Tax Online Ad Revenue to Fund Local and Independent Journalism

Originally published in the New York Daily News

The past year has been a bumpy ride for Facebook — and even worse for its users. But in 2019 we have a chance to clean up some of the mess Facebook has made by taxing the company to support local journalism.

In the spring of 2018, news broke that data firms and troll farms, including Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s Internet Research Agency, had misused Facebook data to spread misinformation and divide U.S. voters.

In November, an investigation revealed that Facebook executives had orchestrated a multi-year effort to cover up evidence of widespread abuse of their platform and enabled an anti-Semitic smear campaign against the company’s growing list of critics. And just last week, another investigation found the company allowed advertisers to target messages to people with an affinity for Holocaust perpetrators and neo-Nazi propaganda.

Want to Save Journalism? Tax the Attention Economy

Originally published in The Hill

Way, way back in 2009 as Facebook was celebrating its fifth anniversary, CEO Mark Zuckerberg blogged that the company was founded “to give people the tools to engage and understand the world around them.”

In the 10 years since then, Facebook’s user base has multiplied more than 10 times. But instead of giving people the tools to better understand the world, Zuckerberg’s creation has hastened the global spread of misinformation designed to divide populations and manipulate voters.

At the same time, news organizations are laying off scores of hard-working journalists, those we rely on to set the record straight. Since 2004, about 20 percent of U.S. newspapers have stopped printing, leaving nearly 200,000 newsroom employees without work and at least 900 communities without anyone covering local news.

On 'Surveillance Capitalism' and the Fate of Journalism

An interview earlier this week between Recode’s Kara Swisher and Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff is a must listen for anyone seeking to understand the "attention economy" and its threat to democratic society as we know it.

It’s spawned what Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” -- a system that has created massive disparities of power and wealth between those who control it and those upon whom it feeds.

“It’s almost like we woke up and suddenly the internet was owned and operated by private capital under a kind of regime, a new economic logic that really was not well understood,” she tells Swisher.

Unsettled Sound

The Puget Sound is a sorrowful sea that’s separated from the Pacific Ocean by the Olympic Mountains to the west.

The large body of water lies above the tectonically active edge of North America. Glaciers occupied the Sound during the last ice age, advancing from the north. When they retreated some 13,000 years ago they left behind large deposits of interglacial sediment. These deposits in turn were carved by frequent rain and sea erosion to form high, unstable coastal bluffs, which were soon covered by a dense blanket of cedar, hemlock, maple, alder and fir.

As erosion progresses these trees slide down high bluffs in slow cascades that often take decades to complete from hilltop to shore. The process is sped up when the northwest rains are heaviest. Landslides can carry trees, sedimental clay and underbrush to the beach in an instant. Once they’ve settled on the shore the floral detritus enters the marine ecosystem, where it functions as nutrient, shelter and barrier.

Fake Comments, FCC Obstruction and the 'Dirty Trickster'

It’s been more than a year and a half since we first saw and heard reports of a concerted effort to use faked comments to undermine the FCC’s 2017 Net Neutrality proceeding.

From the start FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has been reluctant to help reporters, technologists and investigators seeking to get to the bottom of the scandal, and to figure out exactly who is behind the millions of fraudulent comments that found their way into the agency docket.

Thanks to Gizmodo, we now know that Pai’s reluctance may be due to the revelation that the likely culprits behind this fraud were stuffing the docket with comments favorable to his plans to repeal Net Neutrality protections.

While official investigations into the matter are ongoing, a pattern of abuse is emerging.

Here’s the timeline:

Ajit Pai Is No Jedi

The latest news for free-market Jedi Ajit Pai isn’t good.

The FCC chairman’s rationale for ending Net Neutrality in 2017 was that existing Title II rules had supposedly shackled the forces of the marketplace, “deter[ing] the massive infrastructure investment that we need.” If the rules were allowed to stand, he said, we’d “pay the price in terms of less innovation.”

In an ill-advised effort to make his point for the online masses, Pai starred in a video dressed as a Star Wars Jedi, brandishing a lightsaber against evil internet-user safeguards.

But his wizardry isn’t working, and none of his claims from 2017 have turned out to be true.

The Real Crisis Is Not at the Border. It’s How the Media Enables Trump’s Lies.

