Bogus Studies & Unfounded Data: A Warning
Repeat the same mistaken data enough times and people start believing it. If you're active in policy or a reporter and think any of these are accurate, please email me for primary sources. I'm writing this quick note because two respected groups just sent to me stuff I know is wrong.
There is a large, measurable cost to Internet shutdowns. If you can send your birthday gift a few days later or catch up two days of missed lessons, the Brookings report falls apart.
Connecting more people to the Internet has large economic benefits. Senior economists, including one now at Harvard, debunked this in 2009 in D.C.
The Internet has no economic downsides. Tell that to the store owner who went broke because he couldn't compete with giant Amazon. About a third of the world's newspaper reporters lost their jobs. Almost all claims about "economic benefits" leave out the negative.
Steve Mollenkopf's creative engineers produce many of the world's best chips. It's time for him to stop promoting a bogus claim "5G Expected to Create 22 Million Jobs, Produce Up to $12.3 Trillion of Goods and Services by 2035." They offer no evidence or logic that leads to that conclusion. They hired 
Moving the big decisions to where they have power. At the BRICS conference in Xiamen, the global South and China/Russia proclaimed, "All states should participate on an equal footing in the evolution and functioning of the Internet and its governance, bearing in mind the need to involve relevant stakeholders in their respective roles and responsibilities. The structures that manage and regulate the critical Internet resources need to be made more representative and inclusive."With the U.S. effectively blocking any 
Randall, with the $85B Time Warner merger pending, is unlikely to disavow his very visible friendship with Donald Trump although I'm pretty sure he despises much of what the President is saying. Brian Krzanich of Intel, Kenneth Frazier of Merck, Elon Musk of Tesla, Inge Thulin of 3M, and even Denise Morrison of Campbell Soup have resigned. 
** Update: Broadcom did well on appeal October 10th see below** Tessera patent case pushes dozens of Broadcom chips out of the country. U.S. could be next. The German court upheld a Tessera patent "for smoothing the planes of semiconductor chips." The court ruling resulted in this notice on the Broadcom website:
Markets don't capture externalities. Most of us understand that "the market" produces a pollution problem if unregulated. Utilities can save money burning dirty coal; the pollution cost falls on others. That's been a hard problem to solve for two decades. Telecom policy has many similar choices. 
34,000 kilometers of fiber to towns of 250-500 people. The government program, managed by Rostelecom, offers basic service at 10 megabits for less than $1/month to about a million Russians. Complete universal service coverage of Russia will require 215,000 kilometers and is scheduled to be finished by the end of 2018.