Free Press

Over the weekend, News Voices: New Jersey partnered with WNYC in Newark to bring together local leaders, lawmakers, artists and residents to engage in important discussions about race, the media and politics in the Trump era. More than 150 people came together at the Newark Public Library to have a critical conversation about the ways these issues play out in the city. The discussion took place as thousands were taking action at airports across the country in defense of the rights of refugees and Muslims.

My colleague Mike Rispoli and I started planning this event with WNYC’s Rebecca Carroll last August. But the conversation about race in America has taken on new meaning and urgency over the last 11 days. We were all there to all listen, share and reflect on what we could do to better understand the impact of systemic and structural racism in America. The program included three one-on-one conversations covering the American dream, tokenism, black feminism and the women’s marches.

Ajit Pai has been on the wrong side of just about every major issue that has come before the Federal Communications Commission during his tenure. He’s never met a mega-merger he didn’t like or a public safeguard he didn’t try to undermine. He’s been an inveterate opponent of Net Neutrality, expanded broadband access for low-income families, broadband privacy, prison-phone justice, media diversity and more. Pai has been an effective obstructionist who looks out for the corporate interests he used to represent in the private sector. If the new president really wanted an FCC chairman who’d stand up against the runaway media consolidation that Trump himself decried in the AT&T/Time Warner deal, Pai would have been his last choice — though corporate lobbyists across the capital are probably thrilled. Millions of Americans from across the political spectrum have looked to the FCC to protect their rights to connect and communicate and cheered decisions like the historic Net Neutrality ruling, and Pai threatens to undo all of that important work. Those millions will rise up again to oppose his reactionary agenda.

Five years ago today, millions of people came together to shock Washington into action on behalf of the public. Jan 18, 2012 was a day of mass protests against legislation that would have undermined the free and open exchange of information online. The lobbyist-fueled SOPA and PIPA bills were designed to shut down massive tracts of internet content without due process or accountability. The Washington consensus was that this legislation’s passage was a foregone conclusion.

But on Jan 18, we stopped the inevitable. Fifty thousand websites — including Google, Wikipedia and Reddit — symbolically “blacked out” their webpages to protest the legislation. Nearly 10 million people took action online or by phone, urging Congress to ditch the bill. By the end of the day, dozens of senators had come forward to oppose PIPA. The House version, SOPA, had already been put on hold after then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi bent to public pressure and tweeted that they “need[ed] to find a better solution.” A Senate staffer at the time said that “phones were melting” across Capitol Hill. However important the SOPA/PIPA victory was in 2012, its lasting significance depends on how well the internet-freedom coalition holds together in the fights that lie ahead. Whatever form these new threats take, millions of people must remain united and ready to act.

[Commentary] Anyone who’s followed Techdirt’s reporting and analysis over the years knows how vital this news outlet has been when it comes to clearing the fog that often clouds policy debates about Net Neutrality, broadband access, spectrum allocation, copyright reform and media ownership.

Founder Mike Masnick’s incisive reporting and piercing commentary during the fight against the SOPA and PIPA legislation — which would have allowed the film and recording industries to black out huge tracts of internet content without due process — undercut Hollywood’s bogus claims in support of these bad bills. In his frequent coverage of Net Neutrality and other tech policy issues, Karl Bode skewers the sophistry of lobbyists, PR consultants and think tankers on the payroll of the big phone and cable companies. It's not enough for these and other Techdirt writers to be on the right side of an issue. They bring a healthy skepticism to all arguments, even calling out Free Press on occasion. Techdirt is a trusted source that keeps us all honest. Yet for doing so Techdirt has earned itself a few enemies. The publication is now in the battle of its life against Shiva Ayyadurai, a sometime technologist who claims he invented email. Techdirt’s alleged infraction in this $15 million lawsuit is publishing a series of stories that cite credible sources disputing Ayyadurai’s claims.

Bad news: Rep Marsha Blackburn (R–TN) is the new chair of the House Communications Subcommittee. That’s the body charged with overseeing the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, and it’s supposed to ensure that everyone has access to open and affordable communications tools — no matter who they are or where they live. Here are a few of Rep Blackburn’s greatest hits:
1. She’s leading the fight to kill Net Neutrality.
2. She was one of SOPA’s most vocal supporters (and maybe still is).
3. She wants Comcast to censor your news.
4. She wants to take Lifeline phone and internet service away from people who can’t otherwise get affordable connections.
5. She wants to kill community broadband networks.
6. She wants to stop the FCC from protecting your privacy online.

