Washington Post

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s history of Internet regulation is wrong.

The government regulated Internet access under President Bill Clinton, just as it did in the last two years of Barack Obama’s term, and it did so into George W. Bush’s first term, too. The phone lines and the connections served over them — without which phone subscribers had no Internet access — did not operate in the supposedly deregulated paradise Chairman Pai mourns. Without government oversight, phone companies could have prevented dial-up Internet service providers from even connecting to customers. In the 1990s, in fact, FCC regulations more intrusive than the Obama administration’s net neutrality rules led to far more competition among early broadband providers than we have today. Pai’s nostalgia for the ’90s doesn’t extend to reviving rules that mandated competition — instead, he’s moving to scrap regulations the FCC put in place to protect customers from the telecom conglomerates that now dominate the market.

Chairman Pai talks about the importance of competition, but so have a lot of other FCC chairmen wishing that it would happen. Unfortunately, the 1990s legacy he keeps endorsing offers no hope that dumping the rules of those days will give us more competition.

[Rob Pegoraro covers technology for Yahoo Finance, USA Today, the Wirecutter and other sites. From 1999 to 2011, he wrote The Post’s personal-tech column.]

President Donald Trump signed an executive order that sets up a commission to review his controversial allegations of widespread voter fraud, along with reports of voter suppression. The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity will be led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), who has aggressively pursued allegations of voter fraud in his state.

About a dozen other election officials representing both parties will fill out the commission, which will deliver a report to the president in 2018, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. Sanders said that the commission will review policies and practices that enhance or undermine confidence in the integrity of federal elections, including improper registrations, improper voting, fraudulent registrations, fraudulent voting and voting suppression. The commission will not just focus on the 2016 general election but also systemic issues over the years.

There's a huge court case you need to hear about. It might not be on your radar yet because, frankly, some of it gets pretty technical. But the outcome is likely to have enormous repercussions for online privacy, net neutrality and the economy. For months, policymakers have been struggling with the implications of this case, FTC v. AT&T, in part because it overturned about a century's worth of established legal practice and also, analysts say, because it appeared to open a wide loophole that businesses might use to evade most federal oversight. On May 9, the federal appeals court responsible for the ruling announced that it has agreed to rehear the case, potentially opening the door to a different result. Here's everything you need to know.

As Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price walked through a hallway May 9 in the West Virginia state capitol, veteran reporter Dan Heyman followed alongside him, holding up his phone to Sec Price while attempting to ask him a question. Heyman, a journalist with Public News Service, repeatedly asked the secretary whether domestic violence would be considered a preexisting condition under the Republican bill to overhaul the nation’s health care system, he said. “He didn’t say anything,” Heyman said later in a news conference. “So I persisted.” Then, an officer in the capitol pulled him aside, handcuffed him and arrested him.

Heyman was jailed on the charge of willful disruption of state government processes and was released later on $5,000 bail. Authorities said while Secret Service agents were providing security in the capitol for Sec Price and Kellyanne Conway, special counsel to the president, Heyman was “aggressively breaching” the agents to the point where they were “forced to remove him a couple of times from the area,” according to a criminal complaint. Heyman “was causing a disturbance by yelling questions at Ms. Conway and Secretary Price,” the complaint stated.

FBI Director James B. Comey has been dismissed by the president, according to White House spokesman Sean Spicer - a startling move that officials said stemmed from a conclusion by Justice Department officials that he had mishandled the probe of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Comey was fired as he is leading a counterintelligence investigation to determine whether associates of President Trump may have coordinated with Russia to meddle with the presidential election in 2016. That probe began quietly last July but has now become the subject of intense debate in Washington.

It is unclear how Comey’s dismissal will affect that investigation. “The president has accepted the recommendation of the Attorney General and the deputy Attorney General regarding the dismissal of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Spicer said.

Maybe you've heard: Charter Communications is teaming up with Comcast. The two cable companies are working together to protect their nascent cellphone businesses from huge, national providers — such as Verizon and AT&T — by largely refraining from going after each other. Under the deal, Comcast and Charter have temporarily agreed not to take actions that could compromise each other's new offerings, such as selling mobile-phone service to consumers outside their respective cable footprints or trying to buy up existing cellphone carriers such as Sprint or T-Mobile.

Essentially, it's a deal by cable giants to shield their early investments in an industry they're just beginning to explore. But this detente, while it may seem like a small announcement, has some important implications for cellphone service, television and online media. Here's why it's such a big deal.

Two months before May 8's announcement that Sinclair Broadcast Group would pay $3.9 billion for Tribune Media and add to its dominance as the nation’s largest owner of local TV stations, a top executive at Sinclair beamed a short commentary piece to many of the company’s 173 stations. In the segment, which looks like it belongs in a newscast, Sinclair vice president for news Scott Livingston stands before a wall of video monitors and warns that “some members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think.” He accuses the national media of publishing “fake news stories” — a direct echo of President Donald Trump’s frequent complaint — and then asks viewers to visit the station’s website to share “content concerns.” The piece was a “must-run,” meaning news directors and station managers from Baltimore (MD) to Seattle (WA) had to find room for it.

Local TV stations rank high in public trust, and that is partly because they avoid delving into divisive topics such as national politics, said Harry A. Jessell, editor of TVNewsCheck. Sinclair executives such as Livingtston see it differently, Jessell said. They believe they are pushing back against what they see as a liberal bias in most news programming. Livingston “sees himself like an old-fashioned newspaper publisher, one with a point of view,” Jessell said.

Apparently, FBI Director James Comey overstated key findings involving the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation during testimony to Congress recently. In defending the probe, Director Comey offered seemingly new details to underscore the seriousness of the situation FBI agents faced last fall when they discovered thousands of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s e-mails on the computer of her husband, Anthony Weiner. “Somehow, her e-mails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information,” Director Comey said, adding later, “His then-spouse Huma Abedin appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding e-mails to him for him I think to print out for her so she could then deliver them to the secretary of state.” At another point in the testimony, Comey said Abedin “forwarded hundreds and thousands of e-mails, some of which contain classified information.’’

Neither of those statements is accurate, apparently. The inquiry found that Abedin did occasionally forward e-mails to her husband for printing, but it was a far smaller number than Director Comey described, and it wasn’t a “regular practice.”

Apparently, the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into Uber's use of a secret software that was used to evade authorities in places where its ride-hailing service was banned or restricted. The investigation, in its early stages, deepens the crisis for the embattled company and its chief executive and founder, Travis Kalanick, who has faced a barrage of negative press this year in the wake of high-profile sexual harassment complaints, a slew of executive departures and a consequential trade-secrets lawsuit from Google's parent company.

The federal criminal probe focuses on software developed by Uber called "Greyball." The program helped the company evade officials in cities where Uber was not yet approved. The software identified and blocked rides to transportation regulators who were posing as Uber customers in an effort to prove that the company was operating illegally.

In its bid to blow up the nation’s cellular industry a half-decade ago, a company named LightSquared proposed something no wireless carrier had done before: It vowed to build America’s first retail cellphone network using airwaves traditionally reserved for orbiting satellites. After a multiyear restructuring during which LightSquared’s owner and top investor — the embattled hedge-fund manager Philip Falcone — stepped aside, the company has re-emerged. It has a new name — Ligado — and even grander ambitions.

If it succeeds, Ligado will be well-positioned to control a massive chunk of the industrial market for connected devices, a market that Morgan Stanley thinks will be worth $110 billion a year by 2020. Ligado is promising not only to build the world’s first wireless network using ground-based airwaves that had long been considered unsuitable for cellular use, but it’s also planning to join that capability with a satellite hovering above North America.