Monday, November 25, 2019
Headlines Daily Digest
Don't Miss:
Tim Berners-Lee unveils global plan to save the web
The Not So Good, Very Bad and Really Weird Merger of T-Mobile and Sprint
Washington Post Editorial: Congress agrees data privacy is a problem. So where’s the bill?
FCC Meeting
Internet/Broadband
Ownership
Data, Privacy, and Security
Wireless
Elections
Communications & Democracy
Government
Telecommunications
Children & Media
Company News
Stories From Abroad
As part of its continuing efforts to safeguard the security and integrity of the nation’s communications networks, the Federal Communications Commission has barred use of its $8.5 billion a year Universal Service Fund (USF) to purchase equipment and services from companies that pose a national security threat. The Order adopted initially designates Huawei Technologies Company and ZTE Corp. as companies covered by this rule and establishes a process for designating additional covered companies in the future. The Order also establishes a certification and audit regime to enforce the new rule. In an accompanying Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking adopted Nov 22, the FCC is proposing to require carriers receiving USF funds, known as eligible telecommunications carriers, to remove and replace existing equipment and services from covered companies.
The Federal Communications Commission began a rulemaking which would adopt new procedures to protect federal funds from misuse. The proposed rules would provide the FCC with broader and more flexible authority to promptly remove bad actors from participation in the Universal Service Fund (USF), the Telecommunications Relay Services (TRS) Fund, and the National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program. The proposal would align FCC rules with the Office of Management and Budget’s Guidelines to Agencies on Government Debarment and Suspension.
The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeks to provide the FCC with greater flexibility in preventing fraud, including the ability to consider a broader range of misconduct and to immediately suspend entities when necessary to protect the public interest. The proposed rules would require program participants to verify that they themselves are not excluded from participating in federal programs and that they will not enter into new transactions with excluded third parties. This would keep bad actors out of FCC programs and help prevent bad actors from using other companies to shield them from accountability and let them access federal support. The proposed rules would also allow the FCC to participate in a government-wide mechanism through which suspension or debarment by the FCC would apply to other federal agencies and vice versa.
The Federal Communications Commission adopted rules that will help first responders locate people who call 911 from wireless phones in multi-story buildings. The rules will help emergency responders determine the floor level of a 911 caller, which will reduce emergency response times and ultimately save lives. The action builds on the FCC’s efforts to improve its Enhanced 911 rules, which require wireless providers to transmit to 911 call centers information on the location of wireless 911 calls. The rules require wireless providers to meet an increasingly stringent series of location accuracy benchmarks in accordance with a timetable, including providing the caller’s dispatchable location, such as the street address and apartment number, or coordinate-based vertical location on a phased-in basis beginning in April 2021. Nov 22’s Order adopts a vertical, or z-axis, location accuracy metric of plus or minus three meters relative to the handset for 80% of indoor wireless 911 calls. This accuracy metric— within three meters above or below the phone—will more accurately identify the floor level for most 911 calls and is achievable, keeping the deployment of vertical location information to public safety officials on schedule.
The Federal Communications Commission announced the winners of the agency’s Excellence in Economic Analysis, Excellence in Engineering Analysis, and Employee of the Year Awards.
Excellence in Economic Analysis Award – Matthew Collins, Katherine LoPiccalo, Patrick Sun, and Aleksandr Yankelevich of the Office of Economics and Analytics (OEA) share the 2019 award for their substantial and comprehensive economic analysis of the proposed merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. Their work combined rigorous application of standard merger evaluation techniques with novel methods that were necessary to evaluate the proposed transaction and address the multitude of arguments in the record concerning its competitive ramifications.
Excellence in Engineering Analysis Awards – Johnny Le from the Enforcement Bureau’s Dallas Office, recognized for his work in developing a mobile broadband LTE coverage and service drive test survey package to support the Mobility Fund II (MF-II) project.
Employee of the Year – Individual awards were presented to William Beckwith of the Public Service Homeland Security Bureau (PSHSB) for his streamlined improvements to a decade-old annual data collection process, analysis, and report; Jonathan McCormack of OEA for his contributions in designing, overseeing, and launching facets of the MF-II Challenge process; and Jim Scott of the Enforcement Bureau for his coordination with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and PSHSB, as well as repairs to the FCC’s damaged Type I site in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. A team award was presented to Anthony Asongwed, Towanda Bryant, Kathleen Campbell, Jae Lim, Eleanor Lott, Trang Nguyen, and Jeanette Springs of the International Bureau who helped successfully implement a new sixmonth application window for C-Band earth station operators to register with the FCC.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, has launched a global action plan to save the web from political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations and other malign forces that threaten to plunge the world into a “digital dystopia”. The Contract for the Web requires endorsing governments, companies and individuals to make concrete commitments to protect the web from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity. “If we leave the web as it is, there’s a very large number of things that will go wrong. We could end up with a digital dystopia if we don’t turn things around. It’s not that we need a 10-year plan for the web, we need to turn the web around now,” he said. The contract, which has been worked on by 80 organisations for more than a year, outlines nine central principles to safeguard the web – three each for governments, companies and individuals. The contract’s principles require governments to do all they can to ensure that everyone who wants to can connect to the web and have their privacy respected. Further principles oblige companies to make internet access affordable and calls on them to develop web services for people with disabilities and those who speak minority languages. The document, published by Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation, has the backing of more than 150 organisations, from Microsoft, Google and Facebook to the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At the time of writing, neither Amazon nor Twitter had endorsed the principles.
