Free Press

The report calls for a tax on targeted online advertising to respond to the crisis in journalism and fund diverse, local, independent and non-commercial news and information. The report proposes a series of proposals to levy a small tax on ads sold by highly profitable companies like Facebook and Google.

People actually need Title II and all of the protections it provides for internet users. Here’s why.

The decisions by networks to go all-in on Donald Trump in 2016 may sound a distant echo today. But it’s one that is still being heard and felt in the wake of the networks’ decision to air President Donald Trump’s Jan 8 speech about a border crisis that doesn’t exist and a wall that the vast majority of US taxpayers don’t want to pay for. News outlets need to have a deeper reckoning about their role in enabling President Donald Trump’s lies and spreading his racist propaganda.

Initial Free Press research shows that of the nearly 100 new House members, 70 percent of first-term Democratic Reps have already publicly stated their support for real network neutrality. Some of them fought for net neutrality in previous elected positions — like Rep Anthony Brindisi (D-NY), who as an assemblyman in New York pushed for a state bill to restore open-internet protections after the FCC’s misguided repeal. 

In 2016, Free Press released Digital Denied, which showed that disparities in broadband adoption — commonly known as the digital divide —stem not only from income inequality, but from systemic racial discrimination. The report found that nearly half of all people in the country without home-internet access were people of color. Much of that gap was indeed the result of income inequality.

Our 2019 policy priorities lay out a proactive agenda for the new year and the new Congress, to move us closer to building media and communications systems that empower everyone to connect and communicate freely and safely. We’ve identified four major priorities:

In recent days, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai ordered his agency to investigate telecommunication carriers’ slow response in restoring service to the Florida Panhandle, which Hurricane Michael struck on Oct 10. Free Press applauds Chairman Pai for holding telecom companies accountable in this instance. But Chairman Pai failed to show the same urgency in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which struck Puerto Rico in 2017 and left nearly the entire population without phone and broadband service.