The New York State Public Service Commission voted to revoke its approval of Charter Communications' 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. The PSC said it is ordering Charter to sell the former TWC system that it purchased in New York, and it's "bring[ing] an enforcement action in State Supreme Court to seek additional penalties for Charter's past failures and ongoing noncompliance." Charter has repeatedly failed to meet deadlines for broadband expansions that were required in exchange for merger approval, state officials said. The PSC has steadily increased the pressure on Charter with fines and threats, but Charter never agreed to changes demanded by state officials. The PSC said:

Charter is ordered to file within 60 days a plan with the Commission to ensure an orderly transition to a successor provider(s). During the transition process, Charter must continue to comply with all local franchises it holds in New York State and all obligations under the Public Service Law and the Commission regulations. Charter must ensure no interruption in service is experienced by customers, and, in the event that Charter does not do so, the Commission will take further steps, including seeking injunctive relief in Supreme Court in order to protect New York consumers.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is fighting hard against a Federal Communications Commission proposal they say endangers its members and could send CWA work to unskilled non-union contractors. The FCC is preparing to vote Aug 2 on, and almost certainly approve, a proposal to allow for "one touch, make ready" prep for attachment of communications equipment on utility poles. The idea is to speed broadband deployment by allowing those attaching or moving wires and equipment on utility poles to do all the work itself, rather than spreading it across multiple parties--say incumbent users doing the moving and the new attacher doing the attaching. That will save time, but CWA says at the price of safety, as well as jobs. "Pole attachment work is complex, and if done incorrectly, can cause electrocution or poles to fall," it said this week in pushing back hard. In decrying what it said was the dangerous, anti-union proposal, the union said it had collected 9,000 signatures on a petition against the proposal which it delivered to the FCC the week of July 23.

Walt Disney Co. and 21st Century Fox shareholders overwhelmingly approved Disney’s proposed $71.3-billion takeover of much of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox — a milestone in a merger that is expected to dramatically reshape the entertainment industry. The deal’s contours began to form nearly a year ago over wine between Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger and Murdoch at the elder mogul’s Moraga vineyard above Bel-Air. July 27’s vote was more official: The two companies held separate shareholder meetings concurrently in the same Hilton hotel a couple of blocks from Fox’s headquarters in mid-town Manhattan. The lightning-quick approval caps Murdoch’s decision in December to accept Disney’s $52-billion bid for Fox’s television and movie studio, cable television channels FX and National Geographic, Fox’s stake in streaming service Hulu, television operations in India and Fox’s 39% stake in London-based pay-TV company Sky.

In a recent press briefing, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that the grand jury assembled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller had returned an indictment against 12 officers of Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff (better known as Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye, or GRU). The indictment was for conducting "active cyber operations with the intent of interfering in the 2016 presidential election." The filing spells out the Justice Department's first official, public accounting of the most high-profile information operations against the US presidential election to date. It provides details down to the names of those alleged to be behind the intrusions into the networks of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the theft of emails of members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign team, and various efforts to steal voter data and undermine faith in voting systems across multiple states in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Reading between the lines, the indictment reveals that the Mueller team and other US investigators likely gained access to things like Twitter direct messages and hosting company business records and logs, and they obtained or directly monitored email messages associated with the GRU (and possibly WikiLeaks). 

After digging into this latest indictment, the evidence suggests President Trump may not have made a very good call [on the matter of whether Russia was involved in the hacking]. But his blaming of the victims of the attacks for failing to have good enough security, while misguided, does strike on a certain truth: the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and DCC were poorly prepared for this sort of attack, failed to learn lessons from history, and ignored advice from some very knowledgeable third parties they enlisted for help.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is targeting Republican lawmakers and AT&T in a new advertising campaign aimed at highlighting the telecommunication company’s job cuts after receiving a boost from the GOP’s tax law. The CWA has launched radio ads in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Texas that ties Republican candidates to the job cuts. The group estimates that AT&T has cut 7,000 jobs since the tax bill went into effect in 2018. They accuse the company of using its tax savings to enrich its shareholders and executives rather than investing in workers. "AT&T can certainly afford to keep good family-supporting jobs in our communities," Lisa Bolton, CWA’s vice president of technology and telecommunications, said in a statement. "It's shameful for these members of Congress to stay silent while AT&T sends layoff notices to their constituents and moves the work to low-wage contractors."  The radio ads target a handful of races in the Midwest, including Rep Jim Renacci’s (R-OH) bid to unseat Sen Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in Ohio. AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said that the ads were "misleading" and noted that the company has invested more in the U.S. over the past five years — $135 billion — than any other other publicly traded company.

[Commentary] Of all the mind-dizzying hypocrisies that have emanated from President Donald Trump’s communications office, it is hard to find any more outlandish than claiming to “support a free press” while barring a reporter from an open White House event simply because it didn’t like her questions. Outlandish, but not laughable; there’s nothing amusing about the administration’s retaliation against CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins. It underscores — again — the White House’s contempt for the critical role played by the media in a free society. “Highly unusual and possibly unprecedented” is how Post reporters characterized the decision, delivered by press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and communications director Bill Shine, to block Collins from attending an event July 25 in the Rose Garden. No doubt  [President Trump] thinks sowing distrust of the press serves his purposes, but thankfully there are some small promising signs of backlash to his strongman methods.