Joe Kane

Productive use of the airwaves is essential to not only everyday wireless services but also national leadership in wireless technologies. Therefore, technological and policy mechanisms that enhance the productivity of spectrum are important pieces of the national economy. Often, however, decades of accreted allocation decisions coupled with technological changes have left bands in arrangements less productive than they could be, and changed allocations could enable greater commercial spectrum access and thus more productive wireless applications that benefit consumers and innovation.

After President Trump expressed disagreement with media reports regarding damage to planes in Saudi Arabia, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr followed up with renewed promises to take regulatory actions against broadcasters based on the content they air.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) appreciates the opportunity to provide input on NTIA guidance regarding permissible use of BEAD nondeployment funds. First, both the statute and the Assistant Secretary recognize the purpose of BEAD is to close the digital divide, so BEAD nondeployment funds should address the leading causes of the digital divide, namely barriers to home broadband adoption which includes affordability.1 NTIA’s Benefit of the Bargain Round and tech-neutral reforms were a success, and they enable BEAD to close home broadband deployment gaps while cre

Some of the technology and innovation policy issues at top of mind as we start 2026:

The key outcome in BEAD success is, as the text of the statute states and as Assistant Secretary Roth has made clear, bridging the digital divide. For deployment, NTIA’s restructuring policy notice took an essential step toward that outcome by making the program technology-neutral, eliminating extraneous requirements, and reducing the cost of the deployment component of the program. These reforms will be effective at ensuring cost-effective deployment of home broadband service to all locations in the United States. But the digital divide has both deployment and nondeployment components.

The Universal Service Fund, operated by the Federal Communications Commission in conjunction with the Universal Service Administrative Company, has grown old, expensive, and ineffective. It is past time for Congress to shrink, modernize, and retool it to address today’s broadband ecosystem. While the Supreme Court recently upheld the legal legitimacy of USF’s funding mechanism, the need to reform the program persists.

Critics have claimed low-Earth orbit broadband will not be able to meet the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program’s capacity requirements, that LEO networks lack scalability, that it’s more expensive to consumers, and that BEAD itself ought to be biased against LEOs. 

The U.S. broadband market is experiencing even stronger competition than in years past, driven in large part by technological convergence and new players entering the home broadband market. Where once home broadband service was only available from incumbent cable or telephone companies, new technologies have entered the fray, and incumbents themselves have had to reconceptualize their networks around broadband rather than specialized video or voice service.

Imagine being told that your state government has the funds to give your family an affordable high-speed Internet connection—not just this year, but every year for the next two centuries. Now, imagine that same government decides instead to run a fiber optic cable to a single house at the end of a long rural road. This is not a thought experiment. It’s the real tradeoff now playing out across the country under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.

As states weigh how to reform their Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) programs, they face a stark and urgent tradeoff: Spend marginal dollars on reaching the last few unserved homes with fiber—or use those same dollars to help far more Americans actually adopt broadband. That tradeoff must be informed by three key facts: