Ownership

William Barr’s nomination as President Doanld Trump’s attorney general is in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which conducted a confirmation hearing Jan 15. Below are some key communications policy takeaways:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has filed the opening brief in its challenge to the Federal Communications Commission's conditions on the 2016 Charter-Time Warner Cable (Bright House) merger.

The question we face in the digital age is not how to have it all, but how to maintain valuable activity at a societal price on which we can agree. Just as we have made laws about tolerable levels of waste and pollution, we can make rules, establish norms, and set expectations for technology.  Perhaps the online world will be less instantaneous, convenient, and entertaining. There could be fewer cheap services. We might begin to add friction to some transactions rather than relentlessly subtracting it. But these constraints would not destroy innovation.

Attorney General nominee William Barr, a former board member of Time Warner, has agreed to recuse himself from the Justice Department's challenge to the AT&T-Time Warner merger. Currently, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit is considering DOJ's appeal of a district court decision that the merger did not violate antitrust laws. Barr made the promise to Seante Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Ranking Member Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

For several years it has made sense, in some quarters, to lump together the tech giants — chiefly Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, sometimes also including Netflix or Microsoft. But talking about "big tech" is beginning to offer diminishing returns. Many of these companies banded together in 2012 for lobbying purposes as the Internet Association, and they have long shared a set of common regulatory interests in managing their platforms and services with little government oversight. But as privacy regulation of some kind looks more inevitable, their interests are more likely to diverge.

The Minnesota Department of Commerce filed an investigative report on Frontier Communications with the Minnesota Public Utilities Committee. The report says it found Frontier has failed to provide adequate, reliable phone and internet service to its Minnesota customers. The report, which the Connecticut-based company disputed, recommends Frontier be required to refund or credit customers for service outages and unauthorized charges, add staffing to improve customer service and increase investments in infrastructure and equipment.

Tech giants are facing a barrage of tough, negative coverage, with some of the same dynamics that drive saturation coverage of President Donald Trump. Many major news organizations — including The Washington Post, The Atlantic and CNN — are staffing up for greatly expanded tech coverage because: 1) Tech is the new politics. 2) This is partly in reaction to the techlash and partly in preparation for a post-Trump world, when websites can't count on politics to drive massive year-round traffic.

Big Tech is violating the Sherman Act of 1890. Why, then, isn't anything being done about Big Tech violating the Sherman Act? In recent decades, corporate defendants have persuaded judges to narrow the law, by requiring, for instance, evidence of price increases to prove a case. But consumers pay for tech platforms' services with data, not dollars. The Sherman Act makes no mention of prices, and low prices should not be the only goal. Competition should be the goal.

A new lawsuit filed against Comcast details an extensive list of lies the cable company allegedly told customers in order to hide the full cost of service. Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson sued Comcast in Hennepin County District Court on Dec 21, seeking refunds for all customers who were harmed by Comcast's alleged violations of the state's Prevention of Consumer Fraud Act and Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

Here are 10 questions about broadband we hope to find answers to in 2019: