Medium

[Commentary] Dear Acting Assistant Attorney General Hesse:
I am writing to urge you to block the proposed merger of AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Inc. This proposed merger is just the latest effort to shrink our media landscape, stifle competition and diversity of content, and provide consumers with less while charging them more. Consideration of this deal should receive the utmost scrutiny, particularly because it involves a sector so fundamental to a free democracy. As Public Citizen notes, “this merger aims to concentrate far too much market, communications and political power in one corporation, threatening to impede the free flow of information, undermine the integrity of the Internet, raise consumer prices and further corrupt our politics.” In this particular merger, the diversity of programming would be further diminished by truncating the relationship of content and distribution. When one giant company owns both the content and the means of distribution, there is a clear disincentive to provide additional choices to consumers. In these so-called “vertical relationships,” not only is competition reduced, but there is a heightened, if not insurmountable, barrier to the influx of new content and diverse voices.

The media and telecommunications landscape is changing. It is important that public policy concerns guide these changes, so that we may preserve our democratic discourse and open competitive markets for speech and commerce. That is the function of our antitrust laws. I ask you to enforce them and block the proposed merger.

[Commentary] When a slew of websites couldn’t be reached Oct 21, suddenly people across the US started paying attention to the Internet of Things. It turns out that tens of millions of digital video recorders and other devices connected to the internet and protected only by factory-encoded, easily-brute-force-guessable passwords can be harnessed in the service of gigantic distributed denial-of-service attacks. When those devices were instructed to send huge numbers of messages to computers providing pointers to some very popular websites, the computers on the receiving end were brought to their knees—incapable of processing any requests. Without the directional signs in place, suddenly huge numbers of sites couldn’t be found. Who knew the Internet of Things could have such a big effect on our daily lives? Actually, a lot of people knew.

IoT is very big business these days.While we’re patching those insecure home DVRs, routers, and webcams, let’s back up and talk about the implications of IoT for public values generally. Because it’s not just websites that could be affected by unrestrained Internet of Things deployments. We’re not just using IoT in our homes. We’re also going to be using it, in a big way, in the places where 80 percent of Americans live, work, and play: in cities.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]

[Commentary] It is absolutely essential that the next administration work with Congress and local government leaders to get fiber policy right. Here are a few policy ideas to accelerate fiber deployment in Next Century Cities communities so they can realize the promise of next-generation wireless:

• Infrastructure bank support for fiber deployments
• Federal “Dig Once” and “Climb Once” policies
• Streamlined permitting for access to federal lands
• Clarifying community broadband policies

[O’Boyle is Deputy Director at Next Century Cities and Program Director of Media & Democracy Reform Initiative at Common Cause]

[Commentary] In the software industry, programmers continuously revisit a program to clean it up, debug sections, and simplify the lines of code. We need to do the same for government. We need to debug the bureaucracy. Broadly, the next administration should:
Upgrade the executive branch;
Keep the Internet free and open by refreshing the Federal Communications Commission;
Help cut the red tape in broadband deployment;
Reform the Universal Service Fund;
Free up the spectrum market;
Troubleshoot the tax and regulatory system;
Support entrepreneurship and reform R&D spending; and
Educate the next generation of STEM workers.
No one single change will do all of the heavy lifting, nor is this an exhaustive list, but together these policies would help reboot the government and allow the next generation of workers, consumers, and companies to succeed in the quickly advancing economy.

[Will Rinehart is the director of technology and innovation policy at the American Action Forum.]

[Commentary] Peter Thiel’s $1.25 million contribution to Donald Trump — Silicon Valley’s most conspicuous political act in this campaign — is a high-profile glitch; an aberration that emits a distorted signal about the tech industry’s true place and ambition in political America. Trumpism, a movement set aflame by Trump’s celebrity and built on channeling the nativist, nostalgic impulses of conservatives, will survive his candidacy. It now poses the most corrosive threat that Silicon Valley will confront to its aims to reshape society.

Trumpism stunned America with its exhibition of a substantial, revanchist slice of white working class voters who experience politics as a zero-sum game — a group that would rather burn the house down than witness the economic and cultural ascendancy of other identities. If—as Silicon Valley hopes—their deployment first invigorates urban communities across the country, improving mobility, health, and access to jobs, how will white working class and rural communities respond? These voters may well be roused to resentment, and explicit political opposition, as they watch the benefits accrue first and foremost to liberal enclaves, only amplifying anxieties about demographic shifts and social alienation. What—if any—motivation will Trump voters have to trust a Silicon Valley that they believe is accelerating the decline of their relative standing in America? For an industry that has raced to focus on palliatives for technological disruption — universal basic income to solve for the arrival of robots, for one — Trumpism leaves a warning that the implementation of technology is not a given, and may ultimately be the more pressing matter.

