Medium

“These are my people!” Mark Zuckerberg has been in Nigeria for barely an hour and is already rhapsodic. His remark does not reflect his biological heritage — obviously — but rather a connection based on the behavioral DNA that engineers share. Facebook’s CEO has come to Lagos, Africa’s most populous city, to seek out software developers and startup founders; after making a beeline to the Co-Creation (Cc) HUB, a six-story building on Herbert Macaulay Road that incubates startups, hosts investor gatherings, and organizes a kid’s coding camp, he has found the kind of people for whom he was looking. His people.

It isn’t the Free Basics program or the Messenger platform or whether or not a Facebook satellite rains Internet on Africa from outer space that matters to the engineers and entrepreneurs that Zuckerberg visited. It’s the fact that he came. In Silicon Valley, founders learn to think big; to take risks; to use grit and coding skills and a sense of the marketplace so they can chase the unicorn’s horn. They want to do that here in Nigeria, too. But first, they need validation. Mark Zuckerberg said he believed in them. But he could have said anything. From the moment he strolled into Yaba unannounced, his trip was a success.

[Commentary] . Yes, as Peter Moskowitz demonstrates, the Wireless Emergency Alert system is prone to hacking. But what if the hacking were done, perfectly legally, by the one person who has license to do whatever he or she wants with it? Here’s the three use cases for the system:
Alerts issued by the President of the United States.
Alerts involving imminent threats to safety of life, issued in two different categories: extreme threats and severe threats
AMBER Alerts.

Does anything stand out for you — like number one, where the President of the United States gets to determine what gets to interrupt us with a loud noise at any hour and use our mobile devices to get a message before our eyes? Is there any presidential candidate you can think of who likes to stay up late and beam inappropriate messages to millions of people? Who, when he when he’s piqued, has no sense of proportion? Who, when he wants wants attention, will go to extremes to get it? I am not kidding — if Donald Trump is president and someone clues him in to the fact that he has the power to use this system, it’s a real possibility (if not a certainty) that the next time he wants to engage in slut-shaming, poll-boasting or climate-denying, he’ll make our phones shriek and blast out his message, as if a natural disaster is upon us and we must take shelter. And except for the natural part, that would be right.

[Commentary] Barely a week goes by without some headline-grabbing announcement about super fast mobile Internet connectivity. A bevy of acronyms promise faster data speeds. And, on the horizon, wireless broadband technologies promise blazing fast connections without cable clutter. Next Century Cities, a membership organization of more than 150 mayors and city leaders, is “solutions agnostic” — we help cities find the broadband solution that fits their needs and helps deliver next-generation broadband to more Americans. Our member communities have adopted a range of solutions: some create their own networks while others partner with private providers and some even have a mixture of both.

Many of our members have approached Next Century Cities with questions about how wireless technology fits in their broadband plans. Is a brave new wireless wonderland around the corner, they ask. Not exactly. Not yet anyway. Should cities ditch their wired broadband strategies on a dime and embrace all things wireless? In reality, deploying fiber is as important as ever. Advanced wireless technologies should be welcomed, but for mobile connectivity to offer consumers real choice, policymakers must take steps to promote deployment.

[Todd O’Boyle serves as Deputy Director of Next Century Cities and is the program director for Common Cause's Media and Democracy Reform Initiative]

[Commentary] Four years after it began requiring TV stations to upload their records of political ad sales to a central government website, the Federal Communications Commission maintains a recordkeeping system that makes finding out who an ad’s sponsor is feel like a treasure hunt. In 2012, the FCC approved a rule requiring broadcast stations in the largest markets to upload the files showing who bought time for political ads, how much they paid and other details, saving journalists and others from having to visit to individual TV stations to get the info. The directive was gradually expanded and now includes most broadcast, cable, satellite and radio outlets. But the victory for open government turned out to be a website that is searchable only by station call letters, channel number, facility ID number and similar data — not by sponsoring group, candidate mentioned and other terms that would make it easier to track who is running ads in particular federal races, and how much they’re spending.

The current filing system is “pretty useless” for the public, said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, which put out a report on the system’s shortcomings. The political ad purchase records, also known as political files, were basically an unorganized pile of mostly non-machine readable documents with no uniform filing system. Earlier in Sept, the Center for Responsive Politics launched an ad data tracking tool searchable by state and zip code (and soon, by other terms) to continue efforts started by watchdog groups and news outlets such as Sunlight Foundation and ProPublica when the data first came out. But the federal agency responsible for the data still maintains only a vague “due diligence” standard when it comes to stations’ responsibility for ensuring the forms contain complete and accurate information.

[Soo Rin Kim is a reporting intern with the Center for Responsive Politics]
[The Benton Foundation filed complaints recently against several broadcasers on this issue.]

[Commentary] Donald Trump wants to make the Internet great again. Problem is, the GOP nominee doesn’t know enough about the Internet to understand what, if anything, that means.

On Sept 21, Trump’s campaign came out against an Obama Administration plan to relinquish US control of one important aspect of the Internet: the supervision of domain names. The plan is to remove the US government control of that function and transfer it more fully to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, a global body. Trump’s sometime-nemesis Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) is threatening to hold the government-spending bill hostage unless Congress rejects President Barack Obama’s plan. Sen Cruz wrongly states that the ICANN transition would “empower countries like Russia, China and Iran to be able to censor speech on the Internet, your speech." On this Trump agrees. “The Republicans in Congress are admirably leading a fight to save the Internet this week, and need all the help the American people can give them to be successful,” a Trump campaign spokesman said in a statement. “Congress needs to act, or Internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost.”

But Trump and Sen Cruz are wrong. And it’s Trump who has repeatedly threatened to shut down the Internet to keep Americans safe from terrorists. He’s offered few specifics about how this might be achieved.

[Tim Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press]

[Commentary] What is the state of the First Amendment on college campuses? In the past year, this question has been one of significant interest to Knight Foundation, and to observers around the country. As a private foundation with its roots in the newspaper business, we have a longstanding commitment to the First Amendment. For this reason, we took note last fall when protests on college campuses over myriad issues spurred a surprising paradox: Protesters — exercising their right to free speech — simultaneously seemed to limit the speech of others through the creation of “safe spaces.” This trend came to a head most dramatically at the University of Missouri last October, when students briefly attempted to ban the press from covering their protest in a public space, before quickly recanting and permitting press access.

What we found was a portrait as complicated as what we imagined, although not in the ways we expected. Among the key findings:
Disagreement on the security of First Amendment freedoms
Principles and practice don’t match up: When it comes to the principles undergirding the First Amendment, college students are generally more ardent than US adults that colleges should expose students to all types of expression and points of view rather than prohibiting biased or offensive speech (78 percent among college students versus 66 percent among US adults).
Social media seen as positive and negative force for expression.

[Sam Gill is vice president for learning and impact at Knight Foundation.]

[Commentary] Most current analyses of media and the election go to the nature of press coverage of the candidates. But this election has a more transformative nature: the emergence of push versus pull candidacies that reflect the changing nature of media itself.

In this election, the results may very well depend on how citizen-sovereigns view their role. Will they passively receive the messages pushed through the din of information overload? Or will they actively pull in the information they need to make knowledgeable decisions? The new media are indeed the message.

[Charlie Firestone is the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program]

[Commentary] Lincoln made sure we had railroads; FDR made sure we had electricity; Eisenhower made sure we had highways. What US president will make sure we make a national upgrade to competitive, last-mile-fiber-plus-advanced-wireless connections? The question has become even more vital after a disappointing recent court decision that gave the thumbs up to a tactic of big communications companies who, for business reasons, refuse to extend service to rural communities: they can continue to lobby for laws that prevent those communities from setting up their own networks.

The fine-print interpretation by those Sixth Circuit judges has consequences. And some have already happened: Wilson (NC) turned off access for Pinetops (NC) right after the decision came down. The real need here is for national leadership. We need infrastructure banks writing loan guarantees that will lower the cost of accessing capital to build last-mile fiber across the land. We need to set our standards high in defining a basic Internet connection that’s essential for thriving lives — and those standards will need to involve a lot of fiber. To do all this, someone needs to step up, and soon. We need to take the burden off local heroes. It isn’t really their job to fix America’s competitive standing in the world. It’s the job of Congress and it’s the job of the president—but it’s mostly the latter. The president has to see that this isn’t a partisan issue, and that just as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower rose to the occasion, whoever is in the White House in 2017 must also do so, to serve the nation and its people. We can’t afford another administration that doesn’t get this job done.

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

[Commentary] Black Lives Matter may have harnessed the power of social media, but it has yet to control it. For many, Facebook has come to represent a public square — a place where we can assemble with others, share information and speak our minds. But it isn’t public. It’s a private platform where everyone’s rights to connect and communicate are subject to Facebook’s often arbitrary terms and conditions.

Facebook needs clear guidelines and processes that are transparent to users on how it determines whether to block someone’s stream or deactivate an account. It shouldn’t allow police to demand takedown requests to avoid scrutiny or cover up abuse. We need to know when and why Facebook and other social media platforms have granted these requests, with clear standards for the future. The fight for racial equity in the media is often a fight against media monopoly, especially when these companies are white-owned and operated. And Facebook is a face of monopoly in the age of social media. New gatekeepers like Facebook must make confronting racism a priority. Yes, Zuckerberg has been outspoken in his support for racial justice — even hanging a Black Lives Matter sign outside company headquarters. But we must urge him to ensure that his company’s actions match his words. Providing clarity and accountability on Facebook’s policy for suspending accounts and blocking images of police encounters is a start.

[Tim Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press]

Launched in 2013, the ConnectED initiative set a goal of connecting 99 percent of students to high-speed broadband by the year 2018; called on the private sector and other partners to develop quality, low-cost digital devices and content for teachers and students; and aimed to increase investments in professional development for teachers and school leaders so they can lead the transition to digital learning. Since 2013, 20 million more students have gained access to high-speed broadband in their schools and the ConnectED initiative is on track to connect 99 percent of students to the internet by 2018. After the President’s call, the Federal Communications Commission modernized E-Rate — the federal government’s largest education technology program — to make billions of dollars available to expand access to high-speed internet services. Before E-Rate was modernized, just 30 percent of school districts serving 4 million students offered access to high-speed internet. Today, 77 percent of school districts that serve more than 24 million students do so. Improvements to E-Rate also helped rural and disadvantaged communities build the infrastructure needed to increase their access to broadband.