Health and Media

All five Federal Communications Commissioners testified at a Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing. Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) said the hearing was an opportunity for Commissioners to discuss what more can be done to expand broadband access and digital opportunity for all Americans.

The Network Advertising Initiative, a national trade group representing the digital advertising industry, has advised member companies to put stricter controls on consumer mobile-phone location data they provide to government units such as public health authorities and law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Healthcare providers are hurting. As positive coronavirus cases increase in many rural parts of the country, hospitals and health clinics struggle to keep pace with the heightened demand for telehealth visits. Physicians are now seeing 50 to 175 times the number of patients via telehealth than they did prior to the pandemic. The increase in popularity is for good reason.

Contact tracing done wrong threatens privacy and invites mission creep into adjacent fields, including policing. Government actors might (and do) distort and corrupt public-health messaging to serve their own interests. Automated policing and content control raise the prospect of a slide into authoritarianism. But most critics have focused narrowly on classic privacy concerns about data leakage and mission creep—especially the risk of improper government access to and use of sensitive data.

In a letter to Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senators Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i) and Roger Wicker (R-MS) led a bipartisan group of 30 senators in calling for the expansion of access to telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic to be made permanent.

In sent a letter to Congressional leadership on behalf of our 200+ member municipalities, Next Century Cities said that since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the United States, Americans have faced profound disruptions and been inundated with illustrations of why broadband is essential. Aside from schools and businesses having to embrace digital platforms, local governments found a way to stay operable while providing real-time health and safety updates for their residents in the face of a national emergency.

Primal instincts often drive our obsession with stressful news, and social-media platforms are designed to keep us hooked. “These algorithms are designed to take and amplify whatever emotions will keep us watching, especially negative emotions. And that can have a real negative impact on people’s mental health,” says David Jay of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit addressing how social-media platforms hijack our attention.

Although an unexpected message from the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, our aim is really about opportunity and community. We believe that communications policy—rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity—has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities to bridge our divides. We don't believe that broadband educates children. We do believe that broadband facilitates vital connections between students and teachers, especially during this time when so many schools are shuttered. We don't believe broadband makes you healthy.

As though Americans don’t have enough to worry about right now, some people have recently been stoking fears about the supposedly harmful health effects of 5G — the new generation of wireless broadband networks. For decades, the Federal Communications Commission has ensured that equipment that transmits information over radio waves — from station antennas to cell towers to mobile phones to laptops — is safe for consumer use. The FCC most recently reviewed and reaffirmed those standards, which are among the most stringent in the world, in an order issued late in 2019. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has made something clear that the members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have known for a long time: millions of families in the United States do not have access to affordable, reliable broadband internet connections. Technicians can’t install high-speed internet service for households without fiber optic cable in their neighborhoods. Teachers can’t keep children who cannot access online materials engaged and learning.