Lobbying

In our working paper, we discuss how civil rights and minority-focused advocacy groups have engaged – or circumvented – Internet policy issues to better serve the communication and technology needs of their underrepresented constituents. In addition, in accordance with critical race theorists (e.g.

I am thrilled to return to TPRC to present the winners of the Charles Benton Early Career Scholar Award. Deeply embedded in the DNA of the Benton Foundation are three key values: access, equity, and diversity. Today we celebrate a paper that, we feel, makes an important contribution to communications and media policy literature. We know that communities of color face complex challenges achieving equitable outcomes. This paper delves into why. There are a couple of takeaways here that I’d like to highlight.

“I write as a football fan,” read the letter to the Federal Communications Commission, “to strongly urge you to maintain the FCC’s current broadcast rules.” There may have been thousands of bogus, identically worded letters generated on the National Football League’s behalf, posted in 2014 to the FCC’s website from scores of “fans." These supposed fans opposed an FCC move to repeal the sports blackout rule, a rule that banned cable and satellite providers from showing home games that weren’t sold out when the NFL blocked local TV broadcasts of those games. The decades-old blackout rule aime

Frontier Communications is asking employees for help in its fight against state network neutrality rules in CA, claiming that the rules will give "free" Internet to major Web companies while raising costs for consumers. The Internet service provider urged employees to submit a form letter asking Gov Jerry Brown (D-CA) to veto the net neutrality bill that was recently approved by the state legislature. Frontier sent an email to employees and set up an online form for them to send the form letter to Gov Brown.

It's not every day that big telco lobbyists email me their internal documents about how they're going to try to shift all the negative press about themselves and try to flip it onto internet companies. But it did happen. A USTelecom executive emailed a 12-page document of talking points, asking the recipients to "review the document for accuracy and other thoughts" in order to help USTelecom President Jonathan Spalter for when he goes on C-SPAN.

Lobbying groups and trade associations, including several representing the tech industry, are pushing for a litany of deep changes to California's new data protection law that they say would make the law easier to implement before it goes into effect in January 2020. But privacy advocates worry that pressure from powerful businesses could end up gutting the law completely. "This is their job: to try to make this thing absolutely meaningless.

Chairman Pai’s relationship with Sinclair needed to be investigated in light of Sinclair’s ties to the President and the Chairman’s abysmal responses to Congressional Democrats’ numerous oversight letters.  It should not take an IG investigation to get answers to basic questions regarding independence and integrity. The IG report provides the first detailed responses to Congress’ questions.

In response to requests from Congress made on November 13 and November 15. 20! 7, the Federal Communications Commission Oflice of Inspector General (OlG) conducted an investigation into whether FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Chairman Pai "has taken actions to improperly benefit Sinclair Broadcast Group and "is executing his leadership of the FCC free from influences that compromise his objectivity and impartiality," especially with regard to the proposed merger of Sinclair and Tribune Media." 

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai issued the following statement regarding the Office of Inspector General’s independent report, which found no evidence or suggestion of impropriety, unscrupulous behavior, or favoritism towards Sinclair. Moreover, the Office of the Inspector General found no lack of impartiality related to the proposed Sinclair-Tribune Merger:

In recent months, apparently, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft and others have aggressively lobbied officials in the Trump administration and elsewhere to start outlining a federal privacy law. The law would have a dual purpose, they said: It would overrule the California law and instead put into place a kinder set of rules that would give the companies wide leeway over how personal digital information was handled. The efforts could set up a big fight with consumer and privacy groups.