[Khan Shoieb is a communications strategist and served as the National Battleground States Coordinator for President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.]

[Commentary] “Few rights are so fundamental as the right to privacy in our daily lives, yet few are under such frontal assault.” I penned those words 14 years ago, when I and my colleagues on the Federal Communications Commission were considering how best to protect telephone customers from expansive snooping and intrusive marketing practices. Today, I must reiterate this sentiment, and urge the FCC to immediately pass strong new rules to protect the privacy of broadband customers.

Broadband privacy is important for many of the same reasons that the FCC has ensured the privacy of telephone customers for decades. Broadband Internet service providers (ISPs) collect extensive information about all of their customers, including location, web browsing and app use history, when and with whom they communicate, and even the content of those communications. In short, nearly everything a consumer does online is visible to his or her ISP. ISPs need some of that information to provide service, but they also can exploit private details for profit, primarily through marketing. The FCC recently released a fact sheet on broadband privacy, and while it is a significant step forward, there remains the possibility that that intra-agency negotiations might consider alterations that would water-down the privacy regime and leave consumers without needed protections. The need of the hour is to strengthen, not weaken, the pending proposal. The FCC should adopt opt-in rules that more closely hew to Congress’s direction in Section 222 of the Communications Act that make clear telecommunications carriers have a duty to protect confidentiality of the proprietary information of their customers.

[Michael Copps is a retired FCC Commissioner, special advisor for Common Cause's Media and Democracy Reform Initiative, and contributor to the Benton Foundation's Digital Beat Blog.]

[Commentary] Answering questions at the Internet Association’s Virtuous Circle conference recently, Secretary John Kerry presented the US Department of State’s effort to prioritize global digital economy issues abroad in order to reflect the growing importance of these issues in both economic and foreign policy. The State Department has made real progress on this initiative in the last year and hopes to continue our momentum going forward. Approximately six months ago, we announced the State Department’s new Digital Economy Officers (DEO) Program with the goal of strengthening the capacity of our people, embassies, and consulates overseas to address the challenges and seize the opportunities that are emerging with the development of the global digital economy. We believe that this new global platform will help enhance the prosperity not only of US people and firms, but that of other nations and their people, helping achieve more broadly shared prosperity and sparking innovative solutions to both commercial and social challenges that the world faces. Given that the Internet and the digital economy are global in scope and affect a range of US interests, the State Department is uniquely equipped among US agencies, to engage, lead, and advocate on these issues.

[Daniel Sepulveda is the US Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy in the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs.]

[Commentary] Street lights and traffic signal poles are like the Colorado Esplanade in the sky. No, I am not celebrating their function as providers of light. Their real power comes from a transformation — into neutral platforms that provide the tools of connectivity to everyone. Very few American cities (notable exception: Atlanta) have carried out this transmogrification, but every single one will need to. Santa Monica is showing the way: it is a city that will be able to control its future digital destiny, because it is taking a comprehensive, competition-forcing approach to the transmission of data.

Cities that get control of their streetlights and connect them to municipally-overseen, reasonably-priced dark fiber can chart their own Internet of Things futures, rather than leave their destinies in the hands of vendors whose priorities are driven (rationally) by the desire to control whole markets and keep share prices and dividends high rather than provide public benefits.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]

[Commentary] Thirty million Americans have some type of cognitive disability. These individuals may experience difficulty in understanding or processing information, solving problems, or responding to stimuli. This includes individuals with intellectual disabilities, developmental disabilities, brain injuries, and learning disabilities. More than two decades after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, we are at an historic juncture in addressing the needs of this population. Today, digital technology offers us the greatest opportunity in history to use technology to attack challenges that have affected individuals since the beginning of time. It is our responsibility to do everything possible to seize this opportunity.

[Commentary] Practical ingenuity is still on display in Connecticut, which is poised to become the first “Gigabit State” in the country. Talk about your labor-saving, productivity-enhancing inventions — dozens of Connecticut towns are now on a path towards installing wholesale fiber networks connecting all homes and businesses. And those flinty Yankees won’t be paying for the installation of these open access networks themselves, because fiber, with its predictable up-front cost and steady returns, is an excellent longterm investment for private companies.

Meanwhile, any ISP will be able to use these networks to sell service directly to homes and businesses. Result: world-class connectivity at low prices for Connecticut residents in towns across the state — including in rural areas where getting online is a struggle. As Elin Katz, the Consumer Counsel of the State of Connecticut, puts it, “It’s like building the road — and anyone can drive their cars on it.”

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]