Wired

For more broadband choice, encourage your elected officials to make these three things happen:

1) Allow Smaller Providers to Lease Infrastructure. Regulators seem to believe that this is too radical an idea for the US, despite the fact that until 2005, DSL internet providers had to lease their wires.
2) Improve Access to Utility Poles: Mandating one touch make-ready is perhaps the most important thing that local, state, and federal governments could do to help smaller internet providers expand their footprints.
3) Streamline the Right-of-Way: Gathering all the necessary permits to cross state lines or build on public property can also take months or years, and require talking to countless agencies. Those permitting processes are in desperate need of streamlining.

Protecting Internet privacy should be a bipartisan issue, right? After all, Americans seem united in their dislike of the phone and cable behemoths that dominate internet service in the US. “At the end of the day, it’s your data,” says Rep Warren Davidson (R-OH), who voted against the repeal. “I don’t see how it could be anyone else’s.”For most Republicans, it seems, someone else’s private property rights took precedence: the cable and phone companies themselves.

Rep Davidson says he believes most of his colleagues subscribed to the free-market reasoning that because the ISPs built the networks, they could do with them what they pleased. But many people don’t have access to more than one home broadband provider–particularly in many of the rural districts that Republicans represent. And, if money can’t really explain the polarization on internet privacy, then what? Republicans traditionally recoil from government regulation—but the FCC’s regulations carried a special taint: the agency passed them under the Obama administration.

Silicon Valley’s newest congressional representative is bringing the idea of basic income to Washington, to the tune of $1 trillion. Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA) - who's district is home to companies like Apple and Intel—would seem to have little chance of persuading the most conservative Congress in memory to blithely give away so much money. But there’s a wrinkle: The biggest beneficiaries wouldn’t be Rep Khanna’s well-heeled constituents in Cupertino or Santa Clara. It’s President Donald Trump’s core supporters in rural America who would have the most to gain.

Rep Khanna is preparing to introduce a bill that he calls “the biggest move in orders of magnitude” toward providing a basic income in the US. Specifically, it proposes a $1 trillion expansion of the earned income tax credit, which would roughly double the amount of money going into low-income families’ pockets. The main difference between Rep Khanna’s plan and the Silicon Valley utopianists’ version of basic income is that for now recipients would still have to have a job to qualify. Think of it more as a basic income warm-up.

The House of Representatives is set to vote as early as March 28 on a resolution that would reverse Obama-era regulations preventing internet service providers from selling your web browsing history on the open market. All of which means you’ll need to take your online privacy into your own hands. Several technical workarounds—especially virtual private networks, or VPNs—will return some semblance of control to you, the internet user. But even these solutions are far from perfect. When it comes to privacy, tech can help. But it doesn’t take the place of having the law on your side.

[Commentary] President Barack Obama more than any other president sought to apply Silicon Valley’s disruptive methods to government in an effort to make it work better for the people it’s supposed to serve. The White House has tapped President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to lead the newly christened White House Office of American Innovation, which will reportedly operate like an in-house management consultancy, bringing fresh business ideas to government. Destructive innovation can work well for a company like, say, Uber, which is accountable only to its customers. But government doesn’t have customers. It has citizens for whom the government theoretically works. In practice that means policymakers can’t cavalierly destroy something to build it anew. A functional democracy doesn’t pick winners and losers. It exists to serve everyone. Instead of winner-take-all disruption, Kushner and his team of tech A-listers should tackle broader issues of efficiency and collaboration, which can be solved with better technology or processes—things that add value without taking any away from somewhere else.

Network neutrality is in danger, and former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler isn’t pleased. Republicans’ go-to argument against the order is that it gave the FCC the authority to regulate the internet. Wheeler, who stepped down as FCC chair on Inauguration Day in 2017, calls the idea “ridiculous.” “This is no more the regulation of the internet than the First Amendment is the regulation of free speech,” Wheeler said.

