Public Knowledge

Frances Haugen, the (hopefully first of many) Facebook whistleblower, made one thing abundantly clear this week in both her 60 Minutes interview and her Senate Hearing: The United States needs a specialized agency to oversee digital platforms. Antitrust enforcement alone is not enough. Breaking up Facebook would solve some problems, but without additional oversight it […]

Our June 26th event in San Francisco. Learn more at publicknowledge.org/StarfishProblemEvent.

FCC Consumer Advisory Committee Meeting July 25, 2014

This is a lightly edited version of a blog post published on Harold’s personal blog, “Tales from the Sausage Factory,” on WetMachine.com. In any cliche villain scene, there’s a bad guy threatening to hurt someone else — an innocent bystander, perhaps — unless the protagonist does what the bad guy wants. Although no one would […]

France and Australia have moved forward with plans to force Google (and, in Australia, also Facebook) to pay existing media companies for linking to news content. In theory, the laws adopted in France and Australia are designed to compensate these news organizations for the benefit Google and Facebook derive from linking to news. But both […]

This material crossposted from the author’s personal blog on Wetmachine. When I was growing up, I used to hear the nursery rhyme about the itsy-bitsy spider climbing the waterspout, getting washed out, and then doing the exact same thing again. Whereas most people I have encountered regard this little jingle as an ode to perseverance, […]

Last year, Public Knowledge and Roosevelt Institute published my book, The Case for the Digital Platform Act, I argued there that we could define digital platforms as a distinct sector of the economy, and that the structure of these businesses and the nature of the sector combined to encourage behaviors that create challenges for existing […]

Bashing social media for supposed liberal bias has become pretty standard fare for some conservative pundits and politicians. This remains true despite zero evidence of any kind of bias by social media companies against conservative content or Republican politicians. In fairness, Democratic political leaders have made similar accusations. For example, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has […]

We sent a joint letter to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on this topic today, which you can read here. Perhaps the most impressive thing about 5G – the next generation of wireless technology — is that it manages to bridge the hyper-partisan divide in Washington, D.C. Democrats and Republicans — including President […]

This is an edited version of a blog post originally published on Harold Feld’s personal blog, Tales from the Sausage Factory, on WetMachine.com. If you follow spectrum policy at all, you will have heard about the C-Band Auction and the 5.9 GHz fight. You would be forgiven if you hadn’t heard much about the fight over opening […]