Daily Digest 10/21/2019 (USDA Invests in Rural Broadband)

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society
Table of Contents

News From the FCC

News (Of Sorts) From the FCC  |  Read below  |  Kevin Taglang  |  Analysis  |  Benton Institute for Broadband & Society
FCC Confirms Open Meeting Agenda for Friday, October 25, 2019  |  Federal Communications Commission

Broadband

The city with the best fiber-optic network in America might surprise you  |  Read below  |  Jay Woodruff  |  Fast Company
USDA Invests $2.85 Million in Rural Broadband for Tennessee Families  |  Read below  |  Press Release  |  Department of Agriculture
Senator Tina Smith spends time diving deep on broadband and rural economics  |  Read below  |  Jess Gorman  |  Montevideo American-News

Wireless

US companies battle for control of 5G spectrum  |  Read below  |  Kiran Stacey  |  Financial Times

Lobbying

Putting corporate America’s new ‘stakeholder’ principles to work in regulatory policy  |  Read below  |  Tom Wheeler  |  Analysis  |  Brookings

Privacy/Security

Facebook looks to improve child protection over fears encryption will raise risks  |  Financial Times
How Tech Companies Are Selling Colleges on Mass Data Collection  |  EdSurge
Stuart Brotman op-ed: Making Sure the Next ‘Killer App’ Is Not a Privacy Killer  |  Business Insider
Stuart Brotman: How Congress can take action on strengthening consumer privacy  |  Hill, The

Communications & Democracy

President Trump Threatens to Sue CNN Over ‘Highly Biased’ News  |  Wrap, The
How propaganda works in the digital age. It has evolved, and it’s transforming politics.  |  Vox
The costs of Facebook's free speech  |  Axios
Video giant Twitch pushes Trump rallies and mass violence into the live-stream age  |  Washington Post
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights op-ed: Facebook Is Threatening Our Elections—Again  |  Politico
Bipartisan Members Condemn Activision Blizzard and Apple Actions to Enforce Chinese Government Censorship  |  US Senate
Biden Escalates Attack on Facebook Over False Political Ads  |  New York Times
Zuckerberg’s speech draws ire from 2020 candidates, civil rights advocates  |  Washington Post
Editorial: Zuckerberg says progressives shouldn’t abandon liberal values. Progressives object.  |  Wall Street Journal
Most US adults intend to participate in 2020 census, but some demographic groups aren’t sure  |  Pew Research Center

Television

Remarks of FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly Before the New York State Broadcaster Association's Broadcast Leadership and Hall o  |  Federal Communications Commission
AT&T just can’t stop raising TV prices, adds another $10 to streaming plans  |  Ars Technica
Biggest Late-Night Guests Now Bring a News Angle, Not a Movie Clip  |  New York Times

Policymakers

Meet Marybel Batjer, the new President of the California Public Utilities Commission  |  Los Angeles Times
Today's Top Stories

News From the FCC

News (Of Sorts) From the FCC

Kevin Taglang  |  Analysis  |  Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

Two stories from the Federal Communications Commission caught our eye this week. One gained lots of headlines. The second is a bit of inside baseball but could turn out to be big news down the line. Both impact the deployment of broadband and closing the digital divide. FCC commissioners have voted to approve T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint. But the news did not come from any official release from the agency but from an op-ed from FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel published by The Atlantic. In the piece, Commissioner Rosenworcel announced that she had voted to block the transaction because "[s]hrinking the number of national providers from four to three will hurt consumers, harm competition, and eliminate thousands of jobs." Rosenworcel fears that the transaction will mark the end of "a golden age in wireless that helped bring to market lower prices and more innovative services" and result in a "cozy oligopoly dominated by just three carriers." 

And we were intrigued by a letter and a filing by just the state members of the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service. "The State Members of the Joint Board find that the [FCC] has the authority, and that it is in the public interest, to expand the contribution base to include a broader class of services that touch the public communications network, including Broadband Internet Access Service (BIAS)."

Broadband

The city with the best fiber-optic network in America might surprise you

Jay Woodruff  |  Fast Company

The American city with the most sophisticated fiber network is Ammon, Idaho, population 16,500. The city offers residents performance, pricing, and options that inhabitants of a metropolis dominated by one or two internet service providers can only dream of. Ammon is a true local network, where residents own the fiber and providers compete to serve them. “If you were to ask me what the key component of Ammon is, I would say it’s a broadband infrastructure as a utility,” says Bruce Patterson, Ammon’s technology director and one of the key drivers behind the network. “We’ve just found a way to make it a true public infrastructure, like a road.” Residents of Ammon can choose to opt in to the network, which the city began building in 2011. Patterson expects that by the end of 2019, 900 of the town’s 4,500 residences will have joined the network. The city is growing, adding new residential addresses at a rate of about one per day, and Patterson says that every single developer is choosing to include the fiber infrastructure in new construction. Patterson describes four ways in which Ammon’s model is superior to other existing networks.

