by Tom Wheeler
Such judgment perpetuated a hierarchy in which information flowed vertically from an authority. Whether that authority was the state, the church, or an editor, institutionalized information flowed downward from a creator-curator to the masses. Elaborate systems—called public relations—were developed to push information up to the curator in the hope it would be deemed worthy of being pushed back down.
As we have seen, technology invented the mass media. From Luther’s “flying writings” (Flugschriften) coming off the printing press, to the Associated Press’s harnessing of the telegraph, technology enabled innovative and unforeseen results. Now technology has disassembled the media as we’ve known it for the last century and a half, and reassembled it in a nonhierarchical, uncurated format, to take advantage of the total absence of any access bottleneck.
In a classic Daily Show segment, a faux reporter pointed out to a New York Times executive that what was in the paper had already been on the internet. “Why is aged news better than real news?” he asked.37 Once again, the concept of news has been redefined. CNN may have meant coverage of an approaching storm was news, but today, when everyone is connected, it means everyone is a reporter commenting on and providing thoughts about the storm or any other topic. What is “news,” therefore, has become an unsupervised personal judgment passed on at electronic speed.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2015 the majority of Americans (63 percent) relied on personal postings on Twitter and Facebook as the source of their news.38 This reality is not lost on the mainstream media. In the newsroom of the Washington Post, for instance, a huge video screen provides real-time reports of online activity. Those who produce the news are constantly reminded they don’t work for a “newspaper” anymore; they are an electronic information service that receives and distributes information via a ubiquitous network.
The “shoe-leather reporting” that formerly was necessary to turn up stories, while still important, has been augmented (if not replaced in some circumstances) by ceaseless social media monitoring. Twitter feeds and Facebook postings are how news is created. And the big newsroom screen at the Post constantly reminds the journalists that social media both deliver them story leads and convey their writing outward to Post readers. When I was looking at the screen, Facebook and Twitter were the leading sources of readers coming to the Post (consistent with the Pew study). An important measure on the screen was also how long the online readers stayed with each story, and whether they went to another Post story after reading the one that brought them to the site in the first place.
While the Washington Post still performs an editorial function with the information it collects from social media, the unedited voice of the people that dominates the internet affects what is news without ever interacting with an editor.
One of the logical consequences of uncurated news from social media sources is an expansion of opinion. With everybody tweeting about his or her latest discoveries, the value of a scoop decreases. Thus, when product differentiation can no longer rely on scoops, it turns to opinion.
Journalism has always been opinionated. Early newspapers were political rags propagandizing for one side or another. “The golden age of America’s founding was also the gutter age of American reporting,” one commentator observed. Early newspapers were “conceived as weapons, not chronicles.”39
It was the first electronic network, the telegraph, that lifted journalism beyond local bias and partisanship by introducing timely news from afar. This in turn accelerated the shift of news gathering from a tool serving the owner’s political causes to a commercial activity. As a part of this commercialization, advertising revenues gained added importance. With the simple reality that more readers drove higher advertising rates, it became economically wise to offend as few as possible by offering balanced reporting. To maximize appeal to advertisers, therefore, the media attempted to practice objectivity, covering all sides of a topic and muting personal opinion so as to repel as few as possible.
My friend Ron Nessen tells a story about when he closed a 1966 NBC News report on the Vietnam War with an observation about the pope praying for peace. “I think we can all agree on the need for peace,” he opined as he signed off. Upon emerging from the studio, Nessen was confronted by the president of NBC News. Even a brief hope for peace was out of line with the prevailing practices of journalism. “Nobody cares what YOU think, Ron,” he was reprimanded. “Nobody cares what YOU think.”40
It wasn’t long thereafter, however, that cable TV “telepublishing” began to erode the economic rationale for objectivity by seeking profit in market segmentation fired by opinionated talking heads. “I think …” became the most often repeated words by the cable talking heads.
The movement of journalism to the internet picked up on and expanded that trend, but without the curatorial controls created by news gatekeepers. No longer costly to produce or difficult to distribute, text and video uploaded to the internet removed the hierarchical structure that previously policed media content.
The curator of traditional media was responsible for its veracity. Even when cable TV’s real-time reporting led to errors, they were caught by editors. Live all the time meant cable news was “never wrong for long.” However, when everyone has access to everyone else on the spur of the moment to produce a curationless “news selfie,” our information flow begins to resemble the distribution of content before the centralization imposed by networks.
