Wired

[Commentary] In 2006, House Republicans passed legislation empowering the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the Open Internet Policy Statement, but the bill died in the Senate. In 2010, a court blocked the FCC’s subsequent attempt to enforce the policy statement. Democrats wanted legislation, and Google and Verizon even negotiated a deal. Congressional Republicans wanted to negotiate after retaking the House. By then, the FCC had already issued its first net neutrality rules, which partially failed in court in 2014. The following year, Republicans offered a deal, and Democrats have stonewalled since. Lawmakers should enshrine rules against blocking and throttling, enforced by either the FCC or the Federal Trade Commission, and deny the FCC a blank check over the internet. Until Congress acts, telecom Groundhog Day will keep replaying over and over and over.
[Szóka is president of TechFreedom]

The Federal Communications Commission says it wants to hear from you about the future of net neutrality. But in opening its virtual doors to the public, it’s also opened them to spammers and trolls, some of whom might have even managed to knock the FCC’s site offline this past week.

On the one hand, these problems are mere hassles: The FCC’s site was only down for a few hours, and the flood of spam was easy to identify. On the other hand, they show just how hard it is to turn the web into a platform for democratic participation. Just look at any comments section on the internet.

President Donald Trump's overhauled campaign website looks a lot like the original: the resident in a suit and red tie, embedded tweets pillorying #FakeNews, and “Make America Great Again” hats for sale in every color (plus camo, of course). But what really stands out is what’s missing: the entire archive of content published on the site prior to January.

The purge began May 8, after one White House reporter asked press secretary Sean Spicer why the campaign website still included references to the Muslim ban. That same day, during oral arguments in the federal appeals case over the Trump administration’s executive order barring travelers from six Muslim-majority countries, Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert King also pressed Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Wall about the site. Wall argued that the current ban doesn’t discriminate against people on religious grounds, but King insisted the press release contradicts that claim. “He has never repudiated what he said about the Muslim ban,” Judge King said of the president. “It is still on his website.” Within hours it was gone. Within a day, so was every other pesky press release that might someday prove incriminating.

Once Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s notice of proposed rulemaking is approved, which is likely to happen at the FCC’s open meeting May 18, the public will have 60 days to file comments. Then people will have another 30 days to respond to the comments. The FCC’s staff will then have to turn all that feedback into a final order that commissioners will vote on. That process could take months, but based on Pai’s eagerness to re-reclassify broadband providers, you can expect action on that sooner than later.

Senior FCC officials told reporters during a press call that they won’t necessarily be swayed by public opinion. The call for comments is not, they said, a public opinion poll. Fair enough: Sometimes federal agencies have to make unpopular decisions. And if the FCC does vote to scrap net neutrality, it could be a very unpopular decision indeed. Despite growing polarization, a poll conducted by the University of Delaware found that the majority of both Democratic and Republican voters support some form of net neutrality protections.

Net neutrality advocates may have better luck in court than the FCC. Federal agencies must explain sudden policy reversals. If the courts decide that the FCC has acted in an arbitrary or capricious manner, the Title II reversal could be struck down. FCC staff, however, say they are confident that won’t happen. Pai has offered up data suggesting that companies are spending less money building and maintaining their broadband networks as a result of the Title II reclassification, which they believe should be enough to satisfy any legal challenge. Whether those controversial investment stats will be enough to sway the courts remains to be seen.

The Federal Communications Commission will vote on—and given its Republican majority, likely pass—the network neutrality proposal during an open meeting May 18. But that will only start what promises to be a lengthy battle for the future of net neutrality.

To truly torpedo the requirements, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will have to make the case that he’s doing so for good reason. A 1946 law called the Administrative Procedures Act bans federal agencies making “capricious” decisions. The law is meant, in part, to keep regulations from yo-yoing back and forth every time a new party gained control of the White House. The FCC successfully argued in favor of Title II reclassification in federal court in 2016. That effort means Chairman Pai might have to make the case that things had changed enough since then to justify a complete reversal in policy. “That’s a pretty dramatic reversal,” says Marc Martin, chair of communications law at Perkins Coie. “Presuming there’s an appeal, a court may find that arbitrary.”

