Monday, November 18, 2019
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NTIA Minority Broadband Initiative
FCC Telehealth Barriers Report: Almost Half of US Counties Face “Double Burden”
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The Department of Agriculture invested $41.6 million in high-speed broadband infrastructure that will create or improve rural e-Connectivity for rural households and farms in Missouri and Southern Iowa. The Grand River Mutual Telephone Corporation will use ReConnect Program funding to deploy a fiber to the premises (FTTP) broadband network capable of simultaneous transmission rates of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) or greater. The funded service areas include 2,288 households, 17 businesses and 39 farms. The project will facilitate more access to services and information for local residents, and it will improve the overall quality of life for people in the community.
The Department of Agriculture invested $7.2 million in high-speed broadband infrastructure that will create or improve rural e-Connectivity for rural households and farms in Iowa and South Dakota. The Heartland Telecommunications Company of Iowa, doing business as Premier Communications, will use a ReConnect Program loan to deploy a fiber to the premises (FTTP) broadband network capable of simultaneous transmission rates of 1/1 gigabits per second. The funded service areas include 868 households, 17 businesses and 27 farms. The project will facilitate more access to services and information for local residents, and it will improve the overall quality of life for people in the community.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration launched the Minority Broadband Initiative (MBI), working with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to ensure all Americans can participate in the digital economy. NTIA will build upon its relationships with HBCUs, as community anchor institutions, to leverage minority stakeholder engagement in finding new opportunities for broadband deployment. HBCUs offer specific programmatic advantages, including supporting economic growth and competitiveness in anchor communities through high capacity broadband networks and connectivity. The MBI seeks to partner with federal agencies, local government and the private sector to explore opportunities for broadband expansion across HBCU campuses and surrounding communities. NTIA’s MBI aims to achieve the following broad strategic policy objectives:
- Convening a forum where stakeholders can explore options for leveraging HBCU broadband infrastructure to connect neighboring communities of vulnerable populations; and
- Using broadband infrastructure investment as a catalyst for adoption that will result in job growth and economic development and deployment of advanced mobile technologies primarily in the economically distressed communities of the rural South.
On November 14, the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology of the House Commerce Committee held a markup session on nine bills. Of note were two bills aimed at improving broadband data collection so policymakers have a better sense of where networks reach -- or don't reach. As we reported in September, there's a general consensus that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) isn't doing a good enough job collecting broadband data. The bills passed with little debate or controversy. But how will they help?
Broadband for America’s Future: A Vision for the 2020s is a magnum opus of broadband policy for the forthcoming decade. While there are dozens of important insights offered by the paper, perhaps the most important, are those focused on solutions to connect students who lack broadband access at home. According to estimates, 70% of teachers reportedly assign homework that requires internet access. Yet, according to the FCC’s 2019 Broadband Deployment Report, 39.8% of homes do not subscribe to high-speed broadband. As we’ve discussed in the past, where those numbers overlap is what is referred to as the Homework Gap. According to the Pew Research Center, about 15% of U.S. households with school-aged children find themselves in this gap. Of the 53.6 million households with school-aged children, about 8 million families lack a broadband subscription at home. The report provides two solutions to help close these gaps. First, author Jonathan Sallet discusses the value of Wi-Fi hotspot programs – like the one Voqal project, Mobile Citizen, operates – as a short-term solution to close this gap immediately. The second solution is to expand E-Rate, the government program that provides discounts for connectivity to schools and libraries, to cover school children at home.
The Great One, Wayne Gretzky, warned us against this status quo bias. The secret to his legendary success on the ice was to “skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” The Gretzky Test is popular in sports and in business now, and I think competition authorities—and especially those of us in tech and telecom regulation—should hold ourselves to it, too. The Federal Communications Commission has not always met that test. For too long, too many at the FCC sought to preserve the status quo, thinking that doing so could only benefit the Americans we serve. The FCC was wrong. There may be no more important iteration of the Gretzky Test for telecom regulators today than understanding the impact of 5G. Our competition policy—how we define relevant markets, in particular—needs fresh thinking. We need to regulate based on where these dynamic markets are going. And that is the best way to preserve freedom and the benefits that free markets bring to Americans.
Almost half of US counties face a “double burden” of chronic disease and a need for greater broadband connectivity, according to a new report filed with the Federal Communications Commission. The report comes from an advisory committee that was set up to identify barriers to telehealth and recommend solutions. The majority of “double burden” areas fall into what the report calls “clusters” of five or more counties with total populations exceeding 100,000. An “overall shortfall” in access to adequate broadband in rural areas limits the ability to deploy telehealth, the report notes, but the authors add that “people-based” issues are some of the most significant challenges related to the adoption of telehealth. “The process of elected officials developing appropriate regulatory guidance and legislation and licensing criterion for providers is complex and is complicated more by advocacy positions than by generally held policy principles,” the authors observe.
Google has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged. Those actions often come in response to pressure from businesses, outside interest groups and governments around the world. They have increased sharply since the 2016 election and the rise of online misinformation. Google’s evolving approach marks a shift from its founding philosophy of “organizing the world’s information,” to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear. More than 100 interviews and the Journal’s own testing of Google’s search results reveal:
- Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay, contrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action. The company also boosts some major websites, such as Amazon and Facebook.
- Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results. These features include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called “knowledge panels” and “featured snippets,” and news results, which aren’t subject to the same company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change.
- Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by US or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.
- In auto-complete, the feature that predicts search terms as the user types a query, Google’s engineers have created algorithms and blacklists to weed out more-incendiary suggestions for controversial subjects, such as abortion or immigration, in effect filtering out inflammatory results on high-profile topics.
- Google employees and executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent. Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including on topics such as vaccinations and autism.
- To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms’ rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors’ collective evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.
Twitter will no longer allow certain types of geographic or keyword targeting for advertisers promoting any type of cause, as part of rules aimed at blocking most political-related ads on its platform. Geotargeting isn’t allowed at the ZIP Code level nor are advertisers allowed to target users by their political leanings or affiliations, as part of efforts to limit issues-based advertising. Twitter defines issues-based ads as those related to civic engagement, economic growth, environmental stewardship or social-equity causes. For-profit organizations cannot run ads driving political, judicial, legislative or regulatory outcomes and must also follow the new policy, in attempts to eliminate potential loopholes. Twitter officials said the company will likely make mistakes and need to evolve its policy, which will go into effect worldwide Nov. 22.
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.
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