Tom Standage, who oversaw the digital transformation of The Economist, observed in his book Writing on the Wall that the last 150 years of centralized news control were an historical aberration. During the Roman Empire and earlier, news was a “social media” activity “in which information passe[d] horizontally from one person to another along social networks, rather than being delivered vertically from an impersonal central source.”41
The telegraph helped institutionalize and commercialize local newspapers into a connected reporting apparatus based on rules and practices. Follow-on radio and television technology perpetuated the model of journalistic behavior controlled by gatekeepers who presided over scarce distribution capabilities. As the new networks dispense with such scarcity, the flow of information is, once again, being redefined.
This time, however, there has emerged a new kind of digital gatekeeper with a new economic incentive that is often in conflict with the desire for information veracity.
The financial success of a social media platform is determined by how long it can hold the user’s attention in order to deliver advertisements. The average Facebook user, for instance, spends fifty minutes a day on the site.42 To accomplish a long hold on users’ attention, the platforms accumulate information about each user and feed it to software algorithms, the software recipe that tells the computer how to prioritize all the inputs to determine what to send to whom. The principal mandate of those algorithms: deliver what holds users attention (usually by making them feel good) so they will stay on the site for as long as possible (and see as many paid messages as possible).
The famous statement on the front page of the New York Times, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” highlights the difference from social media. The Times describes its purpose as deciphering the fit from the unfit. Social media, on the other hand, have the purpose of delivering what makes the individual user feel good—something they agree with—or something that will make the user click to generate revenue.
When it comes to such clicks, “Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral,” a study in the Journal of Marketing Research found.43 This means that when someone in Macedonia is compensated every time an American clicks on a headline, greed overcomes the search for truth.44 When the best “clickbait” is that which triggers an emotional as opposed to a rational reaction, bold headlines unfettered by fact are the result.
For a century and a half, we have relied on the centralized nature of networks to outsource to a third-party
editor the responsibility for making judgments on the source, veracity, and context of information. Now, in the medium used by the majority of Americans as their source of news, those editors have been replaced by machines running algorithms prioritized not for veracity but for velocity and economic optimization.
The effect of this is that, like the network itself, the role of information curator has been distributed outward.
Software algorithms got us into this situation; software algorithms should also be harnessed to get us out. Pushing the curatorial function outward means there is a need for public-interest algorithms to counter the economic-interest algorithms.
Where there can no longer be an expectation of objectivity, then there must be transparency. I have been privileged to work with Wael Ghonim on his shockingly simple idea: that the inputs to the social media algorithms must be opened to the public. A common occurrence in the software world is what are called “open APIs.” An API—application programming interface—is what allows two software programs to interact with each other. An example is how Uber uses the information in Google Maps to create a taxi service.
Adoption of an open API by social media platforms would not mean revealing the “black box” secrets of the algorithm itself or exposing any personally identifiable information about users. But by opening up what goes into and out of the social media company’s algorithm, third-party programmers could create public-interest algorithms to understand the effects of the social media distribution. Knowing who purchased ads or created posts, for instance, and combining that with information about reach, engagement, and demographics would allow a public-interest algorithm to assemble a picture of what is being spread about and to what kind of groups.
As important as understanding what is happening, is gaining that knowledge with computer speed. It takes only seconds for an ad or posting to spread throughout the world. Yet discovering that the distribution has occurred can take hours or days. Being able to track what’s going in and coming out via a public-interest algorithm would permit the kind of curation for veracity that the platforms do not perform themselves.
Today, public-interest groups of all political stripes monitor the mainstream media. With a public-interest open API, these same groups could also build public-interest algorithms to accomplish the same result in social media. Hopefully, social media platforms would want to provide such transparency voluntarily. If they don’t uniformly do so, then it will fall to government to facilitate such openness.
It is not as if we haven’t seen this before. “They shamelessly print, at negligible cost, material which may, alas, inflame impressionable youths,” wrote a Venetian scribe, bemoaning “degradation in the brothel of the printing press.”45 History’s precedent has been clear: when the cost of information dissemination decreases, the nature of information necessarily evolves as well, bringing with it the need to develop new norms.
Digital Dividend/Digital Divide
In the African bush, a herdsman takes out his mobile phone and sends a text message to check the prices paid for cattle in nearby villages. At the same time, in Manhattan, an executive checks the app on his smart phone to see how his stocks are performing. After driving his cattle to the village, the herdsman receives compensation for his assets via a deposit into his mobile phone’s account. Likewise, the proceeds from the executive’s stock sale are loaded into his mobile-accessible ledger.
The new network is the Great Leveler. When an African herdsman and a Manhattan executive engage in similar economic activities using a common platform, the network driving that platform is accomplishing something far beyond facilitating common experiences—it is creating common opportunity. For the first time in history, network capabilities available for one can be available for all.
