Ownership

[Commentary] Today, faced with serious economic and political dysfunction, we are in need of another round of deep institutional renewal: a Third Republic. We need to coalesce around how best to create shared prosperity. This necessitates increasing productivity — the growth of which has been weak of late — and creating more well-paid jobs as well as finding better ways of redistributing the gains from new technologies and globalization in the fairer way.

Redesign antitrust for the era of big data: The role of large, dominant corporations in the U.S. economy has reached alarming proportions. The conventional commercial doctrine is that data are proprietary to the companies that collect them. This needs to change profoundly and completely since the playing field can only be leveled by making data available to all potential competitors. One way of achieving this is to ensure data belong to the people who generate the information, i.e., to individuals who drive cars, surf the internet, and buy goods. Enforcing this principle will ensure that data can be accessed by all, but also that individuals are compensated for the activities that generate information, at the same time as receiving a strong degree of privacy protection. The American Third Republic needs to clean up the influence industry and strengthen the institutional foundations of our democracy.

[Daron Acemoglu is a co-author with James A. Robinson of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. imon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management.]

[Commentary] Say you're a white supremacist who happens to hate Jewish people—or black people, Muslim people, Latino people, take your pick. Today, you can communicate those views online any number of ways without setting off many tech companies' anti-hate-speech alarm bells. And that's a problem.

As the tech industry walks the narrow path between free speech and hate speech, it allows people with extremist ideologies to promote brands and beliefs on their platforms, as long as the violent rhetoric is swapped out for dog whistles and obfuscating language. All the while, social media platforms allow these groups to amass and recruit followers under the guise of peaceful protest. The deadly riots in Charlottesville (VA) last weekend reveal they're anything but. Now it's up to those same tech companies to adjust their approaches to online hate—as companies like GoDaddy and Discord did on Aug 14, by shutting down hate groups on their services—or risk enabling more offline violence in the future.

MacArthur announced $5.7 million in grants to seven organizations to support professional nonfiction media makers from diverse backgrounds. A total of $2.25 million will be re-granted directly to independent film projects over three years, with remaining funds providing support for fellowships, workshops, training programs, and professional development.

The grants include support to both interactive and feature documentary projects through the Sundance Documentary Fund's New Frontier and Native Programs; enable black filmmakers to experiment with non-linear digital storytelling through Black Public Media's 360 Incubator + Lab; provide a new stream of grant funds specifically for filmmakers in the U.S. South through the Southern Documentary Fund; and equip social movements with nonfiction short films created by filmmakers representing and accountable to affected communities through the Docs in Action project at Working Films. These organizations join eight other nonfiction multimedia storytelling institutions already supported by MacArthur, including Firelight Media, American Documentary, ITVS, Kartemquin, Tribeca, AIR, Chicken & Egg, and the recently launched IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund. Over the last two years, the Foundation has been steadily growing its investment in the documentary community through new partnerships with organizations that can provide comprehensive support to a growing number of filmmakers and new media artists.

A startup that wants to build a mobile data network to fuel the Internet of Things is trying to convince regulators to let it use crucial airwaves. It's the second time the company, now called Ligado Networks, has fought this battle. Its previous iteration, backed by Phil Falcone and called LightSquared, hit a dead-end 5 years ago. Now it's back with a new name, lots of money and well-connected allies as it tries to strike gold with connected devices, which it says it can serve using a combination of satellite airwaves and traditional spectrum — creating a sort of hybrid network. If successful, Ligado could become an important Internet of Things player and produce a big payout for big-name investors like Centerbridge Partners, Fortress Investment Group and J.P. Morgan Chase (the industrial Internet of Things market could be worth $110 billion by 2020, according to estimates).

But Ligado's years-long corporate drama shows the risks involved in making bets on technologies that hinge on regulatory approval. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai hasn't tipped his hand, and there are no indications that a decision is imminent. "We have no update to provide that this point. We're studying the issue," he said recently, adding the agency is listening to all stakeholders. But Ligado is on the clock: it was reported earlier in 2017 that the company was working with bankers to explore a possible sale or find another investment.

House Commerce Committee Ranking Democratic Reps are demanding answers from the Federal Communications Commission about its “favorable treatment” of Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has been cashing in on a series of agency moves that are easing restrictions on its control of local television stations. In a 12-page letter sent to Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Aug 14, Reps Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ), Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Diana DeGette (D-CO) seized on multiple media reports detailing how the agency has been delivering on Sinclair’s deregulatory wish list. “We hope this letter will serve as an opportunity to respond to reports suggesting you have failed to exercise adequate independence as FCC Chairman and that may have resulted in the agency giving unusual and possibly preferential treatment to Sinclair," the three Democrats wrote. They asked Pai to come forward with more information about his office’s contacts with the White House and Sinclair on proceedings related to the broadcaster. They want any correspondence between Pai's office and Sinclair, including any lobbyists or lawyers, and whether Sinclair requested a short time frame.

