Hill, The

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said at his first press briefing that future briefings will include four "Skype seats" for reporters who are outside of the Washington (DC) area. Spicer did not specify how it would be decided which outlets would be brought in via Skype, the world's largest video call service owned by Microsoft. He did say those eligible for consideration need to live more than 50 miles from Washington. Spicer added that the technology would open up briefings to a “diverse group” of journalists who can’t afford to travel to DC.

“Maybe we solicit talk radio and regional newspapers to submit questions — because they can't afford to be in Washington — but they still have a question," Spicer said in an interview Jan 8. "Maybe we just let the American people submit questions that we read off as well,” he added.

[Commentary] American values and interests face three major threats online. First, the volume of private data, about every aspect of our lives, is growing exponentially but is often poorly protected. Second, terrorists, propagandists and purveyors of fabricated news are taking advantage of the online space to undermine democracy. Third, because citizens use the internet to expose corruption, document human rights abuses and mobilize political action, authoritarian governments restrict online freedom, and their controls are rapidly growing in reach and sophistication.

A free and open internet is fundamental to US interests in the world and American values — commerce, innovation, social interaction, and political engagement — but it is coming increasingly under strain. The Trump administration will need to put in place and pursue a broad policy agenda to preserve the internet's benefits and potential for the United States going forward.

[Daniel Calingaert is executive vice president of Freedom House.]

Here are five areas where the tech industry is cautiously awaiting the Administration's plans:

1. Trade: tech leaders are sweating over the possibility they could lose access to huge burgeoning markets abroad, especially China.
2. Immigration: Technology companies across the board have voiced a strong desire for comprehensive immigration reform.
3. Privacy rights: Protecting privacy has been a longstanding passion for tech leaders, who say strong privacy practices give their products a competitive edge and help them win over consumers. But Trump unsettled tech groups and civil libertarians after the San Bernardino shooting.
4. Corporate mergers: Trump's views on corporate mergers have left many in tech scratching their heads, in particular over the biggest merger on the table: AT&T's proposed $85 billion deal with Time Warner.
5. Network neutrality: The fight is set to flare again with the Trump administration and congressional Republicans certain to look at ways to roll back elements of net neutrality.

In one of his last official acts as commander in chief, President Barack Obama signed a law Jan 20 codifying his Presidential Innovation Fellows Program. The program offers top tech talent opportunities to serve in the executive branch. President Obama created the fellowship in 2012, with the bill enshrining it into law the last he signed as president.

The fellowship was popular among both Republicans and Democrats. The bill, called the Tested Ability to Leverage Exceptional National Talent Act of 2017, sailed through the House and Senate with little opposition. The program’s continuity will likely be a boon for President-elect Donald Trump, who was notably unpopular in Silicon Valley throughout the campaign but has since extended an olive branch to the tech industry.

President-elect Donald Trump’s massive infrastructure package should have $40 of private-sector spending for every $1 of public spending, according to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI). “A great agency…has public-private partnerships. For every one dollar of federal dollars, there's $40 of private sector spending,” Speaker Ryan said. “We want to leverage as much private-sector dollars as possible to maximize the fixing of our infrastructure.” It’s perhaps the clearest picture to date of whether — and how much — direct federal funding for transportation upgrades may be included in Trump’s promised $1 trillion infrastructure bill. There has been mounting concern, particularly among Democrats and rural Republicans, that relying on private financing would only attract projects that can recoup investment costs through tolls or user fees.

Staffers for the Trump transition team have been meeting with career staff at the White House ahead of Jan 20’s presidential inauguration to outline their plans for shrinking the federal bureaucracy. The changes they propose are dramatic.

Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump’s team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely. At the Department of Justice, the blueprint calls for eliminating the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Violence Against Women Grants and the Legal Services Corporation and for reducing funding for its Civil Rights and its Environment and Natural Resources divisions. “The Trump Administration needs to reform and cut spending dramatically, and targeting waste like the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be a good first step in showing that the Trump Administration is serious about radically reforming the federal budget,” said Brian Darling, a former aide to Paul and a former staffer at the Heritage Foundation.

[Commentary] A week before the transition to the new administration, the Federal Communications Commission’s Wireless Bureau issued a report about mobile “zero-rating” plans, which provide consumers the option of free data usage paid by advertising. This zero-rating kerfuffle exposes that network neutrality has transmogrified from the FCC’s original net neutrality purpose of protecting consumers’ freedom to competitively access and use the legal content, apps, and devices of their choice, to potentially taking away consumer’s freedom to access cost-saving content and apps of their choice on the device of their choice. How can the FCC claim to be pro-consumer, and then tell consumers that more consumer choice, control, and savings are a net neutrality violation?

The dirty little secret that the FCC does not want people to know is that Title II net neutrality is implicit FCC price regulation that by design forces consumers to subsidize corporations, the exact opposite of how the FCC implemented Title II historically before competition, where corporations’ communications bills always subsidized consumers’ communications bills.

[Scott Cleland is president of Precursor LLC.]

President-elect Donald Trump has asked roughly 50 senior Obama Administration officials to remain in their roles in order to "ensure the continuity of government," spokesman Sean Spicer said. The decision comes as Trump is reportedly struggling to fill important posts in his new administration. Among the President Obama holdovers are key national security officials, including Brett McGurk, special envoy to the global coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The move is somewhat surprising, given President-elect Trump’s repeated criticism of President Obama’s effort to combat the terrorist group. He called the president "the founder of ISIS" during a campaign event last April.

Here are five of the biggest players to watch on technology:

1. Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of PayPal, was arguably the sole top Silicon Valley executive to have publicly backed Trump during the campaign. He is also reportedly considering a run for governor in California in 2018, in a race that may pit him against another billionaire, the Democratic environmentalist Tom Steyer.
2. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) will oversee the confirmation process for Trump’s nominees to the Federal Communications Commission and will likely have a say in who is selected to chair the commission. Some of Thune’s legislative priorities could get more traction under the Trump administration, including sharing government-owned wireless spectrum with the private sector, rewriting the Communications Act and expanding broadband access to rural communities.
3. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai is widely seen as Tom Wheeler’s likely successor as chairman of the FCC. As chairman, Pai will get to set the FCC’s agenda and potentially reverse policies imposed under Wheeler, including net neutrality. Pai has already expressed interest in reevaluating the rules as soon as possible.
4. House Telecommunications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is an outspoken opponent of the net neutrality rules enshrined in the FCC’s Open Internet Order.
5. The Trump transition’s FCC landing team will be in charge of setting the agenda and recommending hires for the new administration when it takes over the agency. The group consists of three scholars from the conservative American Enterprise Institute: Roslyn Layton, Mark Jamison and Jeffrey Eisenach, as well as David Morken, the founder of Republic Wireless and Bandwidth.com. Layton, Jamison and Eisenach are all critics of net neutrality and are generally seen as traditional conservatives when it comes to telecommunications policy.

President-elect Donald Trump signaled a willingness to change his stance against the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger, saying in an interview that he has not “seen any of the facts.” "I have been on the record in the past of saying it's too big and we have to keep competition,” he said. “So, but other than that, I haven't, you know, I haven't seen any of the facts, yet. I'm sure that will be presented to me and to the people within government."

In a campaign speech in October, Trump said unequivocally that he would oppose the $85.4 billion deal because it would give more power to the mainstream media. "As an example of the power structure I'm fighting, AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few," he said, adding later, "Deals like this destroy democracy." But now that Trump is set to take office, many in Washington whether he is open to softening his position on the merger.