[Speech] The primary focus of my remarks will be the primary focus of my chairmanship since day one: closing the digital divide in order to make sure everyone can benefit from the Internet revolution. To date, I’ve visited roughly 90 cities in 33 states in the US, driving more than 8,500 road miles
in some hard-working rental cars. What are some of the key lessons from this travel? One is that no matter what you do for a living or where you do it, broadband is critical.  A second key lesson is that the communities that are the hardest to connect are also the places that have the most to gain from next-generation networks. The third takeaway is that the costs of being on the wrong side of the digital divide are high and getting higher. That brings me to the final subject I wanted to highlight: disaster response. We should learn from our experiences and develop best practices so that we’re all better prepared and more effective in responding to future disasters.

We may come from different countries, but we all share common bonds—bonds of geography and, more importantly, bonds of shared values. As your neighbor, I’m calling on all of us to work together to bring digital opportunity to all the people we are honored to serve.

[Speech] I want to talk about the secret to smart policies about smart cities.  I can summarize my idea in one word.  Learning.

A major tactic in the Federal Communications Commission’s effort to regulate cities is through its Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) process. The stated, and worthy, goals of the BDAC are to accelerate and broaden deployment of next-generation broadband networks and reduce the digital divide. However, the BDAC suffers from significant failures of design and execution. The failures are threefold. First, the BDAC did not have a balanced membership that could have lead to a real consensus between stakeholders. Second, the BDAC started from the false assumption that industry does not have the leverage to negotiate the deals it needs to make investments in new networks, an assumption the industry acknowledges is false. Third, BDAC did not understand how to use a negotiating process to create value for both sides, by focusing on how each can give up on something small to get something big.  Instead, it primarily focused on forcing cities to give carriers what the carriers wanted.But underlying these three failures is a failure to learn anything.

We have a lot of work to do and a lot to learn to achieve the outcomes we desire. But I trust cities can do that learning in ways the FCC has shown itself incapable of doing.

[Blair Levin is the Executive Director of Gig.U. He also serves as a Non-resident Senior Fellow of the Metropolitan Policy Project of the Brookings Institute.]

The Federal Communications Commission has released an additional $36 million annually for 175 small rural carriers that opted to transition to receive broadband Universal Service support based on the alternative Connect America cost model (A-CAM). In exchange, the A-CAM carriers have committed to more aggressive broadband deployment goals – although those goals are not as aggressive as those originally established for the A-CAM portion of the high-cost Universal Service program back in 2016. At that time, more carriers than expected opted to receive A-CAM support, driving the commission to reduce both funding and deployment commitments. Anticipations changed in March 2018, however, when the FCC voted to release an additional $360 million over a 10-year period to A-CAM carriers.  As a July 23  FCC press release explains, the $360 million is based on an adding approximately $36 million annually to the A-CAM budget for the next 10 years.

Watch for network neutrality arguments in future antitrust analysis of mergers, competition lawyers said. The Justice Department’s high-profile attempt to block AT&T from buying Time Warner didn’t address the possibility that the AT&T customers could see slowed internet traffic for some content. But that kind of argument could come up one day. The DOJ has looked at past merger cases on the grounds of its impact on open internet access said Ketan Jhaveri, a former trial lawyer at the DOJ’s Antitrust Division. “If net neutrality were to come up, it would come up in a merger of [internet service] providers,” he said, adding that those legal arguments are likely a long way off. Allegations that a merged AT&T-Time Warner could throttle streaming content from rival ISPs would have improved the government’s case that the merger would cause harm. “But they couldn’t do that,” said Blair Levin, a former chief of staff at the Federal Communications Commission in both the Obama and Clinton administrations. If the DOJ told a court that the combined AT&T-Time Warner would slow internet speeds for rival content services, it would have undermined the FCC’s successful push to undo net neutrality rules, Levin said. 

After being separated from their children at the border and detained in facilities scattered across the US, some migrant parents have to pay steep fees to speak with their children, a policy that a group of Democratic lawmakers have called "shameless" and "morally reprehensible." In a letter sent to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, about 150 Democratic members of Congress argued that the practice of charging "exorbitant" prices to place phone calls from immigrant detention violates ICE's national standards. Detained immigrants are able to call specific lawyers and government help lines for free, according to the agency's telephone access standards. It also states that facilities should enable detainees to make direct or free calls to "immediate family or others for detainees in personal and family emergencies" and that detainees should have "equitable access to reasonably priced telephone services" — which the letter from Congress points out. For anyone else, detainees or the people they are contacting are responsible for the cost of the phone call.

