Vox

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he believes technology companies that displayed Kremlin-linked ads during the 2016 election could help the United States “retaliate” against Russia. “What we ought to do with regard to the Russians is retaliate, seriously retaliate against the Russians,” Sen McConnell told MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt.

For the moment, the fate of the Sinclair-Tribune deal rests in the hands of the Federal Communications Commission as well as the nation’s antitrust regulators. As with any merger of this size, the government has the ability to review and block the merger, permit it to proceed as proposed, or require Sinclair and Tribune to make certain changes in order for them to proceed.

Already, though, Sinclair has benefited greatly from the Federal Communications Commission: Under its Republican chairman, Ajit Pai, the agency has relaxed media ownership rules, beginning with a change in the way some stations are counted toward a company’s national footprint. That deregulatory move made Sinclair’s bid for Tribune fathomable, analysts have said. During the 2016 election, Sinclair stations appeared to have great access to the presidential candidate. While the company claimed it was not playing favorites, President Trump’s closest aide, Jared Kushner, said in December that Sinclair had actually struck a deal with Trump’s campaign with respect to its coverage. (Sinclair said the deal never happened.) Months later, Sinclair snapped up Boris Epsteyn, one of Trump’s spokespeople in the White House, as a chief political analyst.

A Q&A with Lance State, a professor of communications at Fordham University.

The author of "Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World", Strate has written extensively about Postman’s legacy, and about the cultural impact of television. He argues that our desire for entertainment has become “positively toxic” and in this new world defined by TV, the power of the image has overwhelmed our capacity to think and reason carefully. In this interview, Strate is asked what Postman meant when he wrote that our culture had “descended into a vast triviality.” He is also asked if TV has trivialized our politics and made us all dumber as a result.

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. Pai and Tony Romm discussed the future of network neutrality, the role of the FCC in “boring” things like the country’s infrastructure, and the agency's role overseeing telecom giants as they gobble each other up.

Asked, "What happens if we have millions and millions of Americans who file comments to the agency opposing the ideas [on net neutrality] that you’ve put forward?" Chairman Pai said, "Well, look, that’s part of the process. I wanted to make sure that we had a chance for the public to have its say. After that’s over, after that period is over, the agency takes stock of what’s in the record. Under the law, as enunciated by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals here, we have to have what’s called substantial evidence. We have to find in the record sufficient facts to justify what course of action we are going to take. There’s no numerical threshold that the courts have applied. They don’t say, “Okay, 51 percent say yes and 49 percent say no, then the decision is clear," or any proportion greater than that. They’ve said substantial evidence is the standard, so that’s the legal standard we’re going to apply going forward."

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai stressed the importance that net neutrality protections come in the form of “light-touch regulation.” And his public notice leaves it up for tech and telecom companies to debate exactly how that might look. [To hell with broadband subscribers’ opinions.]

• What does “light touch” really mean? In short, “light touch” net neutrality could take a lot of forms, but here’s one of them: There’s a world in which the FCC doesn’t have any explicit, preemptive net neutrality rules on its books at all.
• What Pai really thinks about online fast lanes: “These don’t exist, and prior to 2015, they didn’t exist ... so we’re talking about something that’s entirely hypothetical,” he said of such deals. That means, to Chairman Pai, maybe the FCC doesn’t need to ban them outright.
• How Chairman Pai plans to approach public comments: What happens if a majority still thrashes Chairman Pai and his plan to roll back the Obama administration’s work? “Well, look, that’s part of the process. ... After that [public comment period] is over, the agency takes stock of what’s in the record.” While he said the FCC must have “substantial evidence” justifying its work, he said “there’s no numerical threshold the courts have applied” to evaluate if regulators act appropriately. And by the way, he stopped short of saying consumers’ fears are unfounded. Asked if public-interest groups had been disingenuous, he replied: “The parade of horribles trotted out have no resonance in fact.”

A Q&A with federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai on network neutrality.

“We don’t want to impose monopoly-style regulation developed for Ma Bell in the 1930s, to apply to every single company in the United States that is building out a broadband network,” Chairman Pai said. “We would much rather have the free-market ‘light touch’ approach that the Clinton administration adopted. We’re not saying the choice is either Title II or the Wild West, it’s light-touch regulation, the middle ground, that we’re looking to return to.” He continued, “We have to remember that not all four million were in support of the [net neutrality] rules. Some 1.6 to 1.7 million were opposed. But this is not a numerical threshold. What we have to do at the agency is figure out the right regulatory framework to preserve a free and open internet and the incentive to invest in networks.”

President Donald Trump’s first weeks in office have galvanized tech engineers, who vigorously protested the president — and in some cases, turned their fire on executives like Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, to get them to strike more forcefully at the White House. It isn’t all opposition, however.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and other major tech companies that long have tried to overhaul the US tax code have found a president who’s willing to grant them a few wishes. President Trump’s tax plan is but a page — and it’s already politically imperiled in Congress — but it still backed a one-time tax break for businesses that bring back billions of dollars from overseas. So too have the nation’s tech titans gained a few allies in government. Much is still on the horizon. President Trump has pledged an infrastructure package, for example, that could be valued by as much as $1 trillion. Other work around issues like self-driving cars is well underway. “I think this is a marathon, not a sprint,” said Michael Beckerman, the president of the Internet Association. “A first 100 days is just 100 days, and you have years to go. And a lot of the things that were on the agenda…. are not directly related to our industry. I think the question of success will be later on.”

[Commentary] This week saw a furor surrounding Unroll.me, a service that offers to unsubscribe users from unwanted e-mails, but which apparently sold user data to Uber in the past in a way that wasn’t transparent to users. CEO Jojo Hedaya said it was “heartbreaking” to learn that some customers didn’t understand how the company monetizes its free service. The reaction to the revelations was predictable: Some decried all ad-based business models, using cliches like, “if you’re not paying, you’re the product,” while others said users were naive for imagining a free service wasn’t monetizing their data in some way. Every time I see this happen, I wish we could get beyond the simplistic painting of all ad-based services with the same brush, and have a more nuanced conversation about ad-based business models.

[Jan Dawson is founder and chief analyst at Jackdaw]