Fast Company

After the FCC’s vote to scrap its net neutrality regulations, activists will turn to lawsuits, Congress—and the 2018 election. Lawsuits probably won’t be filed until at least January, but it’s already clear that they will challenge the FCC’s vote on both substance and process. The substance argument is a legalistic, almost existential, debate over the true nature of an ISP.  What’s kept the fire burning all these years is the fight over two lousy choices for how to legally classify an ISP.

[Commentary]  The idea of network neutrality may be intuitively simple, but the regulations that codify it are complex. One point of comparison is the position countries take on “zero rating,” a phrase used to describe telecom service plans that offer discounted or free access to a select group of apps or services. In fact, this image from the website of a Portuguese telecom provider MEO, that uses zero rating, recently went viral because it represents the dystopia of what a fragmented internet might look like. 

In making the case that most Americans have multiple, competing broadband providers, the government acknowledges that up to 40 percent of them do not.

In this first year in the Age Of Trump, favorable public opinion about the news media has gone up. According to a new report from Poynter, 49% of the public has at least a “fair amount” of trust and confidence in the U.S. media, which is an uptick from the year before.  Though this sounds good, when Poynter analyzed this data further, it showed some alarming trends. Specifically, this uptick in trust is very polarized, and represents a resurgence of media trust from people on the left, while those on the right continue to show little confidence in the press.

Myanmar is the latest country to piggyback off of a dangerous rhetorical strategy made popular by President Trump. The New York Times reports that an official in Myanmar’s Rakhine state recently said: “there is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news.” Rohingya is the Muslim minority in Myanmar facing sweeping persecution from hardline Buddhists. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people have fled the country in the wake of what a top UN official called ethnic cleansing.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai thinks everyone from Cher to Twitter has it wrong when they say that his efforts to roll back the US government’s existing network neutrality rules will spell the death of the web. Instead, Chairman Pai said that tech giants could pose the greatest threat by discriminating against viewpoints on the internet.

Cambridge Analytica, the Anglo-American data and behavioral science firm that worked for Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Donald Trump–and that sparked an investigation in the UK and inquiries by US lawmakers–has announced two initiatives in the past year that highlight some of the newer techniques in targeted advertising and the complex relationships that surround them. Since 2016’s presidential campaigns, the company has sought to expand further into targeted, or addressable, TV, an emerging type of data-driven ad technology that marketers and political campaigns can use to know not just what key