Two years before CBS booted him for sexual misconduct, then-Executive Chairman Les Moonves was asked about the circus surrounding Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

“It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," he said. “Who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? … The money's rolling in and this is fun," he said.

If that sounds familiar, you might also remember CNN President Jeff Zucker praising candidate Trump’s constant availability to the media as reason enough for the network to run wall-to-wall coverage of nearly every Trump rally in the weeks prior to the general election.

Their decisions to go all-in on Trump in 2016 may sound a distant echo today. But it’s one that is still being heard and felt in the wake of the networks’ decision to air Trump’s Tuesday-night speech about a border crisis that doesn’t exist and a wall that U.S. taxpayers don’t want to pay for.

How We’re Getting Net Neutrality Back

A year ago today, the Federal Communications Commission under Chairman Ajit Pai made one of the worst, most abnormal decisions in the agency’s history.

It ignored public consensus and voted to strip away the Commission’s authority to protect internet users from companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon that want to block, throttle or de-prioritize the online content people want to see.

Trump’s Global News Network and the ‘Fiction of Reality’

My initial reaction to President Trump’s call earlier this week for the creation of a new, state-run global-news network was: “Wait. Don’t we already have that?”

We do. Sort of.

In the midst of World War II, the U.S. government created Voice of America (VOA) to transmit pro-U.S. propaganda to German citizens who might want a different view than the messages being broadcast by Josef Goebbels and the Nazi information machine.

Following the war, VOA morphed into a global network with a principal aim of countering the pro-Soviet narrative with one of our own.

Why Pai Lied About Net Neutrality Comments

Ajit Pai has a lot of explaining to do.

The Federal Communications Commission chairman will go before a Senate oversight committee on Thursday just days after an investigation by his agency’s inspector general revealed that the FCC had been ... umm ... less than truthful when it insisted a cyberattack crashed its public-commenting system during last year’s Net Neutrality proceeding.

On Tuesday, four Democratic members of the House Commerce Committee sent a series of questions to Ajit Pai, seeking to understand what the chairman knew about the comment system’s failure and when he knew it. 

The questions speak to a curious timeline where Pai and his staff took considerable pains to bolster the FCC chief information officer’s claim that the May 2017 crash was due to outside forces beyond the agency’s control.

Net Neutrality Is Not Dead Yet, or Ever

In a hilarious scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a would-be corpse protests when a relative attempts to deposit him prematurely on a cart stacked high with bodies.

“I’m not dead yet,” he tells the body collector.

“He will be soon. He’s very ill,” his relative says, to which the man insists: “But I’m getting better.”

Net neutrality is getting much better thanks to the fierce public opposition that’s met Trump-administration efforts to kill off the principle that protects the open internet…

More at the Seattle Times

Net Neutrality Can Still Be Saved

Originally published at HuffPost

A future without net neutrality is here. Well, almost.

The Federal Communications Commission will take away the rights of internet users on Monday. Officially, the repeal of the 2015 net neutrality protections ― a repeal that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Trump pick, had pushed for ― will take effect.

That means that internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon will be able to block, throttle and otherwise interfere with online content without any real legal consequences.

Red Alert for Net Neutrality: What You Need to Know

Starting this Wednesday Net Neutrality supporters will raise the alarm in defense of an open internet.

Since December of last year — when the Federal Communications Commission voted to strip internet users of their Net Neutrality protections — millions of advocates of every political stripe have been organizing to nullify the ruling and restore the safeguards we expect every time we go online.

This week and next, we are joining with organizations and online companies are calling on the Senate to pass a “resolution of disapproval.” If passed by both chambers and signed by the president, the resolution would reinstate the Net Neutrality protections we won in 2015. These baseline open-internet rules prevent companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from interfering with our rights to connect and communicate.

Addressing the Federal Overhaul of the Lifeline Program and Its Effect on Low-Income New Yorkers

Testimony of Timothy Karr, Free Press 
Before the New York City Council Committee on Technology
February 28, 2018 

Hello. My Name is Timothy Karr and I’m the senior director of strategy for Free Press. At Free Press we fight for everyone’s rights to connect and communicate, which includes advocating for policies that promote universal access to an affordable and open internet.

