Internet/Broadband

Driving around rural Erie County, Pennsylvania, what you notice — aside from rolling hills, old farm houses, and the occasional small town — are the movie rental stores. There are a lot of them. Jamie Buie is the manager of Family Video in Erie City. As she rang up a customer with a towering stack of DVDs, she said her decision to take a job here five years ago came down to internet access. "For the longest time, we had satellite internet," Buie said. "And with satellite internet, you have no way to stream movies at all. So that was why I originally picked my job with Family Video, so I could get cheap rentals." Thirty-eight percent of people in rural Erie County don’t have access to fixed broadband, according to the FCC’s 2016 Broadband Progress Report. Nationwide, almost 40 percent of rural Americans lack access to fixed broadband, compared to just 4 percent of urban Americans. The movie rental business might benefit from lack of broadband, but it’s hurting many others.

[Commentary] On June 19, 2017, the Supreme Court of the United States used an unlikely vehicle to expand the scope of First Amendment protection for Internet users. In Peckingham v. North Carolina, speaking for five members of the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy started with the general principle that the Court has always recognized the “fundamental principle of the First Amendment ... that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more.” This is the second important Supreme Court opinion addressing the role of the Internet in American life. The first, Reno v. ACLU, was issued in 1997, during the Internet’s dial-up era. Its depiction of the Internet as a medium deserving the same high degree of First Amendment protection as traditional print media played an essential role in the legal framework for the Internet’s evolution over the last two decades. Justice Kennedy’s Peckingham decision consciously builds upon Reno’s recognition of the Internet as offering “relatively unlimited low-cost capacity for communication of all kinds,” specifically citing how people use Facebook (“users can debate religion and politics with close friends ... or share vacation photos”), LinkedIn (“users can look for work [or] advertise for employees”) and Twitter (“users can petition their elected representatives and otherwise engage with them in a direct manner”) as examples. Justice Kennedy stressed the importance of insuring that the law leave ample room for the further evolution of the Internet’s platform for free expression.

[Andrew Jay Schwartzman is the Benton Senior Counselor at the Public Interest Communications Law Project at Georgetown University Law Center's Institute for Public Representation]

[Commentary] Presently, we are on the cusp of another internet reinvention called Web 3.0, and its opening act, the internet of things. Whether the promise of Web 3.0 is fully realized, however, will depend on the policy decisions we make today. The promise of Web 3.0 is finished without open networks to connect it. Precisely, the kind of openness the Trump Federal Communications Commission is trying to remove by undoing the existing Open Internet Rules. Thus far, the debate surrounding the Trump FCC’s undoing of the Open Internet Rules has been an echo of the arguments of 2014 and 2015 prior to the adoption of those rules. In fact, the entire open internet debate is rooted in arguments that have been frozen in time. There has never been a better description of the issue at the heart of the open internet debate: whether the companies that sell internet access to consumers should also be able to exploit their often-uncompetitive position to impose terms, conditions and fees on the activities that connect to the internet. An open internet means access to any content can’t be constrained. But the future and Web 3.0 are way beyond media. The call and response mechanism for Netflix to deliver a movie over broadband internet is a far cry from channeling the flood of intelligence created by billions of connected microprocessors. Hopefully, the nation’s tech leaders will help President Donald Trump see that future and the importance of keeping the internet fast, fair, and open.

[Tom Wheeler is a former chairman of the FCC]

[Commentary] Given the current climate at the Federal Communications Commission, it is not surprising that instead of writing a genuine apology, the FCC chose to dispute the fact that John Donnelly, a reporter for CQ Roll Call, was manhandled by FCC security as he attempted to ask Commissioner Michael O’Rielly a question. Following the “Save the Internet” rally that took place ahead of that day’s FCC vote to revoke net neutrality protections, open internet advocates — myself included — were treated with hostility in the FCC building when trying to access the meeting. Advocates were directed by guards to throw away signs tucked away in their bags before entering the building, and once inside, directed to the overflow room. Despite being a former FCC commissioner, guards and FCC officials made it difficult for me to enter the main meeting room even though I explained that a seat was being saved for me. I was also told that I could not stand in the back of the room. When finally seated in the press section, I was told that I could not move to any other vacant seats. It is not normal for public input to be unwelcome at the FCC, as it appears to be today. Chairman Pai must welcome comments from people of all stripes, return civility and respect to the debate and ensure that the FCC electronic filing system is prepared to handle the many more millions of comments that are expected. Americans, who have come to rely on the internet as an integral part of their lives, deserve and expect no less.

