Medium

[Commentary] In the United States, we’re moving towards tribalism, and we’re undoing the social fabric of our country through polarization, distrust, and self-segregation. And whether we like it or not, our culture of doubt and critique, experience over expertise, and personal responsibility is pushing us further down this path.

The path forward is hazy. We need to enable people to hear different perspectives and make sense of a very complicated — and in many ways, overwhelming — information landscape. We cannot fall back on standard educational approaches because the societal context has shifted. We also cannot simply assume that information intermediaries can fix the problem for us, whether they be traditional news media or social media. We need to get creative and build the social infrastructure necessary for people to meaningfully and substantively engage across existing structural lines. This won’t be easy or quick, but if we want to address issues like propaganda, hate speech, fake news, and biased content, we need to focus on the underlying issues at play. No simple band-aid will work.

[danah boyd is a social media scholar, youth researcher & advocate with Microsoft Research, Data & Society, NYU]

[Commentary] The incoming Trump administration and the new Republican Congress seem interested in providing tax advantages and new debt availability for infrastructure spending. But project developers will need revenue to pay off debt. So the infrastructure has to generate income. To pay back debt and guarantee that infrastructure spending is productive, projects need user fees. The problem is that more than 90% of transportation infrastructure is publicly owned, publicly funded and used for free. Without revenue prospects, private sector developers are not going to enter the business of rebuilding most roads, bridges, tunnels, sewers, water systems, and dams.

On the other hand, almost all 21st century infrastructure is privately owned, funded by users through various fees and charges, and ripe for huge new private spending. To really make America great, the new administration and Congress should make the tax advantages and finance benefits for infrastructure applicable to the 21st century infrastructures of power and communications.

[Reed Hundt is the CEO of Coalition for Green Capital and a former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission]

[Commentary] In recent weeks, the Federal Communications Commission’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau has drawn concern from virtually all corners with its increasingly sharp critiques of innovative offerings that allow U.S. mobile consumers to enjoy more music, video and other bandwidth-intensive wireless content without seeing rising usage count against their data plans. Those new offerings are the latest field of engagement in a ferociously competitive U.S. wireless market, and consumers are wasting no time reaping the benefits — embracing T-Mobile’s Binge On and ONE, Verizon’s FreeBee Data service and AT&T’s DirecTV Now, among other plans. In today’s digital economy, wireless consumers are shunning a one-size-fits-all approach and embracing these new offerings that make it possible (and more affordable) to access the internet over mobile.

Yet over the course of the last year, the FCC’s wireless bureau has begun questioning if these free data services somehow threaten competition. While the current administration has appropriately focused on making available additional spectrum to meet consumers’ growing appetites for mobile data, the FCC in recent years has expanded its control over the wireless marketplace in contradiction of consumers’ clear preferences, including by reclassifying mobile broadband networks as garden variety utilities. Fresh leadership means a fresh perspective on these recent and regressive regulatory decisions and should include a fresh look at what consumers are clearly demonstrating they want from their wireless experience. Such a review and reset is overdue, and it is welcome by wireless innovators. We stand ready to make the most of what mobile innovation can contribute for our nation.

[Diane Smith is a board adviser to Mobile Future]

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission had a great run. Under six Chairmen, Democrat and Republican, the FCC played an important role in one of the greatest economic and cultural transformations in history: the global rise of the converged digital communications environment that now pervades our lives. The agency wasn’t the source of the entrepreneurial ideas, technical innovations, and massive investments, of course. All that took place predominantly in the private sector. Yet without the FCC, the Internet ecosystem today would be different, and in most ways worse: less vibrant, less advanced, less competitive, less open, and less reflective of American leadership and values. Along the way, this tiny agency—a tenth the size of the Environmental Protection Agency—became a highly visible and important player in critical public policy debates.

And now, I fear, the FCC’s moment in the sun is coming to an end. The Trump FCC may become at best insignificant, and at worst, a tool for mischief and dirty tricks that will weaken the foundations of our democracy.

