Washington Post

[Commentary] For as long as the Internet has existed, it has been grounded on the principle of net neutrality — that what you read, see or watch online shouldn’t be favored, blocked or slowed down based on where that content is coming from.

Net neutrality means that cable companies can’t reserve the fastest Internet speeds for the biggest companies and leave everyone else in the slow lane. That’s what ensures a website for a local pizza place in rural Oregon or Minnesota loads as quickly as the website for Pizza Hut or Domino’s. Or why a social network built in a garage is available to the same people as Instagram or Twitter. That’s why it’s so alarming to see that the Federal Communications Commission, a federal agency that’s expected to help protect the Internet, is planning to roll back net neutrality rules. It’s amazing that President Donald Trump, having promised to stand up to the powerful on behalf of ordinary Americans, now has an FCC that gives the powerful what they ask for — even if it hurts consumers.

[Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, and Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, are members of the U.S. Senate. Tom Wheeler was FCC chairman from 2013 to January.]

They've raised prices. They've slowed speeds. But despite their best efforts, the country's biggest cellphone carriers have been unable to kill off the unlimited data plan. Now they're discovering something else: Unlimited data is extremely popular. And it might just be the thing that saves them in an increasingly cutthroat market for wireless services.

After years of trying to shift customers to plans with monthly data caps, companies such as AT&T and Verizon have begun heaping praise on their newest unlimited data plans as consumers have flocked to them. The plans were once common in the industry. But telecom giants stopped selling them as consumer demand for data grew. Many unlimited customers found themselves signing onto metered plans when prices rose, or abandoning their unlimited plans after running into speed limits. Eventually, the number of those on grandfathered unlimited plans dwindled to a handful. In 2015, just 1 percent of Verizon's customers were on unlimited plans.

In his first public appearance since leaving the White House in January, former president Barack Obama told young leaders that "special interests dominate the debates in Washington" and that he had failed to realize his "aspirational" goal of uniting Americans in red and blue states. "That was an aspirational comment," the former president said of his famous 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, prompting laughter from the audience at the University of Chicago.

He added that when talking to individual Americans from different political backgrounds, you learn that "there’s a lot more that people have in common" than it would appear. "But, obviously, it’s not true when it comes to our politics and our civic life." Obama, who has kept a relatively low public profile since the end of his second term, did not mention President Trump once during the 90-minute event. But he said he was determined to galvanize younger Americans to do more politically because they were the ones best positioned to bridge the current political divide.

Verizon has launched a faster version of its FiOS Internet service that can reach download speeds of up to 940 Mbps per second. By taking the leap into “gigabit” service, Verizon is becoming the latest company to compete with Comcast, Google Fiber and others at that speed tier.

The product, known as FiOS Gigabit Connection, is available now in eight US markets on the east coast, including New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia (PA), Richmond (VA), Hampton Roads (VA), Boston (MA), Providence (RI), and Washington (DC). It costs $70 a month as a stand-alone product or $80 if purchased as part of a triple-play bundle, according to the company. Those prices are comparable to that of Google Fiber.

For President Donald Trump — a reality TV star who parlayed his blustery-yet-knowing on-air persona into a winning political brand — television is often the guiding force of his day, both weapon and scalpel, megaphone and news feed. And the president’s obsession with the tube — as a governing tool, a metric for staff evaluation, and a two-way conduit with lawmakers and aides — has upended the traditional rhythms of the White House, influencing many spheres, including policy, his burgeoning relationship with Congress, and whether he taps out a late-night or early-morning tweet. Those Trump tweet-storms, which contain some of his most controversial utterances, are usually prompted by something he has seen on television just moments before.

The president, advisers said, also uses details gleaned from cable news as a starting point for policy discussions or a request for more information, and appears on TV himself when he wants to appeal directly to the public.

