Ownership

The New Yorker recently published a piece about the work of the American Accountability Foundation (A.A.F.) — a dark-money group aiming to sabotage the Biden administration’s agenda by torpedoing the confirmation of nominees to fill critical roles across the government. The group brags about having stopped the confirmation of nominees like Saule Omarova, Biden’s pick to be comptroller of the currency, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, who the pr

All of the big broadband providers brag to the public about how much they spend on their networks. Even at the local level, it’s rare to ask a big broadband provider to a local government meeting where they don’t open the conversation by reminding local politicians how much money they have spent in a given town or county. The story is often just the opposite when problems with networks are pointed out, and communities ask the broadband providers to beef up networks and improve service.

In just the last few years, Europe has seen a landmark law for online privacy take effect, approved sweeping regulations to curb the dominance of the tech giants and is nearing a deal on new legislation to protect its citizens from harmful online content. For those keeping score, that’s Europe: three.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is requesting comments on competition in the mobile application ecosystem.

Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep Mondaire Jones (D-NY) introduced bicameral legislation to help stomp out rampant industry consolidation that allows companies to raise consumer prices and mistreat workers. The Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act would ban the biggest, most anticompetitive mergers and give the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) the teeth to reject deals in the first instance without court orders and to break up harmful mergers. The bill would:

The internet has failed to nourish our news and information diet the way we hoped it would twenty years ago. The norm is major platforms poaching the news they distribute directly from newspaper and television newsrooms while failing to make any meaningful investments in journalism despite generating billions of dollars in advertising revenue that traditional media once depended upon. Solutions have been suggested; one option is vigorous anti-trust to break up monopolies.

Fiber-optic cable, which carries 95 percent of the world’s international internet traffic, links up pretty much all of the world’s data centers, those vast server warehouses where the computing happens that transforms all those 1s and 0s into our experience of the internet. Where those fiber-optic connections link up countries across the oceans, they consist almost entirely of cables running underwater—some 1.3 million kilometers (or more than 800,000 miles) of bundled glass threads that make up the actual, physical international internet.

Five regional internet service providers will be unified under the new name Astound Broadband starting January 12. Digital West, EnTouch, Grande, RCN and Wave when combined will boast coverage in eight of the top 10 metro areas across the country and 10 different states.  Astound Broadband covers some of the biggest cities in the US, including Austin (TX), Boston (MA), Chicago (IL), New York (NY), and San Francisco (CA) among others. While Astound Broadband will be leading the charge, the regional brands will still be included in this evolution of the company.

As technology's role in American life increases, people on both sides of today's political divide have grown wary of its influence. A majority of respondents to a survey by Axios and the Illinois Institute of Technology expressed concern about the use of artificial intelligence, the reach of algorithms, the state of their online privacy, the size of tech firms and dependence on smartphones. Three-quarters of those polled said tech companies are too big (80 percent of liberals and 83 percent of conservatives).