Disrupting traffic has long been a way for protesters to call attention to a cause. But when the cause itself is speed—in this case, Internet speed—the move takes on an extra level of defiance. That’s what one cyclist made clear when he used his bike to protest the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC voted in December to end Obama-era rules for Internet service providers.
Communities of color often face challenges connecting to and maintaining affordable broadband and voice service. The federal Lifeline program has been around since the mid-1980s. While it started as a low-income program to help households afford voice service, it has been expanded to include wireless voice and broadband Internet support.
House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) isn’t joining fellow rural state lawmakers in pushing for dedicated funding for broadband in the infrastructure package. She wants to focus on bills to streamline permitting and clear away regulations impeding new networks, and attach them to the infrastructure legislation. “I want to see how much bipartisan support we can end up building for simplifying this process,” she said.
Apparently, the Senate has now received official notice of the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality repeal. That procedural development is important because it could be the first step to triggering a 60-day clock for Congress to undo the FCC’s decision. (That is, 60 legislative days.) The Senate’s 47 Democrats and two independents plus Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) have said they would support such a maneuver, using the Congressional Review Act. That’s 50 votes, still one vote short of the number needed for approval in the Senate.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) says Congress late last year received “extraordinarily important new documents” in its investigation of President Donald Trump and his campaign’s possible collusion with the 2016 Russian election hacking, opening up significant new lines of inquiry in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe of the president.
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