USDA Invests $2.85 Million in Rural Broadband for Tennessee Families

Press Release  |  Department of Agriculture

The Department of Agriculture's ReConnect Pilot Program is investing  $2,856,167 in high-speed broadband infrastructure to create or improve e-Connectivity for 347 rural households in Tennessee. Tennessee’s Forked Deer Electric Cooperative will use a ReConnect Program grant to deploy a fiber to the home (FTTH) broadband network capable of simultaneous transmission rates of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) or greater. The funded service areas include 347 households and one critical community facility spread over approximately 435 square miles. The project will facilitate more access to services and information for area residents, and it will improve the overall quality of life for people in these communities.

Senator Tina Smith spends time diving deep on broadband and rural economics

Jess Gorman  |  Montevideo American-News

Sen Tina Smith (D-MN) hosted a roundtable discussion in Granite Falls (MN) with local leaders and rural community advocates in an attempt to get to the root of rural needs in the broadband game. Sen Smith previously introduced the Revitalizing Underdeveloped Rural Areas and Lands Act (RURAL Act) to aid cooperatives impacted by new tax codes to retain their ability to get broadband implementation grants without affecting their tax-exempt status. “I want to understand better how I and the federal government can be a good partner with you as we work to expand broadband in small towns and rural areas.” Sen Smith detailed her understanding of the negative impacts of insufficient or nonexistent broadband access. “If you don’t have access to broadband you can’t get your homework done, you can’t work remotely for your job, your healthcare systems don’t work, you have trouble recruiting people into your community.” Her focus as of late is combating and correcting false data on where broadband actually exists. “We have a federal government pushing out a significant amount of money but sometimes it’s pushing out that money based on maps that are not at all accurate about where there is coverage, or there is coverage but it’s pitiful. It’s a few drops of water coming out of a pipe. It doesn’t begin to meet the needs of the community.” Sen Smith was quick to point out that even though Minnesota broadband coverage maps makes it appear most households are serviced “there are still 145,000 households that don’t have it, that doesn’t even count the households sitting at the end of the pipe with a few drops, not able to do what they need to do.”

Wireless

US companies battle for control of 5G spectrum

Kiran Stacey  |  Financial Times

Donald Trump’s push to roll out 5G internet as quickly as possible has sparked a series of disputes over who should get access to parts of the telecoms spectrum, involving groups as large and varied as Facebook, Google, AT&T and National Public Radio. The Federal Communications Commission has pushed forward with a string of spectrum sales in the past few months as it rushes to fulfil the US president’s pledge to “win the race” to establish superfast internet across the country. But experts warn that the tangled mesh of different corporate and government claims over what is known as the “Goldilocks” mid-part of the spectrum threatens to delay the rollout, and leave the US trailing China.

Lobbying

Putting corporate America’s new ‘stakeholder’ principles to work in regulatory policy

Tom Wheeler  |  Analysis  |  Brookings

Too often, the corporate response to regulation has not been “what’s best for all stakeholders,” but “what’s best for the CFO (Chief Financial Officer).” The lobbying refrain sounds like this: “because regulation could hurt profits, it will hurt our ability to invest and innovate and therefore hurt the public interest.” You hear this from Big Pharma’s television ads. Broadband networks used the argument to kill net neutrality. Big Tech hides behind it to exploit our personal privacy. For almost 50 years—spearheaded by the Chicago School of economists—the gospel that companies know best and regulation is bad has been corporate America’s default policy position. The argument received a boost with the arrival of the internet. As new companies arose and old companies retooled, digital technology was presented as something close to magical. Anything that interfered with the companies’ ability to make their own rules for the digital marketplace threatened to break that magic. 

As a regulator, I lost count of the number of times the benefits of “permissionless innovation” were touted as the reason to oppose oversight of corporate activities. The myth of the genius in the garage became the image of digital businesses, whether large or small. It was great positioning, but a specious argument. Oversight of the digital marketplace is less about pre-approval “permission” to follow new ideas than it is about constraining the inherent excesses of company-made rules. The result of “permissionless innovation” has too often resulted in “permissionless exploitation.” 

[Tom Wheeler Chairman Tom Wheeler is a visiting fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. Wheeler is a businessman, author, and was Chairman of the Federal Communication Commission from 2013 to 2017.]

Submit a Story

Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.


© Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 2019. Redistribution of this email publication — both internally and externally — is encouraged if it includes this message. For subscribe/unsubscribe info email: headlines AT benton DOT org


Kevin Taglang

Kevin Taglang
Executive Editor, Communications-related Headlines
Benton Institute
for Broadband & Society
727 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, IL 60202
847-328-3049
headlines AT benton DOT org

Share this edition:

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society All Rights Reserved © 2019