New York Times

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld restrictive laws in North Carolina and Tennessee that will halt the growth of municipal broadband networks. While the decision directly affects only those two states, it has cast a shadow over dozens of city-run broadband projects started nationwide in recent years to help solve the digital divide.

In siding with the states, the court hobbled the boldest effort by federal officials to support municipal broadband networks. While the court agreed that municipal networks were valuable, it disagreed with the Federal Communications Commission’s legal arguments to pre-empt state laws. Now, cities like Wilson (NC) fear they have little protection from laws like those in about 20 states that curb municipal broadband efforts and favor traditional cable and telecom firms. City officials say cable and telecom companies that have lobbied for state restrictions will be encouraged to fight for even more draconian laws, potentially squashing competition that could lead to lower prices and better speeds to access the web. “This is about more than North Carolina and Tennessee,” said Deb Socia, executive director of Next Century Cities, a nonprofit coalition of cities exploring broadband projects. “We had all looked to the FCC and its attempt to pre-empt those state laws as a way to get affordable and higher-quality broadband to places across the nation that are fighting to serve residents and solve the digital divide.”

Using both conventional media and covert channels, the Kremlin relies on disinformation to create doubt, fear and discord in Europe and the United States. The flow of misleading and inaccurate stories is so strong that both NATO and the European Union have established special offices to identify and refute disinformation, particularly claims emanating from Russia.

[Commentary] There was a time, not that long ago, when paper and pencil were all that homework required. But as Anthony W. Marx notes, that time has passed. In urban areas, rural areas and everywhere in between, students who lack Internet service at home have difficulty doing their nightly schoolwork. Many of them cobble together whatever connectivity they can, picking up free Wi-Fi signals in front of libraries, in school parking lots, and at fast-food restaurants. Credit them with creativity and resilience. But getting homework done should not be this hard. Solving this problem will take a mix of initiatives.

Already the Federal Communications Commission has updated its program supporting connectivity in low-income households to include broadband. Many broadband providers have low-cost offerings, and we need to ensure that schools and students are aware of them. We also need federal policies to increase unlicensed spectrum, which is used to support Wi-Fi. Finally, we need to keep tabs on local efforts — from outfitting school buses with wireless service to lending out library hot spots — and make sure that successful programs are copied elsewhere.

[Commentary] The Internet is the 21st century’s marketplace, politically and economically; it’s where the next generation will do business and exchange ideas. That’s why it’s critical that Congress resist partisan efforts to gut the Federal Communications Commission’s recent action modernizing its Lifeline program to support broadband. For more than 30 years, the Lifeline program has enjoyed bipartisan support and helped low-income households buy telephone service. Beginning in December, barring hostile actions from Congress, qualifying households will be able to use their Lifeline dollars to offset the cost of broadband. Our children deserve access to this century’s public square.

[Michael Copps is a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission appointed by President George W. Bush, and a special adviser to Common Cause.]

Facebook, in the years leading up to the 2016 election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American Internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

The Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed.

You may think you are discreet about your political views. But Facebook, the world’s largest social media network, has come up with its own determination of your political leanings, based on your activity on the site. And now, it is easy to find out how Facebook has categorized you — as very liberal or very conservative, or somewhere in between. Facebook makes a deduction about your political views based on the pages that you like — or on your political preference, if you stated one, on your profile page. If you like the page for Hillary Clinton, Facebook might categorize you as a liberal. Even if you do not like any candidates’ pages, if most of the people who like the same pages that you do — such as Ben and Jerry’s ice cream — identify as liberal, then Facebook might classify you as one, too.

The dispute over Hillary Clinton’s email practices now threatens to shadow her for the rest of the presidential campaign after the disclosure that the FBI collected nearly 15,000 new emails in its investigation of her and a federal judge’s order that the State Department accelerate the documents’ release. As a result, thousands of emails that Clinton did not voluntarily turn over to the State Department could be released just weeks before the election in November.

The order, by Judge James Boasberg of Federal District Court, came the same day a conservative watchdog group separately released hundreds of emails from one of Clinton’s closest aides, Huma Abedin, which put a new focus on the sometimes awkward ties between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department. The FBI discovered the roughly 14,900 emails by scouring Clinton’s server and the computer archives of government officials with whom she corresponded. In late July, it turned them over to the State Department, which now must set a timetable for their release, according to Judge Boasberg’s order.

[Commentary] In New York City, with broadband costing on average $55 per month, 25 percent of all households and 50 percent of those making less than $20,000 lack this service at home.

People line up, sometimes for hours, to use the library system’s free computers. Go into any library in the nation and you’ll most likely see the same thing. They come to do what so many of us take for granted: apply for government services, study or do research, talk with family or friends, inform themselves as voters, and just participate in our society and culture — so much of which now takes place online. Our public libraries are charged with providing free access to information, and in recent years we have had to create new ways of doing that. Leaking broadband (frankly, accidentally) onto the branch stoops is not enough.

In 2014, working with Mayor Bill de Blasio, and with support from Google and the Knight, Open Society and Robin Hood Foundations, we were able to let our patrons “check out” the internet. Yet we need help from more than libraries. Another, bolder approach, would be to create Wi-Fi for large geographic areas. I know there are technological hurdles to providing universal broadband. But the commitment I’m asking for isn’t particularly novel.

[Anthony W. Marx is the president of the New York Public Library.]

All is not well in the kingdom of Carlos Slim. For more than 25 years, he has dictated the terms of Mexico’s telecommunications industry and built an empire, making him one of the world’s richest men. Slim and his family are billionaires 50 times over. He has stood at the very top of the Forbes World’s Billionaires list — more than once. His flush years in Mexico enabled him to span the Americas with companies that touch nearly every facet of modern life: telecom, banking, construction, retail and media, among others. But at home in Mexico, the game is changing. And there is not much he can do about it, analysts say.

An examination of 75 think tanks found an array of researchers who had simultaneously worked as registered lobbyists, members of corporate boards or outside consultants in litigation and regulatory disputes, with only intermittent disclosure of their dual roles. With their expertise and authority, think tank scholars offer themselves as independent arbiters, playing a vital role in Washington’s political economy. Their imprimatur helps shape government decisions that can be lucrative to corporations. But the examination identified dozens of examples of scholars conducting research at think tanks while corporations were paying them to help shape government policy. Many think tanks also readily confer “nonresident scholar” status on lobbyists, former government officials and others who earn their primary living working for private clients, with few restrictions on such outside work. Largely free from disclosure requirements, the researchers’ work is often woven into elaborate corporate lobbying campaigns.

Over the many months that officials in Washington debated sweeping new regulations for internet providers, Jeffrey A. Eisenach, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, was hard to miss. He wrote op-ed pieces, including for The New York Times, that were critical of the rules. He filed formal comments with the Federal Communications Commission, where he also met privately with senior lawyers. He appeared before Congress and issued reports detailing how destructive the new rules would be. “Net neutrality would not improve consumer welfare or protect the public interest,” Eisenach testified in September 2014 before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Intense advocacy by a think tank scholar is not notable in itself, but Eisenach, 58, a former aide at the Federal Trade Commission, has held another job: as a paid consultant for Verizon and its trade association.