Research

The most liberal and conservative members of the 115th Congress have attracted more Facebook followers than moderates, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. In both legislative chambers, members’ ideology is a strong predictor of the number of people who follow them on Facebook. The most liberal and most conservative House members had a median of 14,361 followers as of July 25, compared with 9,017 followers for those in the middle of the ideological spectrum. The median number of followers for the Senate’s most liberal and conservative lawmakers was 78,360, while moderates had 32,626.

In “,” Bob Crandall conducts a series of event studies to explore how investors view the effects of the rules on the firms most likely to be affected. Crandall tracks daily equity prices to measure how investors believe the net neutrality regulations will affect Internet service providers (ISPs) and new and traditional media companies (edge companies, or ECs). Overall, Crandall’s analysis identified a limited market response to net neutrality, suggesting that investors did not expect net neutrality regulations to effect significant change in the market. In addition, the small changes in EC equities suggest that investors also believed that net neutrality regulations might not be the boon to EC growth and success that net neutrality proponents expect it to be. This result is particularly notable given the fervor that has developed around this issue. Both proponents and opponents of the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet order argue that regulations or lack thereof will have dire consequences. Crandall’s analysis suggests that the reality may be far more modest.

A new study of millennial public radio listeners suggests that stations should focus on delivering more local and on-demand content to bolster their appeal to the country’s largest generation.

The Millennial Research Project, commissioned by the Public Radio Program Directors Association, found that millennials don’t fit commonly cited stereotypes of being lazy and addicted to technology. It also suggests that their habits are changing how media content is consumed. A common theme from the interviews was that respondents “hold public radio in the highest regard and commonly compare it favorably with the most credible news outlets,” according to an executive summary. But some interviewees also voiced frustrations. Paul Jacobs, VP and GM of Jacobs Media, said that he noticed a shift in perception after the election. Some respondents said they’re “agitated that journalists on public radio are not going far enough, they’re not questioning hard enough, they’re letting people get away with saying things that might not be true,” Jacobs said. “These are perceptions, but they were deeply embedded.” Those respondents “still value public radio,” he said. But “they’re getting a little irritated” and ”they feel there are times when public radio is falling short,” he added.

The Public Lands Telecommunications Act (HR 2425) would make most fees collected by the federal government from firms with communications equipment on federal lands available to be spent, subject to appropriation, by federal land management agencies (Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Reclamation).

Those agencies could use those amounts to carry out certain administrative activities. Assuming appropriation of the amounts expected to be available under the bill, CBO estimates that implementing HR 2425 would cost $104 million over the 2018-2022 period. Enacting the bill would not affect direct spending or revenues; therefore, pay-as-you-go procedures do not apply. CBO estimates that enacting the bill would not increase net direct spending or on-budget deficits in any of the four consecutive 10-year periods beginning in 2028. HR 2425 contains no intergovernmental or private-sector mandates as defined in the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act and would impose no costs on state, local, or tribal governments.

We measure households’ willingness-to-pay for changes in key home broadband Internet connection features using data from two nationally administered, discrete choice surveys. Both surveys include price, data caps, and download and upload bandwidth, but only one includes latency. Together, these surveys allow us to measure tradeoffs between bandwidth and other connectivity features such as price and data caps, and perhaps most notably, provide the only empirical evidence to date of tradeoffs between bandwidth and latency. We find that households' valuation of bandwidth is highly concave, with relatively little added value beyond 100 Mbps.

For example, households are willing to pay about $2.34 per Mbps ($14 total) monthly to increase bandwidth from 4 Mbps to 10 Mbps, $1.57 per Mbps ($24) to increase from 10 to 25 Mbps, and only $0.02 per Mbps ($19) for an increase from 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps. We also find households willing to pay about $8.66 per month to reduce latency from levels obtained with satellite Internet service to levels more common to wired service. Household valuation of increased data caps is also concave as caps increase from 300 GB to 1000 GB, although consumers place a significant premium on unlimited service. Our findings provide the first relative valuation of bandwidth and latency and suggest that current U.S. policy may be overpenalizing latency relative to reductions in bandwidth and data caps. For example, we find that in its CAF Phase II Auction, the FCC is imposing a bidding penalty for latency that is about five times higher than what our WTP estimates suggest it should be relative to bandwidth offered.