Imagine a world where Comcast slows video streaming from Fox News’s website to a pixelated crawl while boosting Rachel Maddow—who happens to star on Comcast-owned MSNBC. What if Verizon, which owns the liberal Huffington Post, charged you more to visit right-wing Breitbart. Or maybe Google Fiber bans access to the alt-right social network Gab.

Today, it’s illegal to impose tiered pricing on any internet content, thanks to the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules. But if Republicans have their way, those rules will soon disappear, leaving companies like Comcast and Verizon free to block, throttle, or charge a toll to access your favorite websites and apps. Republicans may find trying to unwind net neutrality less popular than they think. Americans tend to see internet access as an extension of their First Amendment freedoms—they can say and see what they want online. If they have to start paying more for one kind of political speech over another, they likely won’t stay neutral at all.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai suggested that the reclassification and resulting restrictions have hindered telecoms from investing in improved infrastructure. It’s a tricky game—advocates on both sides can make the numbers say what they want.

But Pai’s gambit appears in part to hinge on convincing people that net neutrality, at least as currently enforced, will slow the spread of 5G, the next iteration of ultra-high speed wireless. Chairman Pai says his deregulatory strategy will help prepare the US for 5G. “It’s not a forgone conclusion that we will fully realize this technological potential,” he said in Barcelona. “After all, building, maintaining, and upgrading broadband networks is expensive.” In other words, he’s worried that if he doesn’t get rid of the Open Internet Order, carriers won’t upgrade their infrastructure to 5G. Ultimately, the bigger threat to the Open Internet Order may come from Congress, where Republicans have been trying to kill it since before the FCC passed it. Pai doesn’t seem likely to wait around for them, even if that means making his case in court.

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona saw the further rise of a movement that seeks to upend the traditional telecommunication business model, encouraging telecom companies to build common infrastructure they all can share. Why build three networks when you can build one? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone, telcos and consumers alike? Wouldn’t you get a 5G signal sooner—and for less money? The chief mover is not a telco. Rather, it’s a company that has made a habit of putting its name, money, and power behind efforts to democratize the development of new technology: Facebook.

On Feb 27, Facebook announced collaborations with two different telcos in Uganda to lay about 480 miles of fiber in the northwest region of the African nation. The three companies plan to share this fiber with any other interested telco, distributing the internet to countless wireless towers and then on to an estimated 3 million people in the process. Facebook hopes the project can serve as a template for telcos looking to more quickly and efficiently deploy fiber to places that don’t already have it. “Where operators can come together and leverage common infrastructure, there is more flexibility, lower cost, and a better time to market,” says Faceboook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh. And ultimately, that means more people will use Facebook.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s rise from relative obscurity to big headlines corresponds not just with the Trump’s arrival in Washington, but with the ever-greater centrality of the internet to American life, political and otherwise.

From its start in 1934, the FCC has played a crucial role in determining how Americans communicate and gather information. But for most of its existence, it’s been a boring, technocratic agency tasked with granting broadcast licenses and divvying up the wireless spectrum. It occasionally waded into controversies like obscenity laws, media consolidation rules, or the Fairness Doctrine, but even when decisions followed party lines, they rarely became political firestorms. But these days, the FCC has grown increasingly polarized—and polarizing. The agency that regulates the internet is becoming as sharply divided as the internet itself. You can’t blame petty politics alone for the mess the FCC finds itself in. Debates over net neutrality and cable boxes stem from an ideological shift in Washington. In earlier days, it was “good regulation versus bad regulation,” says Chris Lewis, vice president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. Now it’s “more regulation versus less regulation.” The Trump administration has signaled a hard shift in the direction of deregulation, though it may occasionally come down in favor of government intervention when politically desirable.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s outlook is clearly in line with administration. But he, like the president and Congress, have an obligation to the public, not just to the Republican base or to free market ideology. No one, not even the telecommunication industry, is well served by regulations that yo-yo back and forth as the political seasons change. The internet, at least in this case, should really be above politics.