Washington Post

[Commentary] Hillary Clinton's campaign just threw down the gauntlet, challenging Donald Trump to accept the three presidential debates that have been scheduled. Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, announced that Clinton would participate in the debates and said the "only issue now is whether Donald Trump is going to show up." It's apparent that Trump might very well skip one or more debates anyway — becoming the first candidate to do so since 1972.

For a few reasons:
1) He's not very good at them
2) He can be baited, and Clinton is good at it
3) He's already hinted strongly that he won't

[Commentary] The prospect of billions of dollars moving opaquely through the Internet and aimed at influencing our votes can sound ominous, especially as the Web is increasingly a tool that Americans use to communicate both personally and politically. In the broadest sense, allowing this flood of ad money feels contrary to our usual efforts to ensure that we know who is spending large sums to try to influence the makeup and actions of our government. But the world of campaign finance regulation has always been fuzzy and complex, especially as we try to balance the values of fairness and transparency with the equally fundamental principle of freedom of expression.

These new advertising tools, from e-mail and websites to Facebook and YouTube and more, clearly offer both opportunities and challenges in an already fraught landscape. The legal framework that defines when political spending should be disclosed — and perhaps even restricted — have centered on the subject of the message and the scope of the spending. Messages that advocate directly for or against federal candidates, and the use of significant amounts of money to present those messages, have been triggers for disclosure and sometimes limits. But these rules were developed in a communications environment where my spending on a 30-second TV or radio ad prevented you from using that same time; a big imbalance in spending could mean some messages were everywhere while others remained unheard. The Internet might be different. My use doesn’t obviously limit yours, and the cost of participating is a lot lower than the cost of broadcast ads.

[Bob Biersack is a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group tracking money in U.S. politics.]

[Commentary] The Internet is rapidly transforming our political campaigns. But as social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter further entrench people into “echo chambers” where they hear more and more of the things they already agree with, is that a good thing? There are a number of reasons a shift toward online advertising will have a huge impact on how people consume political media:

• It’s cheap and easy to implement. Anyone, in theory, has equal access to having a voice online.
• There’s no limit to airtime on the Internet. A candidate’s reach is bounded only by the following they can build.
• Companies such as Alphabet and Facebook can use data to let sophisticated advertisers target voters at a granular level. As a result, advertisers can tailor their messages to closely fit voters’ perspectives viewpoints, which theoretically will let candidates effectively mobilize specific populations to spend money or vote.

So far, the Federal Election Commission has refused to expand its scope to regulating online ads. Political action committees are required to disclose who’s behind the ads only if they were bought on websites. At the moment, free online media accounts — such as YouTube, Facebook or Instagram — are fairly unregulated territory. The result is a media environment in which consumers receive information that’s increasingly designed specifically for them — but they might not be able to tell where it’s coming from.

In a recent ruling, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg for the District of Columbia criticized new rules regarding how long the government can demand secrecy from companies when it requests data on national security cases.

These demands, called national security letters (NSLs), are administrative subpoenas issued by FBI officials without having to seek judicial approval. They are generally accompanied by orders forbidding the recipients from disclosing the NSL’s existence. Judge Boasberg is the first judge to publicly assess new gag-order rules issued by the attorney general as mandated by the USA Freedom Act of 2015. These require the government to revisit gag orders when an investigation ends or on the three-year anniversary of the original subpoena. But Judge Boasberg said the rules contain “several large loopholes.” And thus, he said, they “give the court some pause” as to whether they comply with the law. He rejected the open-ended nature of the gag order, which accompanied requests for data on two of the company’s customers. Such “an indefinite bar . . . seems inconsistent with the intent of the law,” he wrote. He required that officials reconsider the need for the order’s secrecy every three years or until the gag is no longer necessary.

Should your online privacy depend on whether you've paid your Internet provider a little extra this month? That's one of the key policy questions concerning the future of the Web. And the nation's top telecom and broadband regulator, Tom Wheeler, signaled that he's not a fan of the idea.

Talking to reporters, the head of the Federal Communications Commission implied that the Internet risks becoming divided into privacy haves and have-nots, if companies such as AT&T and Comcast can dangle discounts in front of consumers in exchange for slurping up their search and browsing histories for advertising purposes. "I would hope that privacy doesn't become a luxury item," Chairman Wheeler said. The FCC is waist-deep in crafting a set of privacy regulations for Internet service providers (ISPs). Some, such as Comcast, have met with the FCC to ask that it not restrict the ability of ISPs to tinker with a discount-for-data business model. "Low-income consumers have less disposable income with which to pay for privacy-protective plans, and therefore are much more likely to give up their privacy in exchange for access to the Internet," wrote Eric Null, a policy lawyer at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. "Low-income consumers should not have to decide between internet access and privacy, but pay-for-privacy forces that decision upon them."

