Policymakers

The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) Board of Directors announced the recipients of NATOA’s 2017 Community Broadband Awards. Since 2007, NATOA has been recognizing exceptional leaders and innovative programs that champion community interests in broadband deployment and adoption in local communities nationwide. Recipients will receive their awards at NATOA’s 37th Annual Conference, to be held in Seattle (WA) from September 11 – 14 at the Grand Hyatt Seattle.

The 2017 Community Broadband Award recipients are:
Community Broadband Hero of the Year: Danna MacKenzie, Executive Director, State of Minnesota Office of Broadband Development
Community Broadband Project of the Year: Longmont Power & Communications, Longmont, CO
Community Broadband Strategic Plan of the Year: Seattle, WA “Strategic Plan for Facilitating Equitable Access to Wireless Broadband”
Community Broadband Digital Equity Project of the Year: Seattle, WA “Technology Matching Fund”
Community Broadband Innovative Partnership of the Year: Garrett County, MD & Declaration Networks Group, Inc.

Actions by President Trump and his administration have created a historic ethics crisis, the departing head of the Office of Government Ethics said. He called for major changes in federal law to expand the power and reach of the oversight office and combat the threat. Walter M. Shaub Jr., who is resigning as the federal government’s top ethics watchdog on July 18, said the Trump administration had flouted or directly challenged long-accepted norms in a way that threatened to undermine the United States’ ethical standards, which have been admired around the world.

“It’s hard for the United States to pursue international anticorruption and ethics initiatives when we’re not even keeping our own side of the street clean. It affects our credibility,” Shaub said in a two-hour interview this past weekend — a weekend Mr. Trump let the world know he was spending at a family-owned golf club that was being paid to host the U.S. Women’s Open tournament. “I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point.” Shaub called for nearly a dozen legal changes to strengthen the federal ethics system: changes that, in many cases, he had not considered necessary before Mr. Trump’s election. Every other president since the 1970s, Republican or Democrat, worked closely with the ethics office, he said.

Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA) is starting a new caucus for members who have sworn off contributions from political action committees (PACs) or lobbyists.

The caucus, called the NO PAC Caucus, is “designed to encourage members of Congress to voluntarily not accept PAC money and to push for legislation that ultimately bans PAC money from Congress,” Rep Khanna said. The caucus has just two other members so far — Reps. Beto O'Rourke (D-TX) and Jared Polis (D-CO) — but Rep Khanna is recruiting Republicans and Democrats, including Reps. Phil Roe (R-TN), Francis Rooney (R-FL) and John Sarbanes (D-MD), to give the caucus bipartisan bona fides. Both President Donald Trump and Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) campaigned on reducing the influence of special interests in Washington, Rep Khanna noted. “I think this is bipartisan,” he said.

Top House Commerce Committee Democrats rebuked their GOP colleagues for failing to hold any oversight hearings of the Federal Communications Commission amid the FCC's efforts to strike network neutrality regulations.

Ranking Member Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) and Rep Mike Doyle (D-PA), the top Democrat on the technology subcommittee, suggested in a letter that House Republicans are trying to “shield the FCC from having to explain its push to install such unpopular policies,” like the repeal of net neutrality rules. “This Committee has an obligation to perform oversight on behalf of the American people and ensure that the American people understand the consequences of the FCC’s actions,” they wrote in the letter to full Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) and Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has a reputation as a nice guy who remembers co-workers’ birthdays and their children’s names. After he was targeted by trolls on Twitter, he took it in good humor, participating in a video where he read and responded to “mean tweets”. This is the man who could destroy the open internet.

Chairman Pai argues that if the US introduced strong net neutrality protections, authoritarian states would have an excuse to clamp down on online freedoms – in spite of the fact that authoritarian states don’t need an excuse to do so. He also says that legislation should only be applied if there’s a market failure. However, as Pai has said, “nothing is broken” and the rules were established on “hypothetical harms and hysterical prophecies of doom”.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that he has appointed Tina Pelkey as Press Secretary for the Chairman. Pelkey will report to the director of the FCC’s Office of Media Relations. Pelkey most recently served as senior vice president at Black Rock Group, focusing on strategic communications and public affairs. She previously worked in Brussels, Belgium, for Weber Shandwick, a global public relations firm. Prior to that, she worked at DCI Group and served as national press secretary for Senator John Cornyn of Texas. Pelkey is a native of Lenexa (KS) and a graduate of the University of Kansas with degrees in journalism and political science.

[Commentary] Like some contrived, rigged Russian voting block, the new proposed Republican Commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has been selected to make sure that the current direction set by Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Michael O’Reilly will always end up in a vote that almost always benefits the phone and cable companies over the public interest.

[W]e need a Republican that is going to stand up for Republican values of ‘less government’, states’ rights and competition because it was a Republican-based Congress in 1996, under President Bill Clinton, that voted to bring the Telecom Act into existence, to open the monopoly “ILEC” phone networks so that customers could choose their own ISP, cable, phone broadband providers. In short, Brendan Carr should not be appointed and some Republican who will work for the public and wants a free market and competition, and doesn’t believe in government corporate financial assistance, should be made commissioner instead.

[Bruce Kushnick is the executive director of New Networks Institute]

President Donald Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations. But the effort — a signature theme in Trump’s populist campaign for the White House — is being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts.

Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But ProPublica and The New York Times identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Some appointees are reviewing rules their previous employers sought to weaken or kill, and at least two may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone. The appointees include lawyers who have represented businesses in cases against government regulators, staff members of political dark money groups, employees of industry-funded organizations opposed to environmental rules and at least three people who were registered to lobby the agencies they now work for.

With a full set of commissioners and a chief economist named, the Federal Communications Commission is set to undo network neutrality rules put in place during the Obama administration, but thorny issues around industry consolidation remain.

Former FCC commissioners, antitrust scholars, and at least one GOP senator share competition-related concerns about discarding net neutrality — the idea that internet service providers, who perform a gatekeeping function, should treat all data online equally, with no blocking, throttling, or unreasonable discrimination of legal content. On July 5, FCC Chairman Aji Pai announced that Jerry Ellig, a senior research fellow at George Mason University with a focus on competition policy, will lead economic analysis for rule-makings. President Donald Trump nominated Brendan Carr to the FCC for a Republican-designated seat, along with former FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel for a Democratic opening. That will make for a 3-2 Republican majority, up from the current 2-1 edge, with Pai and GOP-appointed Commissioner Michael O’Rielly often on opposite sides of votes with Democrat Mignon Clyburn.

The director of the independent Office of Government Ethics, who has been the federal government’s most persistent critic of the Trump Administration’s approach to ethics, announced that he is resigning nearly six months before his term is scheduled to end. Walter M. Shaub Jr. repeatedly challenged the Trump administration, publicly urging President Trump to fully divest from his business empire and chastising a senior Trump adviser for violating ethics rules. His outspokenness drew the ire of administration officials and earned him near-cult status among Trump’s opponents. Fans started a Facebook page in his honor, and his name has occasionally appeared on posters at anti-Trump protests. Shaub made no reference to those clashes in a resignation letter he posted Thursday indicating he will step down July 19. Instead, he praised the work of federal ethics officials, pointedly noting their commitment to “protecting the principle that public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws, and ethical principles above private gain.” In an interview, Shaub said he was not leaving under pressure, adding that no one in the White House or the administration pushed him to leave. But the ethics chief said he felt that he had reached the limit of what he could achieve in this administration, within the current ethics framework.