Ownership

T-Mobile says it’ll launch a 5G home internet service with fast speeds, easy installation, and low prices that will reach half of all US homes within five years and meaningfully shake up the woefully anti-competitive cable industry. There’s just one catch: T-Mobile says this only comes true if its Sprint merger is approved. In a blog post and Federal Communications Commission filing, T-Mobile outlines in the most detail yet what its 5G home internet service will look like.

Sprint and T-Mobile officials have convinced White House economic and national security policymakers to approve their proposed merger on the grounds that the new company will be a formidable competitor for foreign entities, including those in China, in the ongoing battle to build a fifth-generation wireless network. Despite Sprint and T-Mobile’s successful efforts lobbying those in the executive branch, there’s no guarantee the deal will receive approval from two key regulators that are necessary for the merger to close: The Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice.

State antitrust enforcers are expressing deep concerns that T-Mobile's proposed takeover of Sprint could raise prices for consumers, signaling they might seek to thwart the deal. Some state attorneys general who are investigating the $26 billion transaction took the unusual step this week of publicly voicing worries that the combination could harm competition, offering insight for the first time into how they view the tie-up.

The connective tissue that unites Louis Brandeis’s view of legislative action, the creation and enforcement of antitrust law, and the use of sectoral regulation is the willingness to experiment. We are well-acquainted with Brandeis’s invocation of the “laboratories of the states” but his reliance on experimentation, what we might today call innovation, runs much deeper than that well-known aphorism.

A Q&A Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidentional nomination.

Rep Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is leading a group of progressive Democratic Representatives in calling on regulators to block the proposed $26 billion merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, arguing that the deal will hurt workers and the low-income consumers who rely on the two telecommunications giants' affordable offerings. Rep Tlaib and 36 Democratic Reps are sending letters to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim.

Honesty with the Federal Communications Commission is a foundational requirement for a broadcast licensee. Indeed, providing false statements to the FCC has been a basis for license revocation since the inception of the Communications Act in 1934. But the dissolution of the Sinclair/Tribune consolidation is a circumstance that would render a hearing at this time in the context of this proceeding an academic exercise. That is not to say that Sinclair’s alleged misconduct is nullified or excused by the cancellation of its proposed deal with Tribune.

An investigation reveals in detail how Tea-Party connected conservative activists used the appearance of local newspapers to promote messages paid for or supported by outside or undisclosed interests. Steve Gill, for example, is the political editor of the Tennessee Star, but he also owns a media consulting company that at least one candidate and one Political Action Committee (PAC) paid before receiving positive coverage in the Tennessee Star. Several Star writers have in the past or currently work for PACs or political campaigns that they write about, without disclosing that fact.

On Feb 25, 2019, Free Press released Beyond Fixing Facebook. The authors, Timothy Karr and Craig Aaron, look beyond Facebook to address a deeper problem infecting the entire "attention economy": the abuse of targeted advertising.

President Donald Trump’s technology adviser Abigail Slater suggested that Congress should consider changes to a little-known provision of the Communications Decency Act called Section 230. Section 230 has a simple, sensible goal: to free internet companies from the responsibilities of traditional publishers.