Financial Times

Trust in traditional media is at an all-time low, as many people prefer to get information from friends and social media contacts, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. Pew Research Center surveys show that ideological divisions have widened between Democrats and Republicans, more and less educated people, and older and younger adults.

Since Donald Trump’s election, several news organisations have set out to bridge the rift between liberals and conservatives who inhabit distinct ideological bubbles that determine the media they consume and fuel an increasingly uncivil public discourse. Diversifying media diets is also the goal of apps such as Read Across the Aisle, which notifies users when their news reading skews too far to the left or right. A browser extension called Escape Your Bubble slips stories into your Facebook feed that contain political views challenging your own.

According to lobbyists and consumer advocates, the overturning of broadband privacy rules a forerunner to a pair of bigger fights that will shape the US internet and media industries for years to come: the network neutrality regime that sets the ground rules for access to digital communications and media, and approval of AT&T’s $109 billion bid for Time Warner.

The severe retrenchment of FCC power fits with the agenda of Ajit Pai, the Republican-appointed commissioner who took over as chairman of the agency after the election. Chairman Pai has been a vociferous opponent of net neutrality, and has already taken snips out of the regime put in place by the Obama-era FCC to limit the powers of cable and telecoms companies to exert more control over the data flowing through their networks. The shift in direction to unshackle the network companies threatens to reset the competitive landscape, and is shaping up to be a mixed blessing for internet giants like Google and Facebook.

British Telecom and Ofcom have struck a deal about the future of the company’s Openreach broadband division after it agreed to transfer 32,000 staff into a legally separate company.

The agreement ends two gruelling years of debate between the telecoms regulator and BT over the future governance of Openreach, which owns the fibres and wires that provide homes and businesses with broadband. It is the biggest shake-up in the regulation of British telecoms in a decade. The deal finally removes the lingering threat of a full break up of BT and Openreach that rivals Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone had pushed for. The compromise to legally separate the network business and put in its own board is designed to give it more power to set its own strategy and invest in faster broadband services. But critics have questioned whether the move will lead to greater investment in ‘full fibre’ networks.

Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for a greater degree of “regulatory humility” to open the door to greater investment in 5G and fibre networks.

Chairman Pai defended the decision to do away with hard-fought rules on network neutrality that forbid broadband providers from blocking or limiting internet traffic from some content providers while selling “fast lanes” to others. He said that spending by telecoms companies had fallen after the regulations were introduced which he attributed to “heavy-handed legal framework applied by the FCC” that had deterred investment. “Infrastructure spending is lower today than in 2015. That does not benefit consumers,” he said. Chairman Pai argued that telecoms companies needed to be offered incentives to justify the billions of dollars of investment in 5G and fibre networks and has moved to deregulate the industry as a result. “My goal is to return to the goals of the open internet,” he said, rebuffing accusations that the removal of net neutrality regulations would lead to telecoms companies manipulating internet access to favour certain services.

Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka was a trustee for a large bloc of shares in 21st Century Fox and News Corp that belong to Rupert Murdoch’s two youngest daughters, underscoring the close ties between the US president’s family and the mogul behind the Fox News Channel.

The president’s daughter was a trustee of Grace and Chloe Murdoch, Murdoch’s children by his ex-wife Wendi Deng, during the campaign. The two girls, aged 15 and 13, hold shares worth close to a combined $300 million in the two companies, which are controlled by Murdoch and his family. Ivanka Trump said that she stepped down from the board on December 28.

Technology is transforming the classroom, with personalised learning at the heart of the curriculum. Is this the future?

Leading venture capitalist Marc Andreessen predicts a future with two types of job: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told what to do by computers. Silicon Valley wants to equip young people to rule the machines by focusing on what makes them individuals. But how far can this reinvention of learning be extended from the wealthy environs of northern California to the broader US education system, where some state schools struggle to provide up-to-date textbooks, let alone personalised, digital tutoring?

The year 2017 is shaping up to be a landmark in the US telecoms sector, with industry executives and analysts predicting a frenzied period of mergers under the more deal-friendly regulatory regime of President Donald Trump.

The sector is readying itself for a period of upheaval. “Now is the time to consider that, which in an earlier time might have been unthinkable,” says Jonathan Chaplin, analyst at New Street Research. A “Big Bang consolidation” is inevitable, he says. President Trump has boosted confidence that his administration will be more open to megadeals since assuming the presidency. He picked Ajit Pai — a Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission sympathetic to arguments that telecoms groups need to merge to compete with Silicon Valley rivals — to chair the US telecoms watchdog. And Jeff Eisenach, a consultant who has supported previously blocked telecoms mergers, is head of the FCC transition team. The prospect of lighter regulation has lifted shares across telecoms companies since election night.

The British government is aiming to connect an extra 600,000 homes in rural areas to superfast broadband, after BT released almost £300 million of funds back into a scheme designed to address the gap between speeds available in the countryside and in cities. The original subsidies provided by the government to BT to roll out superfast broadband — of speeds of at least 24 Mbps — to rural areas included clawback mechanisms if take-up was better than expected. The cash was described as a “windfall” by the government, which was criticised during the early stages of the Broadband Delivery UK project for handing all the contracts to BT and being unclear about when specific regions would benefit and how the costs would be shared.

Britain’s surveillance laws have been deemed illegal by the European Court of Justice in a case that throws into question the fate of the UK’s new Investigatory Powers Act. The ECJ ruled the legislation was illegal because it allowed “general and indiscriminate” retention of electronic communications. The judgment said member states could perform “targeted retention of that data solely for the purpose of fighting serious crime” but not the mass and indiscriminate data collection of everyone in Britain allowed by new UK spying regime. This type of legislation “cannot be considered to be justified within a democratic society, as required by the directive, read in the light of the Charter,” the ECJ said, referring to the charter of European human rights.

Silicon Valley practically invented the reality distortion field, so it should not have been surprised that president-elect Donald Trump told technology executives on Wednesday to “like me — at least a little bit” because of “the bounce”. But the only chief executive at Trump Tower to have experienced much of a bounce was Ginni Rometty of IBM.

It is time to cheer up. Taken at its worst, the nationalist, anti-free trade, anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric of Mr Trump would be bad news for the US tech sector, which relies on a steady supply of overseas engineers and the tolerance of foreign policymakers. But look at the financial sector. It would be hit by the same policies if they were enacted. Yet bank investors’ glasses are half-full: they are assuming much of the rhetoric is bluster and greedily anticipating action on deregulation. As Peter Thiel says, people should take Trump “seriously but not literally”. Much of the world cannot afford to be so blasé, but the tech sector can. It should be looking forward to an even more compelling handout, should Trump make good on his promise of a tax holiday on repatriating foreign profits.