Reporting

By some accounts, about 40 percent of the world’s population relies on Huawei equipment.

Officials from Westmoreland County (PA) and seven neighboring counties are studying a proposal for local governing entities to step up and invest in infrastructure needed to expand or enhance broadband connectivity in under-served areas. About a dozen stakeholders from multiple counties attended a kickoff meeting for the Regional Broadband Task Force study.

The trade deal that President Donald Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He signed left the tech world clamoring for more. Industry leaders praised the deal’s progress on forced technology transfers and intellectual property theft in China and expressed optimism about its next iteration.

ITTA-The Voice of America's Broadband Providers "will be shutting its doors effective January 31, 2020 after over a one-quarter century representing wireline communications service providers in Washington." ITTA cited "financial constraints in the wireline service provider sector" for shutting its doors, saying those financial challenges had been "insurmountable." Broadband providers still have a voice via ACA Connects, which represents smaller and midsized providers, NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, NTCCA-The Rural Broadband Association, USTelecom, CTIA and others. 

One PA farmer’s group has an idea to pay for expanding rural broadband access — a tax on cell phone bills. The proposal was floated recently at the annual PA Farm Show in Harrisburg (PA) on back-to-back days by PA State Grange president Wayne Campbell. As a starting point, Campbell suggested that a $0.75 to $1 surcharge per-month on every cell phone user could finance small, matching state grants for local broadband projects.

KentuckyWired, the much-heralded plan to improve internet connectivity across KY, promised to create financial opportunities through reliable, high-speed internet access for rural communities that have repeatedly been hammered by the loss of jobs in the coal and tobacco industries.

The House Communications Subcommittee was in agreement that more needed to be done to boost minority media ownership, but Republican members focused more on what they said broadcasters and cable operators were already doing to address the issue. The hearing, "Lifting Voices: Legislation to Promote Media Marketplace Diversity", looked at various bipartisan bills to promote more diversity data collection and analysis at the Federal Communications Commission and provide more access to capital. 

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the ad-blocking industry for anti-competitive behavior. For years now, some of the largest tech firms have paid ad-blocking companies like Eyeo, which owns Adblock Plus, to avoid the software’s restrictions and have their ads displayed on devices. In 2015, a report showed that companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google were paying out ad blockers so that they could be added to a whitelist to avoid the software’s filters.

Google's Chrome team, advancing its web privacy effort, later in 2020 will begin testing the "privacy sandbox" proposals it unveiled in 2019. The Chrome tests are part of an effort to make it harder for publishers, advertisers and data brokers to harvest your personal data without your permission and to track you online. Other browsers, including Apple's Safari, Brave Software's Brave, Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's new Chromium-based Edge, have pushed steadily to cut tracking for the last few years.

Early in 2020, SpaceX became the operator of the world’s largest active satellite constellation, with 180 satellites orbiting the planet. The milestone is a mere starting point for Starlink, SpaceX’s ambitious project to provide internet capabilities to every inch of the globe. To get that kind of connectivity, the company wants the option to launch up to 42,000 satellites over the next decade. That’s about 21 times the number of operational satellites currently in space — and the true impact of the company’s nascent mega-constellation is still very much a mystery.