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is set to launch a community-driven online news service in response to the widespread distribution of deliberately misleading information masquerading as news. The project, Wikitribune, will be a hybrid model in which paid journalists will work with a broad network of contributors.

“We want to bring some of that fact-based, fact-checking mentality that we know from Wikipedia to news,” Wales says. Wikitribune will be financed through a crowdfunding campaign, launching April 24, that will determine the size of the initial team. Wales describes the core editorial mission of the platform as “facts matter” and intends that the site will be able to support “original reporting and investigative journalism”. “What’s fundamentally interesting is to get money to journalists to go out and research news stories,” Wales says. “One of the things that community guidance can do is to help figure out what do we not know? What are the things we need to know? Then you’ve got a lot of minds thinking about and discussing that this is the piece of the puzzle that needs more research.”

The week of April 10 the world lost the most important tech pioneer whom hardly anyone has heard of: Bob Taylor. When I asked Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt to tell me about Taylor—Schmidt worked in Taylor’s Silicon Valley computer science lab as a graduate student—Schmidt said, “Bob Taylor invented almost everything in one form or another that we use today in the office and at home.”

In 1961, as a project manager at NASA, Taylor directed funding to computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, who used the money, in part, to invent the computer mouse. Five years later, at Arpa (now Darpa), Taylor kick-started the internet when he convinced his boss to invest $500,000 of taxpayer money to build a computer network. That network was the Arpanet, precursor to the internet. In 1972, Taylor midwifed the birth of the modern personal computer at Xerox PARC. But just as important as these innovations: Taylor built one of the greatest teams in the history of high-technology and kept it together for years.

For more broadband choice, encourage your elected officials to make these three things happen:

1) Allow Smaller Providers to Lease Infrastructure. Regulators seem to believe that this is too radical an idea for the US, despite the fact that until 2005, DSL internet providers had to lease their wires.
2) Improve Access to Utility Poles: Mandating one touch make-ready is perhaps the most important thing that local, state, and federal governments could do to help smaller internet providers expand their footprints.
3) Streamline the Right-of-Way: Gathering all the necessary permits to cross state lines or build on public property can also take months or years, and require talking to countless agencies. Those permitting processes are in desperate need of streamlining.

Protecting Internet privacy should be a bipartisan issue, right? After all, Americans seem united in their dislike of the phone and cable behemoths that dominate internet service in the US. “At the end of the day, it’s your data,” says Rep Warren Davidson (R-OH), who voted against the repeal. “I don’t see how it could be anyone else’s.”For most Republicans, it seems, someone else’s private property rights took precedence: the cable and phone companies themselves.

Rep Davidson says he believes most of his colleagues subscribed to the free-market reasoning that because the ISPs built the networks, they could do with them what they pleased. But many people don’t have access to more than one home broadband provider–particularly in many of the rural districts that Republicans represent. And, if money can’t really explain the polarization on internet privacy, then what? Republicans traditionally recoil from government regulation—but the FCC’s regulations carried a special taint: the agency passed them under the Obama administration.

Silicon Valley’s newest congressional representative is bringing the idea of basic income to Washington, to the tune of $1 trillion. Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA) - who's district is home to companies like Apple and Intel—would seem to have little chance of persuading the most conservative Congress in memory to blithely give away so much money. But there’s a wrinkle: The biggest beneficiaries wouldn’t be Rep Khanna’s well-heeled constituents in Cupertino or Santa Clara. It’s President Donald Trump’s core supporters in rural America who would have the most to gain.

Rep Khanna is preparing to introduce a bill that he calls “the biggest move in orders of magnitude” toward providing a basic income in the US. Specifically, it proposes a $1 trillion expansion of the earned income tax credit, which would roughly double the amount of money going into low-income families’ pockets. The main difference between Rep Khanna’s plan and the Silicon Valley utopianists’ version of basic income is that for now recipients would still have to have a job to qualify. Think of it more as a basic income warm-up.