[Commentary] For March 2017, we tallied 585 protests, demonstrations, marches, sit-ins and rallies in the United States, with at least one in every state and the District. Our conservative guess is that 79,389 to 89,585 people showed up at these political gatherings, although it is likely that there were far more participants. Because mainstream media often neglect to report nonviolent actions — especially small ones — it is probable that we did not record every event that occurred. This is particularly true of the “A Day Without a Woman” strikes on March 8. It’s virtually impossible to record an accurate tally of participants for strikes, in part because many people deliberately conceal their motivations for skipping out on work or school when they participate.

Nevertheless, we think our tally gives us a useful pool of information to better understand political mobilization in the United States — particularly how reports of crowds change from month to month. In this case, we note that March 2017 saw fewer people protesting than February 2017, during which we observed 233,021 to 373,089 people participating in crowds.

[Erica Chenoweth is a professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. David Prater is a program manager at the War Prevention Initiative. Jeremy Pressman is an associate professor of political science and director of Middle East Studies at the University of Connecticut. Ches Thurber is assistant professor of political science at Northern Illinois University. Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco.]

Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford University, is among the many — academics, political practitioners, journalists, law enforcement officials and others — who are attempting to understand better the consequences of conducting campaigns and governance here and around the world in the Internet age.

He has written about this in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Democracy in an article with a title that sums up his concerns: “Can Democracy Survive the Internet?” The provocative title isn’t simply the result of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, though that is obviously a front-and-center issue. “I think it’s the shiny object that everyone understandably pays attention to right now, but the problem is bigger than that,” Persily said. The campaign of 2016 highlighted the degree to which elections are carried out on terrain far different from when television and traditional print organizations were the dominant media.

The federal government’s effort to root out an anonymous critic of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies has sparked an investigation into whether officials abused their authority by demanding that Twitter reveal the identity of one of its users, according to a letter released April 21. The Twitter account was part of an explosion of anonymous online criticism of Trump that began shortly after his inauguration in January and appeared to emanate from within many federal agencies. The Department of Homeland Security’s effort to identify the user behind one of these accounts — @ALT_uscis, which uses the acronym for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — prompted a summons to Twitter demanding that the company reveal the identity of the user, who was thought to be a federal employee.

The March 14 summons provoked a lawsuit from Twitter and sharp criticism from privacy advocates. Amid this backlash, federal officials rescinded the summons, and the company dropped its suit, appearing to resolve the case. But DHS Inspector General John Roth decided to investigate possible abuse of authority in this case, as well as “potential broader misuse of summons authority” within the department, he wrote in a letter to Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), who had called the effort to unmask the Twitter user a “witch hunt.”

Federal prosecutors are weighing whether to bring criminal charges against members of the WikiLeaks organization, taking a second look at a 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and military documents and investigating whether the group bears criminal responsibility for the more recent revelation of sensitive CIA cyber-tools, apparently.

The Justice Department under President Barack Obama decided not to charge WikiLeaks for revealing some of the government’s most sensitive secrets — concluding that doing so would be akin to prosecuting a news organization for publishing classified information. Justice Department leadership under President Trump, though, has indicated to prosecutors that it is open to taking another look at the case, which the Obama administration did not formally close. It is not clear whether prosecutors are also looking at WikiLeaks’ role in 2016 in publishing e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John D. Podesta, which US officials have said were hacked by the Russian government.

A new lawsuit claims that Confide, a privacy-focused messaging app reportedly used by several politicians including those in the Trump administration in February, may not be as secure as it has advertised. Filings from a proposed class-action lawsuit in New York say that Confide's contention that it does not allow its users to take screenshots of their messages isn't true. It specifically accuses Confide of breaching false advertising and deceptive business practices laws. The inability to keep a record of Confide messages is one of the product's most-touted features. If someone tries to take a picture of a conversation, Confide is supposed to kick out the person who took the screenshot and alert the other person in the conversation. It's also supposed to only let users see messages one line at a time, to prevent an entire message from ever being recorded, making it ideal for confidential messaging.