In this notice, the Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau announces that there is sufficient funding available to fully meet the Universal Service Administrative Company’s (USAC) estimated demand for category one and category two requests for E-Rate supported services for funding year 2018. 

The Chief of the Bureau is delegated authority to determine the proportion of unused funds needed to meet category one demand and to direct USAC to use any remaining funds to provide category two support. In light of the current funding cap of $4.06 billion and available carry forward funding of $1.2 billion, there is sufficient funding to fully fund all category one and category two funding requests. We therefore direct USAC to fully fund eligible category one and category two requests, using $1.2 billion in E-Rate funds unused from previous years, and any additional funds needed under the current cap to fully meet demand for such services.

The Federal Communications Commission has provided a five-business-day extension for comments and reply comments on its Fourteenth Broadband Deployment report, but denied requests for a longer extension and for any extension on its request for comment on the state of fixed broadband competition.

The new comment dates for the deployment report are Sept 17 and Oct 1, which moves the end of the first comment period away from Rosh Hashanah. The FCC did not specify which holiday, but Rosh Hashanah begins sundown Sept. 9 and the initial comment deadline was Sept. 10. Public Knowledge, INCOMPAS, Common Cause, The Greenlining Institute, Communications Workers of America, Benton Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, TEXALTEL, Federation of Internet Service Providers of America, and Northwest Telecommunications Association jointly sought an extension of initial comments on both the report and competition to Sept. 27 and replies for deployment report to Oct. 27.

They said the extension was needed both to move it away from the holiday and to give stakeholders more time to weigh in. The FCC gave them the holiday break, but pointed to the need to use the record in both to come up with a congressionally mandated (by RAY BAUMS Act) report on the Communications Marketplace by Dec. 31, the FCC could not give them the extra time and fully consider that record and meet the deadline

The Measuring the Economic Impact of Broadband Act of 2018 (S 645) would direct the Department of Commerce (DOC) to assess and analyze the contributions of the digital economy to the economy of the United States and produce a report every two years. The analysis would include the effect of digital-enabling infrastructure, broadband, e-commerce, and digital media.

CBO estimates that implementing S 645 would cost $2 million over the 2019-2023 period for the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to coordinate with several federal agencies and produce the required analysis and reports; such spending would be subject to the availability of appropriated funds. Enacting S 645 would not affect direct spending or revenues; therefore, pay-as-you-go procedures do not apply. CBO estimates that enacting S 645 would not increase net direct spending or on-budget deficits in any of the four consecutive 10-year periods beginning in 2029.

US broadband service, already slower and more expensive than in many other countries, could get even pricier. That's because major internet providers such as AT&T and Verizon want the Federal Communications Commission to scrap a key provision that some say helps keep broadband costs low for small businesses and consumers. Under the rule, large telecommunication companies must allow smaller rivals to piggy-back on their networks at rates set by the government. Those smaller rivals then sell internet service to consumers and businesses. Now, USTelecom, a trade group that represents telecom and Internet service providers (ISPs), has made a formal request to the FCC to waive the rule. Some industry participants say that could result in higher prices for consumers.

The FCC isn't expected to take action until 2019 at the earliest. USTelecom says that the regulation, part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, is out of date and harms consumers. It denies that waiving the requirement will drive up prices, noting that only 11 percent of households access the internet through piggy-backed networks, down from 93 percent in 2003. (Cable companies are exempt from the rule.) A market analysis cited by USTelecom estimates that telecom companies would spend as much as $1.8 billion and create more than 2,000 jobs if they didn't have to share their lines.

In 2018, a federal judge signed a search warrant for a windfall of private information to help find the robber responsible for a string of crimes in southern Maine. Authorities were seeking a large amount of sensitive user data — including names, addresses and locations — of anyone who had been in the vicinity of at least two of the nine robbery locations, within 30 minutes of the crime. Google never responded to the warrant.  It is unclear whether Google, which could not be reached for immediate comment, failed to respond to the warrant in an attempt to thwart law enforcement and protect user privacy or because it couldn’t locate the information. But the incident appears to be an example of corporations struggling with how to position themselves in relation to law enforcement. In an age where virtually everyone carries a phone at nearly every moment of the day, devices have a trove of data for law enforcement to look to — map applications, WiFi hotspots, cell-tower triangulations, images with embedded locations.

People should not have to rely on tech companies to make discretionary decisions about whether to protect such personal data, said Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. Instead, he said, sensitive information should be protected by strong laws and judges’ strong enforcement of the Constitution.

[Commentary] Millions of Americans use social media to get their news, and that number is growing rapidly by the year. But when they log on, they don’t always get the full story. Powerful social media companies are filtering the information that users receive on their platforms. As a result, the picture we get of politics is partial and distorted, like a carnival mirror. Twitter’s subtle censorship targeted conservatives, and seemingly only conservatives. Whether or not bias against conservatives is intentional, it does real damage to our public discourse and to the reputation of social media platforms in the eyes of their users. It is impossible to ignore the fact that only one party is being slammed by this censorship, over and over again. Far from promoting “healthy conversations,” this reality breeds resentment and distrust over time.

