We are in dire need of universal fiber plans. Major telecom carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have discontinued their fiber-to-the-home efforts, leaving most people facing expensive cable monopolies for the future. While much of the Internet infrastructure has already transitioned to fiber, a supermajority of households and businesses across the country still have slow and outdated connections. Transitioning the “last mile” into fiber will require a massive effort from industry and government—an effort the rest of the world has already started. Unfortunately, arguments by the U.S. telecommunications industry that 5G or currently existing DOCSIS cable infrastructure are more than up to the task of substituting for fiber have confused lawmakers, reporters, and regulators into believing we do not have a problem. In response, EFF has recently completed extensive research into the currently existing options for last mile broadband and lays out what the objective technical facts demonstrate. By every measurement, fiber connections to homes and businesses are, by far, the superior choice for the 21st century. It is not even close.

As the big wireless companies roll out super-fast 5G technology, they're facing a significant crunch in airwave spectrum to cover the whole country. There's a possible swath of airwaves that they're eying to solve the problem, but other communications industry players don't want to surrender the space easily. The years-long battle, which is now playing out at the Federal Communications Commission, pits some of the most powerful players in Washington, D.C. on opposite sides. And it's coming to a head with a final decision due in the next few months. The fight is over a segment of airwaves from 3.7 GHz to 4.2 GHz known as the C-band, which seems perfect for 5G usage. The frequency is low enough to travel long distances and penetrate buildings but also offers enough bandwidth for super-speedy downloads. Analysts say the major wireless companies would pay $30 billion to $50 billion for the rights to use a significant part of the C-band for 5G.

Our major companies should have a workforce that looks like America, from entry-level positions to the board of directors. As I have long advocated, diversity is more than just best practices – it is good business. I appreciate how this principle is reflected in the recent Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between T-Mobile and the National Urban League, National Action Network, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC, OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and UnidosUS. The MOU includes important diversity and inclusion initiatives, including increased efforts to hire and retain a diverse workforce, better diverse representation on the board, and improved outreach to communities of color. While this development does not change my opposition to the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, I boldly applaud the spirit behind these commitments and the roadmap that the document offers for other companies seeking to inject greater diversity and inclusion into their operations. To that end, I would expect T-Mobile to honor the commitments made here regardless of the outcome of pending litigation regarding this transaction. T-Mobile should fully utilize the wisdom and expertise of the civil rights organizations consulted here today consistent with its stated desire to champion diversity and inclusion. Execution is everything, and I look forward to seeing how T-Mobile follows through on the commitments made in this MOU.

Sen Ron Wyden (R-OR) introduced sweeping new privacy legislation, the Mind Your Own Business Act, to create the strongest-ever protections for Americans’ private data and to hold accountable the corporate executives responsible for abusing our information. Wyden’s bill contains the most comprehensive protections for Americans’ private data ever introduced, and goes further than Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It would give American consumers an easy, one-click way to stop companies from selling or sharing their personal information, give consumers radical transparency into how corporations use and share their data, and impose harsh fines and even prison terms for executives at corporations that misuse Americans’ data and lie about those practices to the government. The Mind Your Own Business Act protects Americans’ privacy, allows consumers to control the sale and sharing of their data, gives the FTC the authority to be an effective cop on the beat, and will spur a new market for privacy-protecting services. The bill empowers the FTC to:

1. Establish minimum privacy and cybersecurity standards.
2. Issue steep fines (up to 4% of annual revenue), on the first offense for companies and 10-20 year criminal penalties for senior executives who knowingly lie to the FTC.
3. Create a national Do Not Track system that lets consumers stop companies from tracking them on the web, selling or sharing their data, or targeting advertisements based on their personal information. Companies that wish to condition products and services on the sale or sharing of consumer data must offer another, similar privacy-friendly version of their product, for which they can charge a reasonable fee. This fee will be waived for low-income consumers who are eligible for the Federal Communication Commission’s Lifeline program.
4. Give consumers a way to review the personal information a company has about them, learn with whom it has been shared or sold, and to challenge inaccuracies in it.
5. Hire 175 more staff to police the largely unregulated market for private data.
6. Require companies to assess the algorithms that process consumer data to examine their impact on accuracy, fairness, bias, discrimination, privacy and security.

Amid the NBA-China controversy, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that the situation is a “disturbing lesson” on Chinese government leverage. “If the Chinese government has such leverage over NBA stars and the league itself, that raises the question, how else can they can export their censorship, their anti-Democratic values, and ultimately their control when it comes to even more important things like our 5G networks, the wireless networks of the future?” Chairman Pai said. He also mentioned China pressuring Apple to remove the Taiwanese flag from its iPhone emoji list in Hong Kong. “Just imagine if we have 5G networks that power all of our industries that work for our military. What kind of leverage the Chinese government could exert over the operators here in the United States if they want information about how we’re doing business, how we live our lives,” Chairman Pai said. “That is a threat that I don’t think the American people are willing to live with and I am certainly not either as the head of the FCC,” he added.