibility and the repeal of the 2015 Open Internet order allowed them to do that, those are the deep cuts I’m talking about. And those are no joke," she said.

Throughout the world, ink is being spilled and electrons exercised in a frenetic focus on fifth generation wireless technologies, or 5G. The 5G discussion, with all its permutations and combinations, has grown to resemble an elementary school soccer game where everyone chases the ball, first in one direction, then another. There are five often misunderstood facts to know about 5G:

1. 5G is revolutionary because it replaces the hardware components of the network with software that “virtualizes” the network by using the common language of Internet Protocol (IP).
2. 5G is evolutionary as both its new radios and the core network functions are defined as a progression from 4G. Like 4G before it, in most markets 5G will roll out in steps.
3. 5G is not transformational, per se. What will be transformative are the applications that will use the network. The United States was not the first to deploy any of the “G’s” of wireless networks, but nonetheless dominates the wireless ecosystem because of the innovative technologies developed by American entrepreneurs for those networks.
4. 5G is a cybersecurity risk because the network is software based. Earlier networks’ reliance on centralized hardware-based functions offered a security-enhancing choke point. Distributed software-based systems, per se, are more vulnerable.
5. 5G is spectrum dependent. In the long run this means new spectrum allocations. While those are underway, however, the evolution has begun using old spectrum assignments.

[Tom Wheeler served as the 31st chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017.]

I’m excited to have the opportunity to speak with you today about the US satellite industry—and specifically how the Federal Communications Commission is promoting American innovation and investment in orbit. We are committed to streamlining our regulatory processes and ensuring flexible rules that can adapt to new technologies, such as these massive, next-generation constellations. The bottom line is that the space industry is changing, and our regulations need to change with it. We aim to craft forward-looking rules that safeguard the public interest and enable the private sector to deliver consumer value. That’s the only way to ensure that America remains the best place in the world to license and launch satellites. 

I’m pleased to announce new steps that the FCC is taking toward meeting this challenge. This morning, I presented to my colleagues a draft order that would make it easier and cheaper to license small satellites, or smallsats. In sum, if operators want to launch satellites with certain characteristics, such as short orbital lifetimes, they would no longer be forced to comply with the longer and more expensive approval processes required for larger-scale missions. And when the FCC votes on Aug 1, I hope my colleagues approve as well.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing "Protecting Innocence in a Digital World" July 9 on protecting kids online, and Big Tech came in for further criticism over its handling of the issue. Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he hoped to learn a lot from the witnesses about the perils of social media sites, and the internet in general, for children. He also signaled there would be a follow-on hearing where Big Tech was called to account. 

Professor Angela Campbell of the Institute For Public Representation at Georgetown Law outlined the perils. She told the committee that problems with protecting children's privacy, preventing exposure to inappropriate content, and limiting screen time on digital "vices" stem from two things: 1) The business models of the dominant tech companies, which have not been designed to protect children, but to attract users and keep them so they can monetize their data via targeted marketing; and 2) the fact that the government does not have sufficient safeguards and has not enforced the ones it has. She called out the Federal Trade Commission for not vigorously enforcing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which she said has empowered Google, YouTube, Facebook and Amazon to "ignore existing safeguards." 

President Donald Trump has summoned Republican lawmakers, political strategists and social media stars to the White House on July 11  to discuss the “opportunities and challenges” of the Web — but his upcoming summit, critics say, could end up empowering online provocateurs who have adopted controversial political tactics entering the 2020 election campaign. The high-profile gathering follows months of attacks from President Trump claiming that Facebook, Google and Twitter — all services the president taps to talk to supporters — secretly censor right-leaning users, websites and other content online, a charge of political bias that each of the tech giants strongly deny. But President Trump hasn’t invited any of the major tech companies, apparently, opting instead to grant a powerful stage to people who have a track record of sending inflammatory tweets and videos and posting other troubling content that social media sites increasingly are under pressure to remove. 

The purported details in the account of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, seemed improbable on their face: that Seth Rich, a data director in the Democratic National Committee’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Hillary Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad. Yet in a graphic example of how fake news infects the internet, those precise details popped up the same day on an obscure website, whatdoesitmean.com, that is a frequent vehicle for Russian propaganda. The website’s article, which attributed its claims to “Russian intelligence,” was the first known instance of Rich’s murder being publicly linked to a political conspiracy. The Russian effort to exploit Rich’s tragic death didn’t stop with the fake SVR bulletin. Over the course of the next two and a half years, the Russian government-owned media organizations RT and Sputnik repeatedly played up stories that baselessly alleged that Rich, a relatively junior-level staffer, was the source of Democratic Party emails that had been leaked to WikiLeaks. It was an idea first floated by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who on Aug. 9, 2016, announced a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s murder, saying — somewhat cryptically — that “our sources take risks.” At the same time, online trolls working in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — the same shadowy outfit that conducted the Russian social media operation during the 2016 election — aggressively boosted the conspiracy theories. Within months, the Rich conspiracy story was also being quietly promoted inside President Trump’s White House.