Op-Ed

Recently, Tennessee made a smart investment in its digital future when the state awarded $14.8 million in funding to local broadband projects. This funding is a welcome recognition that local networks are really good at connecting Tennesseans to high-quality, reliable, affordable internet access. But Tennessee can do more. The state could expand next-generation internet access to an even greater number of households without spending a dollar by allowing municipal fiber optic networks to expand to areas that want their service.

Decades later, Signaling System No. 7 (SS7) and other components of the nation’s digital backbone remain flawed, leaving calls and texts vulnerable to interception and disruption. Instead of facing the challenges of our hyper-connected age, the Federal Communications Commission is stumbling, according to documents obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) and through extensive interviews with current and former agency employees.

In rural America, many grain legs (bucket elevators for moving grain) have small wireless radios attached to them, providing the grain leg’s owner with broadband service.

A consortium led by USTelecom, ITTA, the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA), and a group of broadband companies have created a new initiative to improve the quality of broadband mapping. The Broadband Mapping Initiative will start with a pilot program in MO and one in my home state of VA. The pilot will aggregate all locations in MO and VA, identify their geolocation, and create a Broadband Serviceable Location Fabric to identify locations that require access to broadband.

Democrats believe that net neutrality can only be achieved by regulating the Internet as if it were a utility under Title II of the Communications Act, which was originally used to govern monopoly telephone companies in the 1930s. The “Save the Net Act” imposes the heavy hand of Washington’s regulatory bureaucracy over the single most important driver of economic growth, job creation, and a better quality of life for all Americans.

Fiber cities know the difference between publicly overseen networks, aimed at providing a utility service, and wholly private, “demand-driven” communications networks. There is no single meaning of the word utility, but the concept is familiar to many people. The basic idea is that a utility is a service that 1) relies on a physical network of some kind and 2) is a basic input into both domestic and economic life. A utility is not a luxury.

There are no doubt many reasons for the rise of partisanship, but our research, using voting data from across the country over a four year period, recently uncovered an important one: the loss of local newspapers. As local newspapers disappear, citizens increasingly rely on national sources of political information, which emphasizes competition and conflict between the parties.

When you signed up for cellphone service, I bet you didn’t expect that your exact location could be sold to anyone for a few hundred dollars. The truth is, your wireless carrier tracks you everywhere you go, whether you like it or not. When used appropriately, this tracking shouldn’t be a problem: location information allows emergency services to find you when you need them most.

I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms. From what I’ve learned, I believe we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

Before the Department of Housing and Urban Development on March 28 announced that it has charged Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act by enabling advertisers to engage in housing discrimination, Facebook said that it would change its ad-targeting methods to forbid discriminatory advertisements about housing, employment and credit opportunities. This plan, announced the week of March 18, is part of its settlement agreement with the civil rights groups that filed suits against the company over the past few years. The substantive terms are not radical.