[Tristani is a special adviser to the National Hispanic Media Coalition and served as a FCC commissioner from 1997 to 2001. She is also a former executive director of the Benton Foundation.]

[Commentary] Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai rightfully gets a lot of crap for his hostility toward net neutrality, but as someone who lives and works out where the Milky Way still shines in its full glory at night, I can't help but admire his talk of bridging the "digital divide" between "those who can use cutting-edge communications services and those who do not." This is a necessary thing. I don't think people in major cities understand how bad it is out here.

A bipartisan group of attorneys general from 35 states is urging the Federal Communications Commission to reject a petition from the cable and broadband industry asking the agency to take away state authority to investigate claims of false advertising over broadband speeds.

“The Petition represents nothing more than the industry’s effort to shield itself from state law enforcement,” the group wrote in a document to the FCC. “As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, a federal agency may pre-empt state law only when and if it’s acting within the scope of its congressionally delegated authority,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said. “The states’ consumer protection powers must be left intact to protect customers from providers who make false claims about broadband speed.”

A Q&A with former Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps.

CBS CEO Les Moonves said it best: “I don’t know if Donald Trump is good for the country. but he’s damn good for CBS.” The election was just a glorified reality show and I do not think it was an aberration. Until we get that big picture straightened out and we get a civic dialogue that’s worthy of the American people and that actually advances citizens’ ability to practice the art of self-government — that informs citizens so they can cast intelligent votes and we stop making such damn-fool decisions — we’re in serious trouble. To me, that remains the problem of problems, it remains at the top of the list. Journalism continues to go south, thanks to big media and its strangulation of news, and there’s not much left in the way of community or local media. Add to that an internet that has not even started thinking seriously about how it supports journalism. You have these big companies like Google and Facebook who run the news and sell all the ads next to it, but what do they put back into journalism? It isn’t much. I don’t think right now that commercial media is going to fix itself or even that we can save it with any policy that’s likely in the near-term, so we have to start looking at other alternatives. We have to talk about public media — public media probably has to get its act together somewhat, too.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai opposing the FCC’s proposal to reclassify broadband as a service under Title I of the Communications Act. Minority Leader Pelosi also requested a public hearing in San Francisco (CA) on the FCC’s harmful plan to dismantle consumer protections on the internet.

“Consumers should be able to use the internet on the device they want, using the apps and services they want without their internet provider standing in the way. I support the current rules because they are in place to protect consumers, and I oppose your efforts to eliminate them,” she wrote. "I was...dismayed to learn you are likely to disregard the millions of public comments filed in the record. The Administrative Procedures Act prohibits the FCC from disregarding comments. You have made confusing statements that you will both give less weight to comments that are not of sufficient quality, and that you will err on the side of including suspicious comments in the agency’s deliberation, even when dozens among a particular batch of comments have sworn that their name and address were used fraudulently. I therefore ask that you clarify your policy on how the agency will consider comments in the record. Finally, if you believe that online public comments are coming from 'astroturf' sources and are of questionable integrity, then you must hear directly from the public in official hearings outside of Washington, DC. "

Today, two-thirds of the world’s internet users live in countries where content that challenges political regimes, social conventions, or national security is subject to censorship. Over time, internet censorship has expanded from restricting access to IP addresses and domain names for websites, to blocking applications and persecuting users for their online activities.

A broad-based coalition of nonprofit groups [including the Benton Foundation] filed a letter calling on the Federal Communications Commission to reject a proposal from the cellular industry, filed by CTIA on June 16, to re-open and revise the rules finalized more than a year ago for a new Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) that opens a large frequency band of unused Navy spectrum for small area, high-capacity broadband innovation. The coalition represents consumers, public institutions and small business users of broadband, and includes the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition, Next Century Cities, Engine, the R Street Institute, the American Library Association and the National Hispanic Media Coalition. The coalition asks the FCC to instead move rapidly to complete implementation of this historic innovation in spectrum policy, which opens unused military spectrum for sharing with Priority Access Licenses that are available for small areas (census tracts) and short terms, thereby making them more useful and affordable to smaller operators and to venues for indoor use.