Vox

As President Donald Trump continues to build out his administration, many of his officials are having trouble filling vacancies in their departments because of questions about the loyalty of the people they want to select — questions that include scrutiny of old social media posts. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is sufficiently frustrated about the situation that “people familiar with the matter” leaked about his frustration to Bloomberg: "The White House’s reasons for the holdups vary, but questions about loyalty to Trump played a role in at least two cases, some of the people said. Mnuchin’s pick for the Treasury’s top lawyer, Brent McIntosh, got an especially tough vetting by the White House personnel office after his Twitter feed was flagged as potentially critical of Trump." Apparently, candidates for jobs have been asked to hand over their Facebook passwords so that old posts can be scrutinized for criticism of Trump.

5G will genuinely be transformative — when it finally gets here. But the problem we’re seeing at Mobile World Congress, is that people are getting excited about the potential of 5G, but overlooking the immediate reality. Dan Bieler, a telecoms analyst with Forrester, said that hype surrounding the technology has “picked up noticeably compared with MWC 2016.” Journalists’ inboxes have been bombarded with news of 5G trials and prototype hardware from pretty much every big tech company around. Samsung, AT&T, Ericsson, Verizon, Nokia, Sprint, Qualcomm, have all had news to share, just to name a few. But while these firms are making genuine steps forward with 5G, some of the language might make you think the technology is right on the cusp of being widely available.

Facebook has a new plan to get more of Africa online: Fiber optic cables.

The company announced plans to lay nearly 500 miles of fiber cable in Uganda by the end of the year, infrastructure that Facebook believes will provide internet access for more than 3 million people. Facebook is not, however, providing its own wireless network. The company is partnering with Airtel and BCS to provide the actual internet service, and says the fiber will offer more support for “mobile operators’ base stations.” The company also says that it’s “open” to working with other network providers down the line. All three organizations are making some kind of financial commitment to the project, though it’s unclear who is paying for what. The move to dig up ground and lay physical fiber cables is the latest in a string of efforts Facebook has made over the past two years to get more people online. Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone in the world with its social network, but that’s hard to do if significant portions of the world don’t have internet access.

It seems that the pending AT&T–Time Warner merger continues to be a political hot potato, with different factions of government and industry continuing to argue over who will review it. Whether the merger ends up at the Department of Justice alone or at the DOJ and the Federal Communications Commission will make all the difference: DOJ policies make it likely to approve the merger, whereas the FCC, even with its corporation-friendly chairman, will have to give it a more rigorous review that could kill the deal or at least place some restrictions on it.

As you may remember, back in the strange world of 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump expressed very clear opposition to the proposed merger, saying it was “a deal we will not approve.” That seems clear cut, except it’s Trump, so... maybe not. And while he can pressure the FCC to act one way or another, the commission is technically independent and out of his complete control. News Corporation / 21st Century Fox overlord Rupert Murdoch “now regularly lobbies Trump against AT&T and Time Warner's tie-up,” trying to have him get it under the FCC’s review so that the commission can block it. The FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, Mignon Clyburn, is also trying to get some say over the merger.

[Commentary] Social media scholars talk a lot about “context collapse,” the term that describes what happens when, on a platform like Facebook, users find that they can’t communicate freely with their friends while their relatives are reading the same posts, or with their relatives while the employers get to read, too, etc. The mix of audiences (on Facebook especially) has led to miscommunications, conflicts and, increasingly, self-censorship. Keeping up with the news is important.

Communicating with friends and family is important, too. But maybe it’s time to separate the “news” from the newsfeed again — not because either of them is unnecessary or frivolous, but because they deserve different kinds of attention. Blended together, they now blur into a whole less meaningful than its parts.

[Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University.]

[Commentary] The Telecommunications Act of 1996 turns 21. Signed into law by President Bill Clinton on Feb. 8, 1996, it was the first major revision of telecommunications regulation since the passage of the original Communications Act of 1934, which established the Federal Communications Commission and gave it jurisdiction over broadcasting and telephony.

