1. Monthly archive
  2. August 2018

August 2018

Rural Broadband’s Only Hope: Thinking Outside the Box?

According to a 2017 Federal Communications Commission Broadband Deployment Report, 92 percent of the total US population has access to both fixed terrestrial services at 25 Mbps/3 Mbps and mobile LTE at speeds of 5 Mbps/1 Mbps. But for those living in rural areas, only 68.6 percent of Americans have access to both services, compared to 97.9 percent of urban dwellers."These are big challenges that call for another rural electrification administration approach.

How Municipal Broadband Models Generate Results

Broadband access throughout California and the country are the result of different models implemented by governing authorities. Those models sometimes differ from municipality to municipality, and they result in various avenues to internet access — either wholly funded by taxpayers and implemented by public agencies or provided entirely by private business in a competitive market, noted Blair Levin, nonresident senior fellow for the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, in a recent assessment.

New York City Has ‘a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity’ to Create an Internet for All

Troy Walcott, a 39-year-old cable technician, felt vindicated in July when New York moved to expel his employer, Charter Communications, for allegedly failing to keep its promises to the state. “I shouted to myself,” Walcott said about hearing the news.

We can't tell if we're closing the digital divide without more data

Much has been made of the digital underpinning of many of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals – gender equality, good health, quality education, industry innovation, and smart and sustainable cities – and the need to set ICT sub-targets for them.

22 states ask court to restore net neutrality

Attorneys general representing 22 states and the District of Columbia asked a federal court to reinstate network neutrality, saying the Federal Communications Commission failed to properly consider the issues when removing the policy in 2017. In a brief filed Aug 20, the attorneys general argue that the FCC’s decision “will cause [inevitable harms] to consumers, public safety, and existing regulatory schemes” and that the commission “entirely ignored many of these issues” when overturning net neutrality.

Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1

Facebook has begun to assign its users a reputation score, predicting their trustworthiness on a scale from zero to 1. The previously unreported ratings system, which Facebook has developed over the past year, shows that the fight against the gaming of tech systems has evolved to include measuring the credibility of users to help identify malicious actors. Facebook developed its reputation assessments as part of its effort against fake news, Tessa Lyons, the product manager who is in charge of fighting misinformation, said in an interview.

5 facts about the state of the news media in 2017

Every year since 2004, Pew Research Center has issued an annual assessment of the state of the news media that tracks key audience and economic indicators for a variety of sectors within the US news media industry. Here are the key findings for 2017:

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