Any solution to this problem must start with accountability from companies like Twitter, whose platforms have enormous potential to impact the national conversation—and unfortunately, enormous potential for abuse. If social media companies are committed to a healthy conversation, they should establish clear and transparent standards for penalties against their users. And they should disclose more details about their algorithms so users can see whether they are living up to their promises.  I encourage leaders of other tech companies to accept House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden’s (R-OR) standing invitation to appear before his Committee. Social media censorship threatens our ability to have these conversations. When only one side is doing the talking, you don’t call it a dialogue. You call it a lecture.

Once silent on InfoWars, the controversial media outlet that publishes viral conspiracy theories, consumer-facing media companies like YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Apple, and Twitter have pulled an about-face in recent weeks, cutting ties with the website and its owner Alex Jones. The result: The ability for Jones and InfoWars to reach viewers with videos, listeners with podcasts, and followers with posts appears to have been severely curtailed. But Jones doesn’t need these companies to reach the InfoWars audience. Instead he relies on Internet infrastructure companies—the ones that handle the unspoken plumbing of the Internet—to help distribute his views via the InfoWars website, which remains online. These companies, some publicly traded and most based in the United States, manage everything from registering the InfoWars domain name to defending the site from massive distributed denial of service attacks. They have mostly remained quiet about Jones. Those who battle for free-speech say that hesitation may be a good thing. It is too easy, they argue, for companies to pull the plug on groups who need the Internet’s freedoms most.

Housing Sec Ben Carson accused Facebook of enabling illegal housing discrimination by giving landlords and developers advertising tools that made it easy to exclude people based on race, gender, zip code or religion -- or whether a potential renter has young children at home or a personal disability. The action, which comes after nearly two years of preliminary investigation, amounts to a formal legal complaint against the company and starts a process that could culminate in a federal lawsuit against Facebook. It stands accused of creating advertising targeting tools -- which classified people according to interests such as “English as Second Language” or “Disabled Parking Permit” -- that resulted in violations of the Federal Housing Act.

The move by the Department of Housing and Urban Development came on the same day that the Justice Department also targeted Facebook on similar issues. In that action, the government took the side of several fair-housing groups in opposing Facebook’s efforts to have a discrimination lawsuit dismissed, arguing that Facebook can be held liable when its ad-targeting tools allow advertisers to unfairly deprive some categories of people of housing offers. Taken together, the moves mark an escalation of federal scrutiny of how Facebook’s tools may create illegal forms of discrimination, allegations that also are central to separate lawsuits regarding the access to credit and employment opportunities, which, like housing, are subject to federal legal protection. The federal action also suggests limits on the reach of a key federal law, the Communications Decency Act, that long has been interpreted as offering technology companies broad immunity against many types of legal claims related to online content.

[Commentary] “Operation Golden Gate” was the name of a 1948 plan among the followers of a political movement known as Technocracy Inc. to converge on the San Francisco Bay area. These self-described Technocrats gathered from around the country to educate the public in their central belief: that politicians lacked the ability to effectively manage the complexities of the modern world and that the public should delegate decision-making instead to a small group of technological experts.

From the vantage point of Silicon Valley, the health of the public sphere is in question not because of any fault in the systems it has engineered but because users cannot be trusted with the tools they’ve been given. Not only is this a Technocratic idea, it’s a fundamentally anti-democratic one.

I for one welcome new features that allow me to measure the sad fickleness of my attention. But these gimmicks will do nothing to address the underlying issue: that our habits and proclivities have been monetized in ways that have begun to affect the shape of public discourse. As calls for digital privacy regulations continue to grow, we should remain suspicious of attempts by tech companies to shift blame onto addicted users for irresponsibly overindulging in their “neutral” tools. At the same time, technological fixes such as tweaking the News Feed algorithm cannot replace regulation and critical conversations about technology and culture. We can do better than simply counting on the expertise of Technocrats and the abstinence of users.

[Grant Wythoff is a visiting fellow with the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University.]

Photo fakery is far from new, but artificial intelligence will completely change the game. Until recently only a big-budget movie studio could carry out a video face-swap, and it would probably have cost millions of dollars. Artificial Intelligence (AI) now makes it possible for anyone with a decent computer and a few hours to spare to do the same thing. Further machine-learning advances will make even more complex deception possible—and make fakery harder to spot. These advances threaten to further blur the line between truth and fiction in politics. Already the internet accelerates and reinforces the dissemination of disinformation through fake social-media accounts. “Alternative facts” and conspiracy theories are common and widely believed. Fake news stories, aside from their possible influence on the last US presidential election, have sparked ethnic violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka over the past year. Now imagine throwing new kinds of real-looking fake videos into the mix: politicians mouthing nonsense or ethnic insults, or getting caught behaving inappropriately on video—except it never really happened.

Perhaps the greatest risk with this new technology is not that it will be misused by state hackers, political saboteurs, or Anonymous, but that it will further undermine truth and objectivity itself. If you can’t tell a fake from reality, then it becomes easy to question the authenticity of anything. This already serves as a way for politicians to evade accountability. President Donald Trump has turned the idea of fake news upside down by using the term to attack any media reports that criticize his administration. He has also suggested that an incriminating clip of him denigrating women, released during the 2016 campaign, might have been digitally forged.