Fortune

[Commentary] Despite Internet service providers’ clearly stated threats and attempts to circumvent net neutrality protections, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai wants to unilaterally disarm the FCC and move broadband providers from light-touch regulation to no regulation. That would be disaster for the Internet ecosystem. The U.S. has always had a free and open Internet precisely because of net neutrality protections. The only danger now is Pai catapulting us into a future without it.

Comcast Xfinity Internet service suffered major problems on Nov 6, leaving customers in many major cities with slow connections or none at all.  Internet-monitoring company Downdetecter said that the outage is affecting Xfinity customers in Denver (CO), Portland (OR), Chicago (IL), Seattle (WA), New York (NY), San Francisco (CA), Houston (TX), Minneapolis (MN), Boston (MA), and Mountain View (CA). Comcast’s customer care on Twitter apologized for the outage and said that the company was trying to fix the problem, but it did not say when it would be solved.

The Trump administration proposed plans giving two big wins to the nation's largest communications companies. President Donald Trump proposed tax cuts that would make AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast among the biggest winners of his plan. Later, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed lifting net neutrality rules that put limits on Internet service providers.

A former ally of Vice President-elect Mike Pence with a strong focus on deregulation could be in line for an appointment to the Federal Communications Commission, possibly as the next chairman. Brandt Hershman, a longtime Indiana state senator, is rumored to be the leading candidate for an opening on the agency, which oversees the telecommunications, broadcasting, and cable industries, apparently. Hershman worked closely with the vice president-elect after Pence was elected Indiana’s governor in 2012. Hershman, the senate majority floor leader, authored a massive law to deregulate telecommunications in Indiana a decade ago. The bill ended government regulation of phone rates, freed up cable companies from needing to get dozens of local licenses to offer service, and stopped cities and towns from setting up their own municipal broadband services.

Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) says that Time Warner should be blocked from using Washington’s so-called revolving door to push through its controversial deal with AT&T.

The media giant has hired lawyer Christine Varney -- a partner at Cravath, Swaine and Moore -- to make the case to the government that AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner would not kill competition. Varney is one of the nation’s top antitrust lawyers working for corporate America. But six years ago, Varney was the government’s head antitrust cop, leading the Obama administration’s effort to crack down on deals that could result in higher prices. Now, she is one of the attorneys who’s being paid big bucks to try to get the AT&T-Time Warner merger approved. “Americans have had it with regulators like Varney, who talk a good game about holding the bad guys accountable while counting down the days until they can collect a fat paycheck from the corporations they were supposed to regulate,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren tells Fortune. “The revolving door is out of control. If we want to hold corporate lawbreakers accountable, we can’t ask their friends to do it.”

Federal network neutrality rules are supposed to prevent Internet service providers from discriminating against content providers—but also from unfairly favoring their own content. The wireless industry has been testing the boundaries of the rules, an effort that’s taken off over the past few days with moves by Verizon Communications and AT&T, the two largest mobile carriers. Some critics are calling on the Federal Communications Commission to crack down on the two carriers, which have exempted some of their own video services from customers’ monthly data allowances, a practice known as zero rating.

“AT&T is using its latest data-cap exemptions to prop up its satellite-TV business by disfavoring the competitive and diverse video choices people have online,” said Matt Wood, policy director at Free Press. Wood was similarly critical of Verizon’s Go90 data exemption, when it became public in February.

Retired Air Force Brigadier Gen. Gregory Touhill just got a promotion. The White House has named Touhill as the first ever federal chief information security officer, a role that is focused on bolstering the US government’s digital defenses.

The Obama Administration first announced the creation of the position in February as part of a $19 billion “cybersecurity national action plan” that included IT investments and new hires. Touhill currently serves as the deputy assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications within the Department of Homeland Security. In the new job, he will report to Tony Scott, the federal chief information officer and former executive at business software company VMware. Touhill will lead a team within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget “that conducts periodic cyberstat reviews with federal agencies to insure that implementation plans are effective and achieve the desired outcomes,” said Scott, the US info chief, and Michael Daniel, US cybersecurity coordinator, in a jointly authored blog post announcing the news. Touhill will be responsible for “helping to ensure the right set of policies, strategies, and practices are adopted across agencies,” they said.

Apparently, Todd Park is planning to step down as Chief Technology Officer by year-end.

He is expected to take on a new White House role, working from Silicon Valley to recruit tech talent into government roles.

He won early praise for his 90-day development of the initial Healthcare.gov rollout, and in 2012 was picked by President Barack Obama to replace Aneesh Chopra as CTO. In this role he helped oversee the repair of Healthcare.gov’s subsequent (and disastrous) relaunch.

A Q&A with former NBCUniversal executive Lauren Zalaznick.

Asked about what she sees in the future of the media industry, Zalaznick said: “The challenge is that the great media companies today are going to remain the great media companies of the future, but they are going to be joined by the emerging great media companies of today. The great middle is what is going to suffer the most.”

She left a job with Big Media to start her own newsletter, LZSunday Paper. Although she is not a journalist, Zalaznick added that maintaining a diversity of voices in the media will remain important in the future.

Annoyed by slower broadband speeds offered by a handful of private ISPs, multiple municipalities across the US have established their own public broadband services.

Comcast, Verizon, and other major ISPs routinely lobby against cities’ abilities to establish such networks; limits on public broadband have been enacted in 20 states so far.

“The cable companies especially have the capital to invest in bringing everyone a fast lane,” says Christopher Mitchell, director of Community Broadband Networks at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “They just don’t want to do that because they effectively have a monopoly on high-speed access.”

City-owned fiber-optic networks aren’t cheap, which is why many cities across the US continue to rely on private ISPs. But the public networks that are constructed have their intended effect, Mitchell says: Private ISPs drop their broadband prices and increase broadband speeds.

Put aside, for a moment, the notion of “fast lanes” bandied about in the current net neutrality fervor: the real problem is a lack of competition due to much of the US broadband market being controlled by large, private ISPs, a situation well documented by Harvard law professor Susan Crawford in her book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

There’s a better way than the interconnection agreements proposed by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler. Why not instead undo the barriers facing municipal broadband instead?