At the dawn of the new millennium, the United Nations set an audacious goal to cut the world’s poverty rate in half by 2015. The outcome was closer to a 60 percent reduction—one billion people emerging from extreme poverty.46 New network connectivity—principally wireless—is universally cited as a critical driver of this reduction. According to the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU), more than 95 percent of the world’s population is covered by a wireless signal.47 That connectivity demarginalized the masses by opening capabilities the developed world had long taken for granted.
It is difficult to overstate the impact of the vast majority of the world’s population sharing a basic level of common connectivity for the first time in history. The ability to make a call to check on a loved one, or to conduct business, or to summon emergency help—simple actions that were previously impossible—changes lives forever.
Connectivity is not just about making phone calls. In most of the world, access to water and electricity has always been limited because of the absence of a payment infrastructure to share the cost of the necessary facilities among users. But when 500 million households without electricity have a mobile connection (and the ability to use it for payments), the economic infrastructure for electrification exists. The same is true for the 700 million without access to clean water who have a cell phone.48 While the vast majority of the world’s population has never had a bank account with which to save and dispense funds, the system that allows for the payment for mobile phone service has also created the platform to make possible the construction and operation of almost everything else.
But while mobile voice and text have been transformational in their impact, access to the broadband internet remains aspirational to most. On average, eight in ten individuals in the developing world own a mobile phone, but only about three in ten have internet access.49 Nor are we in the developed world immune from such realities when approximately 20 percent of the population is not online.50
The divide between those without internet access and those with access has the potential to exacerbate—rather than attack—economic inequality as those who have connectivity advance and those without fall farther behind. Whether innovative solutions are brought to bear, and how, is one of the critical decisions yet to be made about the implementation of our new networks.
Two principal factors—one economic and the other structural—govern access to broadband networks.
The cost of service to individuals remains a significant economic barrier. In the United States about half of households with incomes below $20,000 were not online in 2014.51 One of the initiatives we developed at the FCC was to expand a program that had subsidized the cost of basic phone service for low-income households by applying the subsidy to broadband internet access.
One of the principal divides the FCC program was designed to attack was the “homework gap” that existed for low-income students.52 Because the majority of U.S. public school students live in poverty, they are less likely to have internet access at home.53 Even when schools provided a laptop, the students couldn’t do their homework unless they went to a location with Wi-Fi, such as the local McDonald’s.54 Upgrading the government’s traditional low-income support for phone service to include broadband internet was a step toward the kind of universal access to the network necessary for schoolwork, as well as for applying for a job and for virtually every other modern-day activity.55
Structurally, the cost of delivering broadband to areas of low population density limits the realization of its benefits. Running new fiber-optic lines to remote areas is costly. In the days of the phone monopoly, the costs of providing Theodore Vail’s universal service to remote areas were buried in everyone’s phone bill. Since the demise of the monopoly, the subsidies necessary to support high-cost areas have been more explicit through a fee on the bill that funds a program overseen by the FCC to subsidize rural phone companies. But even with these subsidies, wiring remote areas is too often a high-risk investment.
Wireless networks that overcame geography to provide voice service to the previously unconnected offer a similar potential for lower-cost broadband infrastructure. Fourth-generation (4G) wireless service provides low-level broadband inter
net connectivity, but it is expensive as its limited spectrum means it has limited capacity. Fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology offers faster broadband-like speed, but the spectrum limitation remains.
Hot on the heels of terrestrial wireless, however, are even newer network technologies with the potential for even lower costs. From circling drones and balloons to new constellations of satellites, the march of new network technology can once again reshape connectivity by eliminating terrestrial infrastructure, especially the physical improvements required to “backhaul” the data feed picked up by a network antenna to the rest of the network.
Proposals we dealt with at the FCC, for instance, included the 2019 planned launch of three new satellites with as much bandwidth as the 400 or so other satellites in the world combined.56
Further revolution is coming from the reduction in the cost of satellites. Previously, the cost of a new satellite was in the $200 million range; now thanks to new technology and assembly-line-like processes, it has fallen to approximately $1 million. Accompanying the reduction in satellite costs is the reduction in launch costs as commercial launch services replace NASA’s monopoly. Taking advantage of these developments, two new constellations of 4,700 refrigerator-sized satellites in low earth orbit promise to deliver the internet everywhere, even to the most remote areas.57
New networks have produced spectacular dividends. The promise of continued innovation driving additional dividends is palpable. The question remains whether the fruits of innovation will be equally delivered, both among nations as well as within them.