[Commentary] Today, US technology companies adhere to a wide array of requirements from repressive governments that undermine Internet freedom and privacy. These demands violate international law, including the right to freedom of expression. But the enormous benefits of market access outweigh the relatively low costs associated with accepting repressive governments’ demands.

Undoubtedly, there are circumstances in which requests for information or access to accounts are reasonable, such as when investigating terrorism and major crimes. But the misuse and abuse of this power by authoritarian governments are routine. Unless the U.S. government stands in support of companies that refuse to comply with wrongful requirements, authoritarian regimes will feel emboldened to make ever-increasing and unreasonable demands. And while U.S. technology companies should be able to invest in Internet-restricting countries, if their choices directly facilitate the persecution of these governments’ political opponents, then they should bear the costs.

[Jared Genser is an international human rights lawyer based in Washington.]

America's largely romantic view of its giant tech companies — Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. —is turning abruptly into harsh scrutiny. Silicon Valley suddenly faces a much more intrusive hand from Washington, based on rapidly accumulating vulnerabilities. Today's conditions — populist rage in the country, combined with growing suspicion of corporate behemoths — closely mirror those that gave us Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting of oil and steel at the turn of the 1900s, and the progressive reforms that ushered in today's antitrust protections.

When I showed a draft of this item to my tech colleagues at Axios, they pointed out that many of the giants have been trying to recalibrate their Washington operations for the Trump era: Facebook hired a former top Senate aide to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Google, with long Democratic ties, did "an about-face" to woo Republicans after the election. Amazon hired a lobbyist with close Trump ties, Brian Ballard. A key executive at one of the targeted companies told me: "It's the attitude and the mood of the country, underscored by the election. It's hit in so many different directions, including the institutions of news and the institutions of higher learning."

It’s not easy being the first and only Fox News host in Silicon Valley. But Steve Hilton, a tech entrepreneur who was once chief adviser to former Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, added that role to his résumé in June. Now every week, Hilton flies from the home he shares with his high-profile tech executive wife, Rachel Whetstone, in Silicon Valley’s billionaire enclave of Atherton (CA) to Fox’s studios in Los Angeles to host “The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton.” Fox News markets the Sunday night program as exploring “the impact of the populist movement.” All of which makes life complicated for Hilton in overwhelmingly liberal Silicon Valley, where supporters of President Trump are nearly nonexistent and few think populism would improve their lives.

The day before President Trump’s inauguration, the top executive of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation’s largest owner of television stations, invited an important guest to the headquarters of the company’s Washington-area ABC affiliate. The trip was, in the parlance of the business world, a deal closer.

The invitation from David D. Smith, the chairman of Sinclair, went to Ajit Pai, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission who was about to be named the broadcast industry’s chief regulator. Smith wanted Commissioner Pai to ease up on efforts under President Barack Obama to crack down on media consolidation, which were threatening Sinclair’s ambitions to grow even bigger. Smith did not have to wait long. Within days of their meeting, Commissioner Pai was named chairman of the FCC. And during his first 10 days on the job, he relaxed a restriction on television stations’ sharing of advertising revenue and other resources — the exact topic that Pai discussed with Smith and one of his business partners, according to records examined by The New York Times. It was only the beginning. Since becoming chairman in January, Pai has undertaken a deregulatory blitz, enacting or proposing a wish list of fundamental policy changes advocated by Smith and his company. Hundreds of pages of emails and other documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal a rush of regulatory actions has been carefully aligned with Sinclair’s business objectives.

Months before social-media company Snap publicly disclosed slowing user growth, rival Facebook already knew.

Late in 2016, Facebook employees used an internal database of a sampling of mobile users’ activity to observe that usage of Snap’s flagship app, Snapchat, wasn’t growing as quickly as before. They saw that the shift occurred after Facebook’s Instagram app launched Stories, a near-replica of a Snapchat feature of the same name. Facebook’s early insight came thanks to its 2013 acquisition of Israeli mobile-analytics company Onavo, which distributes a data-security app that has been downloaded by millions of users. Data from Onavo’s app has been crucial to helping Facebook track rivals and scope out new product categories.