The House Commerce Committee selected Rep Marsha Blackburn (R–TN) to chair the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. Rep Blackburn, who will take over the subcommittee from incoming full Committee Chairman Rep Greg Walden (R–OR), has long sided with the phone, cable and entertainment industries against ordinary Americans:

In 2011, she supported the ill-fated SOPA bill, which would have allowed the film and recording industries to black out large tracts of internet content without due process.
In 2013, she co-authored a letter to the FCC opposing the agency’s Lifeline Program, which helps low-income households gain access to high-speed internet services. She continued her opposition to the program throughout 2016, criticizing the FCC decision to help subsidize broadband in addition to traditional phone service.
In 2014, she introduced an amendment to appropriations legislation that would have blocked federal efforts to protect world-class municipal-broadband initiatives local residents and governments have launched in towns and communities across the country, including in her home state of Tennessee.
She has repeatedly opposed Net Neutrality protections and in 2015 introduced the “Internet Freedom Act,” which would have stripped the FCC of its clear authority to prohibit online discrimination and protect the open internet.
In 2015, she joined with other House Republicans against the FCC proposal to protect broadband users’ privacy by requiring internet service providers to seek consumers’ permission before exploiting their online data for their own monetary gain.

[Commentary] Recently, a broad coalition of civil rights, civil liberties, privacy and immigrant-rights groups met with representatives from the FBI and Justice Department to demand more transparency around the use of an increasingly popular law enforcement tool: facial recognition technology. The meeting was in response to a recent report from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology that found that law enforcement agencies across the country are adding this technology to their arsenal of investigatory tools.

While the report found that the practice affects over 117 million people, agencies across the board have failed to put in place safeguards to protect our privacy. Worse yet, while the technology potentially threatens the rights of everyone in America, the report uncovered damning racial biases within the systems.

On Dec 14, Free Press held a community-building dinner at Gallery Aferro in Newark (NJ) as part of our News Voices: New Jersey campaign, which connects reporters and residents in ways that benefit both groups. A group of 60 individuals — including statewide allies, Newark-based community activists, and journalists from Newark and around the state — came together to break bread, share ideas, learn more about each other and build trust ... all things we needed to do to begin working toward a common purpose. That goal? Strengthening local media. Those who were new to News Voices came with open minds, not sure what to expect. As a Free Press organizer, I had questions too: Should we talk about what we’re doing to better the lives of our members? Should we share ideas and strategies we think are essential to reshaping local media? These are all valid and important questions. But we also sought to raise an even more crucial question that can lead to pivotal change: If you could reinvent local media to serve residents’ information needs, what would it look like?

In this report, we demonstrate that communities of color find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide for home-Internet access – both in terms of adoption and deployment – in a manner that income differences alone don’t explain. Once we control for other economic and demographic factors that contribute to this divide, the data illustrate persistent broadband adoption and deployment gaps for people of different races and ethnicities. We find that several personal and household characteristics are associated with home-Internet adoption, including race and ethnicity, along with family income, educational attainment, and use of the Internet at work or school. There are however large differences in some of these factors depending on a person’s race or ethnicity.

We conclude that public policies aimed at closing the digital divide must focus on correcting failures endemic to the home-Internet market, such as supra-competitive pricing, provider cross-subsidization, and the lack of a functioning resale/wholesale market. Confronting these market failures would increase the ability of people in marginalized communities to access advanced telecommunications services and purchase those services in an equitable manner.

At Free Press, we fight for everyone’s rights to connect and communicate — including making sure people get the news and information they need. That’s why I’m excited about a new campaign we just launched — showcased at NewsVoices.org.

The News Voices campaign aims to build a network of activists who want to change media, technology and journalism at the local level. We’re starting in New Jersey, where we launched our first News Voices campaign over a year ago. We’ve since held events that bring together local reporters and residents to discuss underreported issues, build relationships and spark new ideas. In New Jersey, a debate is playing out about how to spend the proceeds from the anticipated sale of four valuable public TV station licenses. The sale could generate hundreds of millions of dollars to meet a variety of state needs. We believe a significant portion of this money should be used to improve local journalism and better serve the information needs of communities statewide.