Of course, two decades is a long time in the world of technology, and telecom is vastly different today than it was then. In 1996, just 16 percent of Americans had mobile phones, which only supported voice communications, with simple text messaging just beginning to appear. Apple’s iPhone, which kicked off the smartphone era in 2007, was still a decade away. There are a number of other big challenges that will require attention by policymakers in the immediate future. A new report from the Aspen Institute (which I authored), “Setting the Communications Policy Agenda for the New Administration,” based on a meeting of industry stakeholders, public interest advocates and other experts held this past summer, identifies several top priorities:

• Supporting the transition to 5G
• Providing more spectrum for mobile broadband
• Supporting innovation and modernization of telecom
• Expanding access
• Improving cyber security

[Richard Adler is a noted futurist and distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto (CA)]

In January, we reached out to BuzzFeed in the wake of the dossier to find out whether the company felt it would be putting itself at risk — legal and financial — by publishing such materials. Recently, Aleksef Gubarev, the Russian-born chief executive of tech firm XBT, sued BuzzFeed for defamation.

Though Gubarev’s lawyer insists that his client is in no way tied to the president’s administration and the suit is not political, it does pose a major question for BuzzFeed: What are the potential repercussions of its aggressive approach to journalism, which pushes beyond some of its more traditional competitors? And in the Trump era, how should it balance the risk and reward of hard-hitting journalism at a company that makes most of its money on light-hearted entertainment?

[Commentary] Never before have people been able to self-organize and multiply for offline action almost instantly and with such little financial cost and planning effort. This awesome power — facilitated by free, ubiquitous and mobile tools for many-to-many communication — creates new possibilities for the grassroots to drive electoral and legislative outcomes, whether by rejecting establishment candidates or bringing people out into the streets to protest government action. We’re witnessing an important reminder that the tools we build in Silicon Valley can meaningfully shift sources and forms of political power. And as with all technologies, whether it is leveraged for good or bad is ultimately up to those who use it.

As an emerging sector, civic tech is beginning to improve the machinery of democracy even if our scale hasn’t yet transformed ballot box outcomes in the way that the Internet and iPhones have transformed the speed and scale of protests. Perhaps the best place for these new tools of democracy to focus is at the state and local level, where a new battleground is forming and where voter turnout is especially low.

[Mahan is CEO of Brigade, a startup he co-founded with Sean Parker in 2014 to reenergize public participation in democracy.]

While the tech industry as a whole started speaking out against President Donald Trump’s travel ban over the weekend, one segment has been noticeably silent: The big telecommunication firms.

There hasn’t been a peep from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile, and there could be a clear reason why. Each of those firms really wants big things from the Trump administration and doesn’t want to risk angering the new president. Sprint and T-Mobile are seen as highly likely to seek approval for some sort of merger, while AT&T is in the midst of trying to buy Time Warner. Verizon, which has already made several deals, is seen as a potential buyer of a cable company or other major player that would require regulatory approval. All four would also like to see the Federal Communications Commission pull back on overall regulation, including the most aggressive parts of net neutrality.

At some point during the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations, the White House comments phone line, 202-456-1111, was shut down. If you call the line Jan 27, you’ll hear the following message directing you to comment via one of two alternate channels: "The comment line is currently closed, but your comment is important to the president, and we urge you to send us a message at whitehouse.gov/comment or send us a message through Facebook Messenger."

The shutdown of the phone line has sparked criticism that the move reflects the Trump administration’s “diminishing accountability.” But the phone line was actually closed during the final weeks of the Obama administration, and it seems possible that it’s a temporary victim of the Trump administration’s larger transition struggles: White House press assistant Giovanna Coia said that White House staff is “still learning how to work our computers.” What’s more notable at present is that the Facebook Messenger option callers are presented with after dialing the closed phone line doesn’t actually seem to exist.