Reporting

After months of talks on bipartisan legislation, Senate Commerce Committee leaders have unveiled dueling privacy bills ahead of a hearing on Dec 4. But insiders believe the process might still yield a compromise both parties can embrace. Sen. Maria Cantwell's (D-WA) Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act would give the Federal Trade Commission greater enforcement authority and would allow consumers to enforce the law by bringing civil lawsuits. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) circulated his discussion draft, the United States Consumer Data Privacy Act; the bill would:

Tech has been given surprisingly little airtime during the 2020 Democratic primaries. It has rarely come up on the debate stage. While candidates such as Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Andrew Yang, and Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) have made tech-related issues part of their platforms, the matter is often eclipsed by other political hot topics, including health care and taxes.

If you have autoplay enabled on your Netflix or Amazon Prime account, listen up: it could cost you hundreds of dollars a year if you’re not careful. ew services like Disney+ offer us unfettered access to most of the gems of the Disney vault, along with Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars and 20th Century Fox, with the expectation that we'll watch them for hours.

With less than 100 days before the 2020 census is fully underway, rural communities caught in the digital divide are bracing for a potential undercount that could make it harder for them to advocate for resources over the next decade. For the first time, the US census will play out primarily online and only about 26% of households — mostly in areas with low Internet subscription rates — are set to receive paper questionnaires either in the mail or hand-delivered to their addresses by mid-March,

Sprint has for years failed to accurately measure how many of the low-income Americans it serves through the federal Lifeline program actually use their phones. The company is facing a potential settlement with the Federal Communications Commission after the regulator in September said Sprint improperly collected “tens of millions” of dollars in federal subsidies for 885,000 Lifeline customers who weren’t using the service.

T-Mobile announced that it has launched "America's first nationwide 5G network," but T-Mobile's definition of "nationwide" doesn't include about 40% of the US population. "America gets its first nationwide 5G network today, covering more than 200 million people and more than 1 million square miles," T-Mobile's announcement said. The US Census Bureau estimates the population to be more than 330 million people.

State lawmakers unanimously voted in February to create a structure to use state grant funds to expand high-speed internet to Arkansas' farthest flung areas, but the program spawned by that law, as now proposed, would do the opposite, about a dozen legislators said. Local government officials, internet companies and other stakeholders had near-universal praise for Gov.

The weaponization of nonprofit advocacy and service organizations has been ongoing in Sacramento (CA) (and Washington) for years, although it seems to have risen recently to new levels of duplicity and complexity. If you were hanging around Sacramento this legislative year, for example, you couldn’t help but run into The Nonprofit Alliance, a newly constituted advocacy group which claimed to be the voice of nonprofits.

Throughout her 30 years in telecommunications and technology policy, Gigi Sohn has worn many hats—a telecom lawyer, a progressive advocate, a top aide at the Federal Communications Commission, an academic. But if there’s one thread uniting the career of a woman widely viewed as the godmother of progressive tech policy in Washington, it’s her ability to bridge the vast chasms between industry, the advocacy community, and the federal government. “I spend a lot of time building bridges between industry and public interests—and also between the public-interest groups themselves,” Sohn said.

Cyber Monday — with a predicted $9 billion in US sales online — has become a self-sustaining phenomenon in the world of e-retail, with email blasts and ad blitzes pushing pre-holiday season discounts. This event did not emerge organically. It's a marketing construct built around a discredited prefix that was originally coined for an invented science. Back in 2005, data showed online sales spiking the Monday after Thanksgiving.