Ownership

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is setting a record pace for deregulating the communications industries. Believe it or not, things are about to get worse in Nov. Starting with the FCC’s open meeting on Nov 16, the agency is poised to approve or propose no fewer than four decisions that will deregulate consolidated industries, remove consumer protections, and widen the digital divide:

My country, Serbia, has become an unwilling laboratory for Facebook’s experiments on user behavior — and the independent, nonprofit investigative journalism organization where I am the editor in chief is one of the unfortunate lab rats. Facebook allowed us to bypass mainstream channels and bring our stories to hundreds of thousands of readers. But now, even as the social network claims to be cracking down on “fake news,” it is on the verge of ruining us. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg’s arbitrary experiments are so dangerous.

Sens Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Tom Udall (D-NM), and 13 of their Senate colleagues are requesting the inspector general of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) open an investigation into the objectivity and impartiality of the FCC’s review of the proposed merger of Sinclair Broadcasting and Tribune Media.

Sinclair/Tribune deal friends and foes clashed on Capitol Hill Nov 15 at a debate and panel session hosted by the Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law & Policy. The forum did not break a lot of new ground, but there was some scorched earth, particularly when the issue of shared services and joint sales agreements came up.

[Commentatry] We exist in a time when technological capabilities and economic incentives have combined to attack truth and weaken trust. It is not an act of pre-planned perdition. Unchecked, however, it will have the same effect. The broader question is how to deal with the exploitation of the Web as a vehicle for de-democratizing communities fueled by fact-free untruth? I would argue that it was software algorithms that put us in this situation, and it is software algorithms that can get us out of it.

A big year of wins for the broadcasting industry is about to get even bigger with a pair of votes at the Federal Communications Commission on Nov 16. One proposal would lift rules that say one company can't own a television station and a newspaper in the same market and a similar rule for owning both radio and television stations in a market. It would also allow the FCC to waive a prohibition against owning two of the top television stations in a market on a case-by-case basis.

We embarked on our research with a relatively simple yet ambitious research question: How are small-market newspapers responding to digital disruption? Key Findings:

As AT&T prepares to fight for its merger with Time Warner if necessary, it has the Communications Workers of America solidly in its corner, and against any CNN-prompted spin-off demands by the Justice Department. The union said Nov 14 that is it fully supportive of the deal. “This merger is about maintaining and creating good U.S. jobs and developing new and innovative ways to deliver technology and content,” said CWA President Chris Shelton.

The current media ownership rules limit any one entity from owning too many of the newspaper, radio, and/or television entities within a local market, in order to ensure viewpoint diversity. These rules are under attack. Broadcasters are spectrum licensees, and without some strong public interest requirements on spectrum licensees, we are at risk of losing local, community-centric information.

AT&T is promising to spend an additional billion dollars in 2018 if Congress slashes its tax bill for the next 10 years or more, and the company isn’t making any promises beyond that. This extra billion in investment would cost the rest of us at least $50 billion over the next decade. That’s a literal steal for AT&T and its shareholders. Put another way: For the $50 billion this corporate tax break would cost us for AT&T alone, the government could pay to have fiber-to-the-home built to every single AT&T-covered household that doesn’t yet have it.