Medium

[Commentary] Recently, US District Judge Richard Leon raised the question of whether an arbitration condition would be enough to address the potential harms from the AT&T-Time Warner merger. This proposal would create a mechanism where both sides in a fee dispute concerning Time Warner programming would present a rate to a third-party arbitrator, who would pick the one that was more reasonable. AT&T-Time Warner would not be permitted to take channels off the air and cut the distributor off from its content during the arbitration process.

[Commentary] The week of Jan 8, after President Donald Trump signed two significant executive orders on improving broadband infrastructure, members of the House Communications Subcommittee introduced four resolutions laying out our principles for broadband expansion nationwide. The resolutions include prioritizing infrastructure funding to areas that are currently unserved, easing the regulatory process, ensuring coordination among all levels of government, and establishing clear, consistent rules regardless of broadband technology.

[Commentary] Our nation has faced the corrosive power of monopolies before. The lack of competition that initially contaminated the industrial revolution was gradually tamed, and the benefits of technological progress eventually produced a secure and stable American middle class. But this achievement did not happen by accident, and was instead the product of a hard-fought effort to inject competition into an economy dominated by large and powerful companies.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s record is missing key evidence: over 50,000 Net Neutrality consumer complaints submitted to the FCC between 2015 and 2017.

[Commentary] As I watch great work [of net neutrality rules] get wiped away by a Federal Communications Commission chairman focused exclusively on making an industry happy, I can’t escape the recognition that led me to move on from this field just over a decade ago.

[Commentary] A few weeks ago, representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter came to town to testify before Congress. But let’s look beyond the narrow scope of those hearings and explore a broader conceptual issue, a massive and thorny topic: the role and responsibility of technology companies that began as platforms and transformed, I believe, into publishers. These are two very different things, with different roles in society. Are they merely platforms and tech companies, or are they publishers with social and legal responsibility for what they publish?