[Commentary] One of the most cherished assumptions about this race, one explicitly voiced by Donald Trump and even entertained by some neutral observers: Trump can win through sheer media dominance alone.

In a recent episode, Trump gained enormous amounts of media attention by publicly hallucinating about video of the cash transfer to Iran. But did he really gain anything from all that attention, other than widespread ridicule, at a time when his poll numbers are tanking? Press coverage tends to get harsher when a candidate gets weaker, and that’s what this episode brought. Trump himself has repeatedly said, in various ways, that his strategy is premised on sucking up all the media oxygen.

After Melania Trump’s convention speech was revealed as plagiarism, Trump said that all the publicity devoted to the speech was a positive, because “all press is good press.” Before that, Trump flatly stated that he had an advantage in the general election because “I have the loudspeaker.” But it’s becoming increasingly obvious that “the loudspeaker” is turning voters against Trump, perhaps to a point from which there will be no coming back. Trump’s ongoing battle with the Khan family drew enormous media scrutiny, but, given that it brought with it widespread media coverage of Republicans and military figures criticizing his conduct, all this attention has been simply awful for him. Indeed, the Clinton team is now explicitly premising its strategy on the idea that all the coverage has grown so lethal that its best play is to get out of the way and let it continue.

The idea that Trump’s media ubiquity is largely a positive for him is merely a subset of larger myths about this race — that everything he does is shrewdly calculated and a reflection of his ingenious media manipulation, or even worse, that he possesses some species of Magical Trumpian Political Powers that allow him to defy the conventional rules of politics. Trump could still win, of course. But as of now, all of this has been thoroughly discredited.

There has never been a worse time to declare your politics publicly, according to a new and nationally representative online poll conducted by the Rad Campaign, Craigconnects and Lincoln Strategies. This year’s survey, the second in a biannual series, found that nearly a third of all Internet-using adults self-report that they’ve been “harassed online for expressing political opinions.” That abuse is highest among Democrats, the highly political and those ages 55 to 64. It’s also nearly double the rate of political harassment that users reported in 2014.

Dr Alan Perce died at the family home in Lexington (VA) on July 10, 2016. Perce was born November 10, 1937, in Manchester, England. He studied at the London School of Economics and Indiana University, where he received a Doctor of Philosophy in Business.

Perce was one of the prime architects of the information era, coming to Washington (DC) in 1970 as Chief Economist at the Federal Communications Commission, and later working for the House Subcommittee on Communications, and at the White House, Office of Telecommunications. Dr. Pearce founded Information Age Economics, providing consulting services to high tech companies. Before coming to the US, Perce was a newspaper reporter, and worked as Foreign Desk Editor for Independent Television News (ITN). A Memorial Service will be held September 10.

Facebook is digging in over its fight with the Internal Revenue Service. The social network said that it faces a potential $5 billion tax bill after moving some of its assets to Ireland. The company’s tussle with tax authorities dates back to its decision in 2010 to transfer many of its global “intangible” assets — those not in the United States or Canada — to its Irish holding company. The transfer allowed the company to pay a lower tax rate on the profits made from those assets, tax experts say. (The corporate tax rate in Ireland is 12.5 percent, compared with 35 percent in the United States.)

The IRS said in court documents the way the assets were valued was “problematic” and that the “transferred intangibles” may have been undervalued by “billions of dollars." On July 28, Facebook, which reported more than $2 billion in profits during its second quarter, said it received a "deficiency" notice from the IRS and could end up with a tax bill of $3 billion to $5 billion, plus interest and penalties. "We do not agree with the position of the IRS" and will challenge the decision, the social network said in an Securities and Exchange Commission filing. If the IRS prevails it "could have a material adverse impact on our financial position." The tussle comes amid a worldwide reexamination of the tax strategies employed by US multinational corporations. French authorities raided the Paris headquarters of Google and McDonald’s in May and the European Commission is investigating tax deals that Amazon and Apple reached in Luxembourg and Ireland.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission published a pair of decisions recently that show in sharp contrast the right and wrong ways regulators use their authority to shape the trajectory of disruptive technologies. This time, the continuing evolution of the Internet is at stake.

First, the agency voted to open large amounts of very high frequency radio spectrum for early developers of next generation mobile broadband, known as 5G. The United States is poised to be the first country in the world to take this critical step. In keeping with long-standing US policy, some of the newly allocated bands will be auctioned off to network operators, some will be set aside for anyone to use, and some will be shared. At the other end of the innovation life-cycle, the second decision further delayed the ongoing retirement of the decaying analog telephone network, which has long since been made obsolete by better and cheaper digital technologies. The proceedings have dragged on for more than a decade, and the FCC has once again punted on the final conclusion. The first decision, in short, was visionary. The second, on the other hand, will waste valuable time and resources.

[Downes is a project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy]