Wall Street Journal

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai faces a tough challenge in coming days: rolling back network neutrality rules that he regards as an overreach, without reaching too far himself.

In the highly charged legal and political debate over how the Trump administration and Republican Congress would reverse the Obama-era rules, almost any misstep could be fatal to the effort. Chairman Pai could announce his game plan as soon as this month to start acting at the commission’s May meeting, according to some people familiar with the matter. His timing will be crucial. If Chairman Pai moves too fast to kill the existing rules, he risks provoking a court fight he could lose, according to some experts. But if he goes too slowly—potentially, by starting over with the government’s full rule-making process—he and his GOP allies might suffer politically, as online activists’ protests multiply.

[Commentary] Shares of broadband providers have run up since the election on the hope that the Trump administration will bring a lighter touch to telecom policy. But even with looser network neutrality rules on the horizon, little may actually change.

New rules are expected to end the policy of classifying broadband as a utility subject to price regulation and return providers to a more limited regulatory framework. That would remove a big long-term risk for cable and telecom companies. But it may not make much of a difference in the short term, raising the question of whether recent stock-price gains are fully justified. Critics of the current rules argue that the threat of price regulation has chilled investment. But cable capital expenditures at Comcast , the largest wired broadband provider, have continued to climb since the new rules and are expected to rise again in 2017, according to UBS. Any declines in capital spending at other companies could be chalked up to normal pauses between investment cycles.

Altice USA filed paperwork to go public April 11, in an offering that would raise more than $1 billion, apparently. The US arm of French mogul Patrick Drahi’s cable operator Altice NV filed a registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of shares of Class A common stock.

The IPO is likely to value Altice USA at more than $20 billion. BC Partners Ltd. and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which together own 30% of Altice USA, are likely to sell 5% to 10% of the company, apparently. Altice is so far planning to keep its 70% stake in Altice USA, although the IPO process is likely to take several months, and Altice’s approach could change over that time.

An investigation of Google has found it systematically pays female employees less than their male counterparts, US Department of Labor officials said, a claim that adds to allegations of gender bias in Silicon Valley.

The Labor Department found the gender-pay gap during a routine probe into whether Google, a federal contractor, is complying with laws that prohibit contractors from discriminating against applicants or employees. The department is suing Google to compel the company to disclose more compensation data for its investigation. At a procedural hearing before a federal administrative law judge in San Francisco, Labor Department Regional Director Janette Wipper said the agency “found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce” at Google.

Apparently, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai laid out preliminary plans to roll back the agency’s network neutrality rules in a meeting with trade associations. The conversation shows that the FCC chairman is inching closer to making his plans public, possibly as soon as April.

The plans appear aimed at preserving the basic principles of net neutrality but shifting enforcement to the Federal Trade Commission, while undoing what Republican critics regard as the regulatory overreach of the FCC’s rules. Pai’s plans likely would reverse the reclassification of broadband Internet access service as a telecommunications service, so the FTC again would have jurisdiction over the telecommunications carriers. To preserve the basic tenets of net neutrality, the plans would require broadband providers to pledge to abide by net neutrality principles such as no blocking or paid prioritization of internet traffic. That would allow the FTC to go after violators for deceptive or unfair trade practices. Chairman Pai also is believed to be considering provisions to restore FTC oversight of broadband providers’ consumer privacy protections. GOP lawmakers, with the backing of Chairman Pai, recently passed a measure repealing an Obama-era FCC privacy rule that broadband providers criticized as unfairly restrictive. Pai’s plans could begin to be adopted as soon as the FCC’s monthly meeting in May, although the June meeting remains possibility.

Federal regulators plan to reverse an Obama-era rule that prevented major television-station owners from buying stations or readily selling themselves, a move that could touch off a wave of deals among media companies.

The proposal, which would effectively loosen a national cap on audience share for station owners that the rule had tightened, is scheduled to be put before the Federal Communications Commission in late April, an agency official said. Chairman Ajit Pai is expected to announce the plan on March 30. The longstanding ownership cap limits TV groups to a 39 percent national audience share. But for years, the government said station owners didn’t have to fully count UHF stations in calculating their share because UHF was typically a less powerful signal.

The Obama-era FCC eliminated the so-called UHF discount last September, contending that the distinction between UHF stations and VHF stations had effectively disappeared. The FCC under Chairman Pai is expected to revert to the previous rule in one of a series of actions he is taking as he plans to reverse several policies adopted under his predecessor, Tom Wheeler, who was FCC chairman for much of President Barack Obama’s second term.

For the first six weeks of the Trump Administration, the State Department didn’t hold a single on-camera press briefing — long a fixture of US diplomatic communications — finally beginning them on March 7. Less than three weeks later, they’ve stopped again.

Officials said the on-camera briefings won’t resume for at least two weeks as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson moves to get a permanent spokesperson in place. Mark Toner, a career foreign service officer who has been the department’s acting spokesman, is slated for another assignment. He might return to the podium on camera in April, but the Trump administration doesn’t yet have a full-time spokesperson in place. That official is expected to be Heather Nauert, until now a Fox News anchor, but she is awaiting approval of her security clearance. She hasn’t been officially named and hasn’t yet started at the State Department. In the interim, the State Department will hold background briefings, in which unnamed officials will brief intermittently on specific topics. Under the Obama Administration and those before it, the State Department took questions on-camera on a nearly daily basis. The briefings are closely watched by foreign officials as well as US diplomats around the world for public guidance on US policy.

Facebook wants to get us more politically active in the real world. Facebook has rolled out a nonpartisan civic engagement service in the US called Town Hall. It identifies your elected officials—even local ones—sends reminders to vote and goads you to pick up the phone. It is one of the first glimpses of how Facebook will execute on Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of using the social network’s influence—built on keeping up with friends—to address humanity’s biggest problems.

[Commentary] If President Donald Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that President Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.

The latest example is President Trump’s refusal to back off his tweet of three weeks ago that he had “found out that [Barack] Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory” on Election Day. He has offered no evidence for his claim, and a parade of intelligence officials, senior Republicans and Democrats have since said they have seen no such evidence. Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has President Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt President Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.

The Trump administration at times wears its populist hat and at others its pro-business hat. When it comes to antitrust enforcement, investors are betting it is sporting the latter. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this wager is the spread between Time Warner’s share price and the price implied by AT&T’s deal for it, announced Oct. 22. If it were to close by the end of 2017, holders of Time Warner shares would stand to gain 12%. That compares with 21.6% on Oct. 31. The narrowing suggests investors are increasingly convinced that President Donald Trump won’t follow through on his pre-election threat to block the proposed merger. It also speaks to a general optimism about lenient antitrust enforcement under President Trump.