Ownership

The day after President Donald Trump ordered a ban on travelers from seven majority Muslim countries, Mamoon Hamid was rallying a response from Silicon Valley. The Pakistan-born venture capitalist held a private dinner that night in San Francisco (CA), where he pitched other investors, entrepreneurs and technology executives on a coalition that could challenge the Trump administration’s most controversial policies in court.

The goal was to solicit funding for the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. The group offers a legal swat team of sorts “to protect people at a moment of great instability and peril,” said Hamid, the chairman. He had been planning the white-linen event with attendees from Facebook Inc., Google and other tech companies for months, but the immigration ban offered newfound urgency.

The Federal Communications Commission will vote in Nov to eliminate a decades-old rule designed to preserve media diversity in local markets, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Oct 25. The move is aimed at supporting economically struggling media outlets in an age of digital consumption. But critics say it will lead to greater media consolidation and the loss of independent voices.

The regulations, passed in 1975, prevent any single company from owning both a full-power TV station in a given market and a daily newspaper at the same time. “The marketplace is nothing like it was in 1975,” Chairman Pai told House Communications Subcommittee members at a hearing, arguing that the restriction on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership was outdated. “The FCC's rules still presume the market is defined by pulp and rabbit ears.” The FCC vote, expected Nov 16, could also eliminate a rule that prevents TV stations in the same market from merging if the outcome leads to fewer than eight independent stations operating in that market. “If the federal government has no business intervening in news, then we must stop the government from intervening in the news business,” he said.

Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel of the Federal Communications Commission told Congress that the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai has been taking actions that appear to favor Sinclair Broadcasting, and suggested that needs investigating.

Commissioner Rosenworcel was asked to weigh in during an FCC oversight hearing in the House Communications Subcommittee Oct 25, and she did not hesitate. She said she was concerned that the FCC's recent policy decisions, from restoring the UHF discount to "foisting" on American households a new broadcast standard (ATSC 3.0) for which Sinclair has patents, seemed to serve Sinclair's business plans. "I think it has reached a point where all our media policy decisions seem to be custom built for this one company, and I think it merits investigation," she said. "That is a pretty strong statement," responded Rep Jerry McNerney (D-CA), who clearly shared her concern.

Ajit Pai’s disastrous proposal is tailor-made for Sinclair and other giant broadcast chains that push often slanted or cookie-cutter content over the public airwaves. He’s fulfilling a longstanding industry wish list and ignoring how decades of runaway media consolidation have significantly harmed local news and independent voices.

The Federal Communications Commission has routinely failed — and been repeatedly scolded by the courts for doing so — to consider how gutting these rules will impact already abysmally low levels of broadcast ownership by women and people of color. We need to strengthen local voices and increase viewpoint diversity, not surrender our airwaves to an ever-smaller group of giant conglomerates. Chairman Pai is clearly committed to doing the bidding of companies like Sinclair and clearing any obstacles to their voracious expansion. But his attempt will be met with fierce opposition at the Commission and in the courts.

Democratic Sens have called on Univision and Verizon (with an assist from the Federal Communications Commission) to settle their retransmission consent impasse, which has kept Univision nets off Verizon's FiOS pay-TV and mobile wireless platforms since Oct 16.

In a letter to Verizon and Univision CEO's Lowell McAdam and Randy Falco, respectively, as well as to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, the senators expressed their concern with the ongoing dispute, pointing to the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico and the importance of Spanish-language news. They said they were not weighing in on who was right or wrong in the dispute, saying they recognized they were "contractual discussions between private parties," But they asked the FCC to bring those parties together--there is precedent for that--so the negotiations can conclude and the impasse be resolved. They said consumers were being unfairly disadvantaged. Signing on to the letter were Sens Ed Markey (D-MA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bob Casey (D-PA), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Ben Cardin (D-MD).

The tech giants are too big. They’re getting bigger. We can stop them. But in all likelihood, we won’t.

The history of American business is one of repeated cycles of unfettered, sometimes catastrophic growth followed by periods of reflection and regulation. In previous eras of suffocating corporate dominance over our lives — when industrialists gained an economic stranglehold through railroads and vast oil and steel concerns, or when rampant financial speculation sent the nation into economic paroxysms — Americans turned to their government for a fix. For nearly two decades, under Republican and Democratic presidents, most tech giants have been spared from much legislation, regulation and indeed much government scrutiny of any kind.

The Content Creators Coalition (c3), which advocates on behalf of musicians, is launching an ad campaign against YouTube and its parent company Google, accusing them of exploiting artists. The group unveiled a pair of video ads on Oct 25 that call out YouTube for undermining musicians’ control over their content and cutting into their ad revenue streams.

“Google’s YouTube has shortchanged artists while earning billions of dollars off our music,” said Melvin Gibbs, an accomplished bassist and the president of c3. “Artists know YouTube can do better. So, rather than hiding behind outdated laws, YouTube and Google should work to give artists more control over our music and pay music creators fairly when our songs are played on their platform.” The group wants Congress to update the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which it believes places too much of a burden on content creators to police the internet for copyright infringements while letting internet platforms off the hook.

In Fort Collins (CO)—a town of about 150,000 north of Denver—Big Telecom has contributed more than $200,000 to a campaign opposing a ballot measure to simply consider a city-run broadband network. It's the latest example of how far Big Telecom is willing to go to prevent communities from building their own internet and competing with the status quo.

"It's been wild," said Glen Akins, a Fort Collins advocate for municipal broadband. "We're overwhelmed by the amount of money the opposition is spending." When the residents of Fort Collins vote on November 7 they'll have a couple of ballot measures to consider, including one on city-run internet. If that measure is approved, Fort Collins will be able to change the city charter to allow it to run a municipal broadband utility. This doesn't mean it will happen for sure, and the city still hasn't finalized what that utility would look like, but it opens the door to further discussions.

Apparently, Bill O'Reilly, the former Fox News anchor, has been negotiating for a position with the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation's largest television-station owner.

Sinclair, known for its conservative commentary, is continuing with the talks despite the sexual harassment cases that cost O'Reilly his job at Fox earlier this year, the sources said. Last week, The New York Times reported that O’Reilly settled a $32 million sex harassment claim against him by a former legal analyst, Lis Wiehl. Apparently, the news does not appear to have sidelined the talks. "They took a pause but it didn't really change anything for them," one of the sources said. O’Reilly has said the Times article was designed to hurt him in the marketplace. He told The Times that the report was “politically and financially motivated.”

Facebook has been criticised for the worrying impact on democracy of its “downright Orwellian” decision to run an experiment seeing professional media removed from the main news feed in six countries. The experiment, which began 19 Oct and is still ongoing, involves limiting the core element of Facebook’s social network to only personal posts and paid adverts. So-called public posts, such as those from media organisation Facebook pages, are being moved to a separate “explore” feed timeline. As a result, media organisations in the six countries containing 1% of the world’s population – Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia, Serbia and Slovakia – have had one of their most important publishing platforms removed overnight.

“The Facebook explore tab killed 66% of our traffic. Just destroyed it … years of really hard work were just swept away,” says Dina Fernandez, a journalist and member of the editorial board at Guatemalan news site Soy502. “It has been catastrophic, and I am very, very worried.” For those who rely on Facebook to campaign politically, share breaking news, or keep up to date with the world, that might be a concerning thought. “I’m worried about the impact of Facebook on democracy,” said Fernandez. “One company in particular has a gigantic control on the flow of information worldwide. This alone should be worrisome. It’s downright Orwellian.”