1. Monthly archive
  2. July 2020

July 2020

Rural Broadband Acceleration Act

Senators Rob Portman (R-OH), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Mike Braun (R-IN), Michael Bennet (D-CO), and Doug Jones (D-AL) introduced the Rural Broadband Acceleration Act, bipartisan legislation that will bolster efforts to expand access to rural broadband nationwide and speed up the distribution of the Federal Communication Commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The RDOF will allocate $20.4 billion to building rural broadband in two phases and this legislation will ensure that some of that money is distributed to communities much faster than the original deadline.

Goodbye to the Wild Wild Web

Within a 48-hour period this week, many of the world’s internet giants took steps that would have been unthinkable for them even months earlier. Taken independently, these changes might have felt incremental and isolated — the kind of refereeing and line-drawing that happens every day on social media. But arriving all at once, they felt like something much bigger: a sign that the Wild Wild Web — the tech industry’s decade-long experiment in unregulated growth and laissez-faire platform governance — is coming to an end.

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