[Kevin Werbach is a Professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania]

[Commentary] In classic Silicon Valley fashion, Peter Thiel made a contrarian bet that the ideas Donald Trump espoused — primarily, that many Americans weren’t being served by the current establishment, and a massive disruption could unleash the change they needed — would be embraced. He was right.

The danger is that Thiel’s stab at remaking the administration under President-elect Trump will turn out as misguided as his attempt to build a program to replace college — instead of introducing the change that will make all of America great again, it will simply make a lot of rich white men (and a few women) even richer and more entrenched than they already are.

[Commentary] Yes, I’m retiring from the New York Times. I’m certain that when the next corrupt president is impeached it will be because of the hard work and persistence of some new Woodward and Bernstein. Most of you know that before I became a reporter I was a political activist. I was part of a generation that was radicalized by the war in Vietnam.

At some point in the late 1970s I realized that I’d missed the memo and the movement I thought I was part of was no longer. No longer being a True Believer was good training for being a reporter. Fake news will come and go, but an independent press will always be the bedrock of a democracy.

[John Markoff is a former science writer for the New York Times]

[Commentary] From July 2015 through August 2016, I interviewed dozens of New York Police Department (NYPD) leaders and employees, many anonymously, in an attempt to fully document the department’s adoption of Twitter and other online platforms. (The full case study was published by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.)

This adoption was a transformative move for the department and an attempt to balance crime prevention and community outreach — an effort, as NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said, to shift the police mindset from “warrior” to guardian.

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

[Commentary] Those who urge progressive tech policy have no more ideas than anyone about how the surprise results of the 2016 election will affect the issues about which they care the most. But in one area, I see reason for hope.

Donald Trump and his colleagues are reportedly warming to the idea of an infrastructure bank, although we don’t have much information about how that bank would operate. An infrastructure bank or banks could nudge the country fully into the digital era as well as generate a host of new occupations. Jared Kushner, the soft-voiced, influential son-in-law of the President-elect, will understand these suggestions. (I respect Kushner; I met with him a few times to discuss connectivity issues in New York City.) After all, he and his team launched WiredScore.com, which labels commercial buildings across the country on the basis of their connectivity. He knows that where there are uncompetitive markets for data services, businesses suffer. It’s Kushner’s role as a developer that should make it particularly easy for him to understand the need for open, multipurpose, do-it-once infrastructure that forces competition into markets where it has withered.

[From Nov 23, 2016]

[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’s been a little more than a year since Alphabet (then Google) and I launched Sidewalk Labs. Larry Page and I shared a view that a combination of digital technologies — ubiquitous connectivity, social networks, sensing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and new design and fabrication technologies — would help bring about a revolution in urban life. Their impact will be as profound as the steam engine, the electric grid, and the automobile, the three previous technological revolutions that have largely defined the modern city.

We started by conducting a detailed thought experiment: What would a city look like if you started from scratch in the Internet era — if you built a city “from the Internet up?”

[Daniel Doctoroff is the CEO of Sidewalk Labs, a startup company focused on developing technology focused on city life]

[Commentary] The web that we’ve built — the social web, search engines, and spaces governed by algorithmic systems attuned to social signals (clicks, shares, likes, comments) — makes it increasingly difficult to locate a definitive response to fabrications like Clinton funding ISIS. There’s a broad range of not-fake-but-not-completely-true information. Leaving out information makes for a much more cohesive story but also may nudge a reader in a desired direction. There are other models of automated filtering and downgrading for limiting the spread of misleading information (the Facebook News Feed already does plenty of filtering and nudging).

But again, who decides what’s in or out, who governs? And who gets to test the potential bias of such an algorithmic system? If our collective goals include increasing trust in institutions and supporting an informed public, there is a lot of work to be done, and not only by Facebook. A number of actors, including publishers, social networks, content distributors, and forums, are all important in this space. By pointing our fingers at Facebook and looking at the extremes of fake news, I fear we’re missing out on an opportunity to actually make a difference.

[Gilad Lotan is the Chief Data Scientist at betaworks]