By Daniel Frankel, Multichannel News, 1-29-21Perhaps no chief executive lobbied harder than Comcast’s Brian Roberts for the FCC’s 2017 rollback of net neutrality rules under Trump-appointed FCC chief Ajit Pai.Now that Biden appointee Jessica Rosenworcel is running the agency, and another reversal of course on net neutrality seems likely, Roberts was asked during Comcast’s fourth-quarter [...]
By Gary Arlen, Multichannel News, 1-28-21 Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) outlined an aggressive plan to legislate a “competition policy” that she envisions will be accompanied by increased antitrust enforcement, especially in the technology and digital platform sector. In the closing keynote address to the State of the Net conference on Wednesday, she voiced concern [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 1-27-21 Some civil rights groups are using the first days of the new Biden Administration as an "inflection point" to bend the arc of tech priorities toward justice and inclusion…. Their agenda includes privacy, content regulation, competition, and broadband, and their goal is a host of reforms made even [...]
Participated in an amicus brief (with the Reporters Committee and other amici) filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Callahan v. United Network for Organ Sharing. This case concerns the common-law right of access to judicial documents. The underlying suit was brought by certain hospitals and patients against UNOS, [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 1-26-21 A group of academics weighed in on the state of Sec. 230 during the virtual State of the Net conference Tuesday (Jan. 26). Alan Davidson, senior advisor at Mozilla, who hosted the panel, said that while a year ago revoking or revising Sec. 230 was a long shot, [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 1-21-21 Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) have written the heads of Facebook, Twitter, and Google asking them to face up to and fix the "fundamental design features of their social networks that facilitate the spread of extreme, radicalizing content to their users," the sort of radicalizing [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 1-21-21 The National Association of Broadcasters has circulated its agenda among policymakers as the new Administration settles in with a flurry of activity and stemming what it calls the undermining of local news by Big Tech is high on the agenda. NAB argues that as the ad market has [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 1-19-21 Department of Justice Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim said that if the government does not find a way to harness the massive market power of those platforms to democratic policies, the country risks "devastating outcomes for our civil democratic society." He suggested one solution could be a new "public-private" [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 1-19-21The FCC and National Association of Broadcasters made their virtual arguments to the Supreme Court Tuesday (Jan. 19) on why a lower court (the Third Circuit Court of Appeals) was wrong to invalidate the FCC's 2017 broadcast ownership deregulation decision, a defense that came in the waning hours of the [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 1-15-21 Senate Commerce Committee Chairman (for a few more days) Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) wants Big Tech to pony up info on what he says has been their silencing of conservative users, saying it appeared to be politically biased censorship. The most notable "silencing" in recent days was Twitter's and [...]