The present work proposes the use of social media as a tool for better understanding the relationship between a journalists’ social network and the content they produce. Specifically, we ask: what is the relationship between the ideological leaning of a journalist’s social network on Twitter and the news content he or she produces? Using a novel dataset linking over 500,000 news articles produced by 1,000 journalists at 25 different news outlets, we show a modest correlation between the ideologies of who a journalist follows on Twitter and the content he or she produces. This research can provide the basis for greater self-reflection among media members about how they source their stories and how their own practice may be colored by their online networks. For researchers, the findings furnish a novel and important step in better understanding the construction of media stories and the mechanics of how ideology can play a role in shaping public information.

With few alternatives, many households are choosing to simply cancel the services they need. A 2015 study found that 15% of American adults had abandoned their paid cable or satellite television service. Meanwhile, only 67% of adults had broadband service at home, down from 70% from just two years prior. This case study aims to examine a community absent from telecom companies’ field of view. The subject of this study is a working-class couple in their late 50s....Americans have been vocal about their opposition to increasing TV and internet prices, sometimes opting to cancel their services altogether. As service providers start to recognize the threat of losing customers, they must acknowledge the extent to which their practices have harmed elderly, immigrant, and working-class households in particular. Most importantly, policymakers must take advantage of the role they may play in advocating for these communities through promoting competition among telecom companies.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has a theory. He believes that accessing the Internet through a smartphone is just as good as having high-speed Internet access in your house. In fact, he appears to believe this so strongly that he is looking into changing his agency's guidelines so that any place in the U.S. that has sufficient mobile coverage will be considered "connected," even if people living there have no option to receive broadband access in their homes. That theory forms the essence of a new Notice of Inquiry that the FCC has just put out.

The notice is a first step toward a potential policy change with respect to how the agency measures broadband deployment in the US. If Pai's idea somehow becomes the new official credo for the FCC, it would be a disaster for efforts to improve access to connectivity in America—a country that has, as we have noted several times in just the last year, a persistent, embarrassing digital divide. Mobile broadband access isn't the same as connectivity at home. The screens are smaller, data caps on mobile bandwidth are much tighter (and overages far more expensive), and speeds are slower—something the agency seems to acknowledge in the notice, when it suggests that "mobile broadband" be defined at 10Mbps of download speed and 1Mbps upstream. For the record, that's less than half the 25Mbps/3Mbps threshold necessary for a home connection to qualify as "broadband."

Many experts say lack of trust will not be a barrier to increased public reliance on the internet. Those who are hopeful that trust will grow expect technical and regulatory change will combat users’ concerns about security and privacy. Those who have doubts about progress say people are inured to risk, addicted to convenience and will not be offered alternatives to online interaction. Some expect the very nature of trust will change.

Even if members of Congress truly want to translate their current pique at institutional dysfunction into genuine deliberation, into a process of “regular order” where committees develop legislation, where would they begin? They’d need to build back a whole lot of lost capacity. Consider some responses from a new survey of senior staff from the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) titled “State of the Congress: Staff Perspectives on Institutional Capacity in the House and the Senate.”

Below are the percentages of senior staff who said they were “very satisfied” with their chamber’s performance in the following benchmarks:
“The chamber’s human resource support and infrastructure is adequate to support staffers’ official duties (e.g., training, professional development, benefits, etc.)”: 5%
“Members have adequate time and resources to understand, consider, and deliberate policy and legislation”: 6%
“The technological infrastructure is adequate to support Members’ official duties”: 6%
“The chamber has adequate capacity and support (staff, research, capability, infrastructure, etc.) to perform its role in democracy”: 11%

Congress has been de-investing in its institutional capacity for decades, and congressional staff earn absurdly low salaries, leading to high turnover and consistent staff inexperience.