The Federal Communication Commission’s surprise move to block Sinclair Broadcast Group’s $6.6 billion acquisition of Tribune Media came after the head of a rival conservative news outlet discussed his opposition to the deal with President Donald Trump. “I have discussed my opposition to the merger a few times with him,” Christopher Ruddy, founder and chief executive of Newsmax, said on July 18, referring to his longtime friend, President Trump. It is not known if President Trump ever discussed the deal with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai — who said he has “serious concerns” about the merger and would move to block it. Ruddy, who operates a right-leaning cable news network and website, has been a constant and outspoken critic of the Sinclair-Tribune deal.

On July 12, Newsmax’s lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner filed papers with the FCC questioning Sinclair’s transparency — or lack thereof — in selling three key stations, including WGN, to less than an arm’s distance buyers, apparently. Four days later, on July 16, the FCC moved to block the deal — citing some of the same transparency issues highlighted in the Boies letter.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) launched another effort at massive communications deregulation, one he has been pushing for most of a decade, so far without success. Rep Scalise has reintroduced a discussion draft of his Next Generation Television Marketplace Act, which repeals must-carry and retransmission consent rules and the compulsory license. That is the license that allows broadcasters to include nonlocal programming in their retransmission deals without having to secure individual rights from national network and syndication rightsholders. The bill would also "eliminate the government's role in defining the scope of programming exclusivity" and "codify the repeal of certain limitations imposed on local broadcasters that prevent them from adapting to today’s dynamic communications marketplace." Like previous incarnations, the bill also includes eliminating the network nonduplication and syndicated exclusivity rules, as well as broadcast ownership limits.

“Innovation tends to follow the path of least government resistance. For proof, look no further than the growth of online streaming services that are operating in a completely free market, while competing against other platforms that are regulated as if they were still monopolies from the 1990’s," said Rep Scalise. "My legislation will level the playing field so consumers can benefit from even more freedom in the video marketplace.”

Newspaper layoffs have far from abated in the past year, and digital-native news outlets are also suffering losses.  At least 36 percent of the largest newspapers across the United States – as well as at least 23 percent of the highest-traffic digital-native news outlets – experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018, according to the Pew study. Among newspapers, those with the highest circulation were most likely to be affected. The analysis comes amid a series of highly publicized staff reductions by hedge fund companies that had acquired well-known newspapers, including The Denver Post, where employees publicly criticized the cuts made by the papers’ owners. Of the 110 daily newspapers in the analysis, 40 – or 36 perceny – were found to have gone through publicly reported layoffs during the 16-month study period, with at least 12 experiencing more than one round of layoffs. It is possible that even more occurred but remained under the radar of the search methods employed in this analysis.

[Commentary] We need to move away from the arguments that the country should care about laid-off reporters or that the suits should be held to account. This can’t be about us. It has to be about why the country should care if local news goes away, which is the trajectory we now find ourselves on. What are the effects on a democracy if local news is no longer in the picture? How is my life as a New Yorker going to be worse now that the Daily News has been so terribly hobbled? If you’re in journalism and you can’t muster an answer to that question, you need to move on.

For the rest of us in this profession, it is the case we now must make, especially in the face of a national administration that has made it its business to question why journalism matters. What does it mean not to have local news in your town? Would it change where you live, how you raise your kids, where they go to school? It would if a local coach were abusing kids, and would have kept doing so if a newspaper hadn’t reported it. It would if money that was supposed to be going to city services was instead going to higher financing costs for government bonds, since no one was paying attention to the deals the city was cutting. It would if there were a spike in health viruses, because there wasn’t the news infrastructure to warn people to be safe. All of those examples are real. And it’s easy enough to add Daily News scoops to the list, something many of its fans, myself included, will be doing as they process this terrible day.

Our job at Columbia Journalism Review—and the job for all of us who care about the importance of the press to democracy—is to answer the foundational questions we face as a country. Our window for addressing them—and, crucially, in a way that resonates with readers—is in very real danger of closing entirely.

In the early evening of July 9th, President Donald Trump stood in the gold draped East Room of the White House with a small group of senior advisers to rehearse his announcement of Judge Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee for the Supreme Court. President Trump stepped on and off the podium, riffing with his aides. While this was going on, Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, was meticulously obsessing over the camera shot which looked out upon a red carpet, apparently.  Hours before the announcement, Shine had gone to the East Room to test the lighting, apparently. He showed the president three different lighting options and Trump selected his favorite. President Trump has been frustrated that some of his previous appearances on camera have not had the production values of the prime time TV shows he spends so much time watching. Trump frequently complains to aides about the "terrible lighting," apparently.