As such, we often cross swords with the Federal Communications Commission. And we’ve been particularly busy during the Trump administration. President Trump appointed as FCC chairman a person who’s devoted his career to handing telecommunications giants special favors at the expense of the people he’s supposed to be serving.

Net Neutrality Politics is Local

“All politics is local,” the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said. O’Neill is less known for another saying that also holds true: “You can’t assume anything in politics. That’s why every Saturday I walk around my district.”

It’s easy for cloistered Washington politicos to assume that Net Neutrality is dead, undone in December by the Trump FCC and its Verizon-friendly chairman, Ajit Pai. But any elected official who follows O’Neill’s advice and walks beyond the Beltway is hearing a very different story.

Trump’s Appalling Record on Internet Freedom at Home Makes Him a Weak Champion of Rights Overseas

Donald Trump wants to make the internet great again … in Iran.

But it’s another story when it comes to defending online rights in the United States.

On Tuesday, Under Secretary of State Steve Goldstein told the Iranian government to stop blocking social-media sites being used to help organize protests across the country. Goldstein also encouraged Iranians to use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to circumvent state-network controls.

Goldstein’s comments followed up to a Trump tweet from earlier in the week calling out the Iranian leadership for “[closing] down the Internet so that peaceful demonstrators cannot communicate.”

Indeed, Iran has gone to new extremes to restrict its people’s access to the free and open internet.

Trump's Secret Weapon against a Free Press

Originally published at BillMoyers.com

Journalists in Manila had very little time to cover Monday’s meeting between President Donald Trump and his Philippine counterpart Rodrigo Duterte. But it was enough to witness one aspect of the budding bromance between these two world leaders.

As soon as journalists began asking questions about Duterte’s deplorable human-rights record, security shooed them from the room. Duterte pointed at the departing reporters and said, “Guys, you are the spies.” This elicited a laugh from President Trump, who feels a kinship with anyone who opposes a truth-seeking press.

According to Human Rights Watch, at least 177 journalists have been killed in the Philippines since 1986, making it one of the deadliest countries to be a reporter. Of these, nearly half were targeted for their coverage of politics, corruption, crime and human rights, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Block the AT&T-Time Warner Deal — But Not Because Trump Hates CNN

AT&T’s plan to take over Time Warner has hit a snag at the Justice Department.

According to press reports, top DoJ officials have told AT&T executives that they may need to divest Time Warner’s Turner Networks — including CNN — for the regulator to approve AT&T’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of the media giant.

Some of those reports also suggest that dumping DIRECTV, AT&T’s recently acquired satellite pay-TV platform, might also be a route to approval.

Still, speculation is rife that the DoJ is putting the brakes on the merger at the behest of President Trump, a fierce critic of CNN, which has pulled few punches in covering his administration.

In 2016, Trump made a campaign pledge to reject the AT&T deal if elected president. “It’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” he said in a speech just two weeks before the general election.

Breaking ideological gridlock from the bottom up

Originally published at OpenDemocracy.net On a cold Thursday morning in January, a small group of advocates gathered outside the imposing edifice of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C. They opened the trunk of a red Ford Fusion parked nearby and began unloading more than 20 white banker’s boxes. Within minutes, they had assembled a makeshift cardboard podium. Inside the boxes were more than a million signatures collected in just two weeks from people across the country. Each person had signed an online petition urging the FCC to protect Net Neutrality, the democratic principle that ensures the internet remains free and open and prohibits the companies that control high-speed internet access from blocking or throttling content.

Five Reasons to Fire FCC Chairman Pai

Originally Published at Huffington Post

The Senate majority is charging forward with plans to vote to reconfirm Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai for another five years. Rehiring Pai to head the agency that oversees U.S. communications policies would be a boon for the phone and cable companies he eagerly serves. But it would hurt everyone else who needs this agency to put our communications rights before the profits of monopoly-minded media giants.

Usually nominations to agencies like the FCC sail through without a dissenting vote. But based on the last five years he spent at the agency (and his past eight months as designated chairman), it’s clear Pai doesn’t deserve another term.

That’s why Free Press Action Fund is urging the Senate to reject Trump’s nominee and why thousands of people are calling Capitol Hill before the vote — expected as soon as Monday — and asking their senators to fire Pai.

And for good reason.