It’s not legitimate to claim Silicon Valley is biased against conservatives, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said in an interview on C-SPAN's The Communicators set to have been televised this weekend. President Donald Trump offered anecdotal evidence of social media’s anti-conservative bias at a White House summit Thursday (see 1907110066).
Third-party streaming of local live TV broadcasts is growing, with Locast adding markets and Didja, trialing in three markets, hoping to sign retrans agreements with major broadcasters soon. Though the copyright and retans lawsuits some saw as possible with the early 2018 launch of Sports Fans Coalition's Locast (see 1801110026) haven't materialized, some say it's not in the clear.
Consumer and public interest groups said the FCC should deny a petition by the P2P Alliance asking to clarify peer-to-peer text messages to cellphones aren't subject to Telephone Consumer Protection Act restrictions (see 1805040028). It's late in the game. Industry and agency officials said Chairman Ajit Pai supports acting on the P2P petition, likely with the support of the other Republicans. Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks haven't staked out a position.
President Donald Trump offered anecdotal evidence of social media bias and alleged throttling of his followers and activity on Twitter. Speaking Thursday to hundreds of invitees at his Presidential Social Media Summit (see 1907100040), he cited dramatic fluctuations of follower counts and Twitter interaction. “It would be like a rocket ship when I put out a beauty,” he said, claiming nowadays it takes him 10 times as long to gain 100,000 followers.
The New York Public Service Commission voted 3-1 to approve the state’s settlement with Charter Communications. At a livestreamed Thursday meeting, commissioners noted regrets and lessons learned from the sometimes-contentious process between the PSC's threatening in July 2018 to boot Charter out of the state (see 1807270027) and this year’s settlement (see 1904190059).
The FTC should remain the U.S. privacy enforcer but needs more resources, House Consumer Protection Subcommittee ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., told us Thursday. Two House Democrats from California are contemplating draft legislation that would replace it with a new data privacy agency. A prospective privacy bill will need bipartisan, bicameral support to pass, she said after an appearance at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event.
Lawmaker interest in the draft order on improving its broadband coverage data collection practices continued Wednesday and Thursday before its afternoon release (see 1907110071). The order and broadband mapping legislation came up repeatedly during a House Agriculture Commodity Exchanges Subcommittee hearing. A day earlier, the Senate Commerce Committee scuttled a planned markup of the Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (Data) Act (S-1822), one of several measures seen as potentially influencing the proposal's direction (see 1907100061).
The FCC would use two reverse auctions to distribute $20.4 billion in funding over the next decade through a Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) that Chairman Ajit Pai announced at the White House in April (see 1904120008), per a draft NPRM released Thursday. The new USF program (in docket 19-126) would help deliver broadband service tiers of at least 25/3 Mbps to rural communities unserved and underserved. The draft circulated Wednesday; commissioners will vote on it at their Aug. 1 meeting (see 1907100072).
The FCC’s Aug. 1 commissioners’ meeting will be headlined by proposed rulemakings on robocalls and the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, per the tentative agenda and drafts released Thursday late afternoon. Members will vote on an NPRM on low-power FM technical rules, orders on 911 location and small satellites, plus items on a toll-free number auction and local franchising authority over cable.
The FCC is prepared to “go to rules” in early 2020 if major voice providers don’t deploy by year-end, said Chairman Ajit Pai at a Thursday summit on Shaken/Stir. Pai's encouraged by what he heard at the summit and asked larger providers to work with their smaller peers so everyone offers secure handling of asserted information using tokens (Shaken) and secure telephone identity revisited (Stir) technology on a timely basis. Speakers warned that hurdles remain and bad actors will do their best to circumvent anything industry does. Small carriers said they face unique problems.