Never a fan of net neutrality, AT&T has upped the ante on controversial zero-rating programs, announcing a new program this week that will allow subscribers to stream video from DirectTV (a company AT&T owns) without consuming data under the company’s data caps. This means that AT&T is giving preferential treatment to its own data and putting all other video providers at a clear competitive disadvantage. While other programs like T-Mobile’s BingeOn service have tried to avoid the most egregious net neutrality violations by allowing any video service to participate in the zero-rating program without payment, AT&T’s program seems to directly implicate the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order. 

Engine is looking for startups, entrepreneurs, and the organizations that support them to sign our letter telling Congress that startups care about broadband competition. Startups, businesses, and other institutions often need significantly more internet bandwidth than consumers use at home, so they rely on what are known as “business data services” (BDS) to deliver high-speed, high-capacity connectivity. Unfortunately, the BDS market is dominated by a few broadband gatekeepers that distort the market and jack up prices for startups and other customers. But that could change soon: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is in the process of a rulemaking that will introduce competition and lower prices in the BDS market.

For years, the startup community has been calling for reforms to our immigration system that would allow immigrant entrepreneurs to build their companies in the U.S. It’s a no brainer, especially in light of the fact that more than half of the current group of U.S.-based “unicorns” (startups valued at more than $1 billion) have a foreign-born founder. While reforms in Congress have stalled, the Administration is proposing a new International Entrepreneur Rule that will allow foreign entrepreneurs to live in the U.S. for up to five years to help scale their business. To be eligible, the entrepreneur must have a 15 percent or greater ownership stake in the company and play an active and central role in its operations. 

We’ve lamented again and again that the current patent system just isn’t working for innovators. There’s been lots of talk about ways to curb abusive patent litigation tactics, but efforts to push legislative solutions through Congress have stalled for the time being. Still, there are creative ways to combat troll tactics in the short-term. This week, Engine announced a partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to Reclaim Invention. The initiative aims to address one of the unexpected sources of troll behavior: American universities. Did you know that universities often license or sell their inventions to patent trolls?

By June 2012, President Barack Obama and his Republican rival Mitt Romney had already received over $11 million in donations from tech industry workers. But these employees—“long a reliable source of presidential donations”—haven’t been as generous with the 2016 nominees. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have only received a combined $3.5 million from tech workers so far. And Trump is faring much worse than Clinton, having pulled in a mere $128,000 from 238 tech donors so far. That’s less than 6 percent of what Romney had raised from tech by this point in the race.

Back in May, regulation crowdfunding went into effect, allowing anyone to invest in a startup through an online platform for the first time ever. But, as Engine has previously explained, we’re skeptical about the extent to which this market will truly take off given the current regulatory framework. We welcomed the House’s passage of Rep. Patrick McHenry’s Fix Crowdfunding Act (H.R. 4855) last month, which makes a couple of fixes from the startup community’s wish list like permitting special purpose vehicles. But the bill was heavily amended before passage, and as Evan argues in Bloomberg this week, it is missing a number of the startup community’s desired changes. 

Three weeks ago, Engine took a look at how the Democratic Party’s draft platform would impact the tech and startup communities. This week, the party released their final platform to coincide with the beginning of the Democratic National Convention (DNC). Building on their draft, Democrats committed to rolling out broadband to every American and added language around the deployment of next-generation 5G technologies and free, public Wi-Fi. Some changes were made around encryption as well. While the initial draft did not even mention the issue, the final platform pledged support for a “national commission” on encryption, an idea that has been championed by Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Michael McCaul.

As the Republican National Convention kicked off this week, GOP leaders released the final draft of their party platform. The platform included a commitment to several issues important to the tech industry, such as expanding broadband access and pushing back against over-regulation, as well as a nod to startups and small businesses by supporting an expansion of tax deductions for startup and small business expenses. The GOP also reaffirmed their commitment to digital privacy rights and called for a resolution to the ongoing encryption debate, though they declined to take a firm stand on the issue. Unfortunately, the party reiterated their ardent opposition to net neutrality, and language in the platform on high-skilled immigration reform and LGBT issues will likely disappoint the tech community. 

Startups across the U.S. use stock options to attract and incentivize top talent. But as we’ve written before, the current tax code makes it difficult for employees to exercise those options requiring employees to pay taxes on their options even when there’s no public market to sell them to cover the tax burden. On Tuesday, Senators Dean Heller (R-NV) and Mark Warner (D-VA) and Representative Erik Paulsen (R-MN) introduced a bill aimed at remedying this.