For those of you unfamiliar with the merger, 17 months ago, in April 2018, T-Mobile and Sprint announced that they would merge in a deal valued at around $26 billion dollars and sought permission from the Justice Department to do so. You might think that with clear evidence of price increases and other consumer and competitive harms, and before a Justice Department that had sued to block the vertical merger of AT&T and Time Warner, and whose Antitrust Chief, Makan Delrahim, had made it abundantly clear multiple times that behavioral remedies were inadequate to resolve competitive harms, this 4-3 merger would have been blocked a long time ago. But you would be wrong. Instead, we’ve witnessed one of the worst and weirdest cases of industrial policymaking I’ve ever seen in any Administration, Democratic or Republican.
Congress has been promising federal privacy legislation for a year now and producing little more than a hodgepodge of conflicting piecemeal proposals. Now, at long last, one party’s leadership has stepped up to put the muscle of its caucus behind...a loose set of principles. Senate Democrats under Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) unveiled what is basically a wish list for a bill-to-be, supported by the ranking members of the four relevant committees. The showing of support lends some leverage to Sen Maria Cantwell (D-WA), who has been negotiating with Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) in search of a bipartisan plan. And there’s a deadline: a hearing to be scheduled for early Dec, by which time lawmakers will either have to present some language or show up empty-handed.
The Democratic principles are promising in this regard: They rely on some long-standing concepts about Americans’ rights to know how firms handle their data, but they also direct the focus away from the consumer’s responsibility to read impenetrable terms of service and toward corporate responsibility to treat people’s data more responsibly and respectfully. Republicans should take the Democratic offer and run with it. Democrats, in turn, should stay serious about playing ball.
On Nov 20, AT&T announced a partnership with the Washington Post to weave 5G technology into the paper’s reporting operations. "Teams at both companies will experiment with new formats and see what immersive journalism can do better as the world is increasingly connected to 5G," AT&T said. “The Post plans to experiment with reporters using millimeter wave 5G+ technology to transmit their stories, photos and videos faster and more reliably," the newspaper said. The 5G AT&T plans to provide to Washington Post workers in downtown DC will be more like Wi-Fi in that the carrier’s millimeter-wave coverage—the fastest and most responsive kind of 5G, which AT&T will market as “5G+”—will come from a special setup inside the newsroom. In other words, don’t expect to be able to hop on that blessed bandwidth from across K Street.
A long-awaited international deal governing how the world’s technology companies should roll out 5G technology poses serious risks to weather forecast accuracy, according to data from federal agencies and the World Meteorological Organization. Negotiators from around the world announced a deal Nov 22 at a meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for how to roll out 5G technology that operates using specific radio frequency bands. Studies completed before the negotiations by US government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Navy had warned that 5G equipment operating in the 24-gigahertz frequency band could interfere with transmissions from polar-orbiting satellites used to gather weather data. This could make forecasts much less reliable, the reports found.
Going into the negotiations in Egypt, the US took a negotiating position that was extremely concerning to scientists at NOAA and NASA, because it called for a limit of up to -20 decibel watts of interference (the lower the limit, the more buffer room there is). European regulators and the World Meteorological Organization, a UN agency, took a stricter line, arguing for stricter interference limits of up to -55 decibel watts. The newly agreed standard represents a middle ground and will be introduced in two stages. The first stage, which will be in effect until Sept. 1, 2027, will be -33 decibel watts, and this will tighten to -39 decibel watts after that.
After the 2016 presidential election, Republican Party officials credited Facebook with helping Donald Trump win the White House. One senior official singled out a then-28-year-old Facebook employee embedded with the Trump campaign, calling him an “MVP.” Now that key player is working for the other side—as national debate intensifies over Facebook’s role in politics.
James Barnes left Facebook this spring, and said he is now dedicated to using the digital-ad strategies he employed on behalf of the Trump campaign to get President Trump out of office in 2020. Barnes, who had been a lifelong Republican, has registered as a Democrat and recently started working with a progressive nonprofit called Acronym, where former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe is on the board. In a series of interviews over the past three weeks, Barnes discussed how he helped the Trump campaign leverage some of Facebook’s powerful tools and products to extend its reach. He talked about the pressure he felt behind the scenes, both from the Trump campaign and some colleagues at Facebook. His account sheds new light on Facebook’s role in the Trump campaign and what Democrats are trying to learn from it going into the next presidential election.
The DOTGOV Online Trust in Government Act (S 2749) would codify the process through which federal and nonfederal entities request internet domain names specifically for governmental users (i.e. domain names ending in .gov). The bill would transfer the responsibility for overseeing the current process from the General Services Administration (GSA) to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The bill also would permit state and local entities to apply for homeland security grants to help fund the costs of transitioning to those governmental domain names.
GSA spends about $5 million each year to manage the program. CBO expects that under the bill, CISA would pay for those operating expenses instead; thus, any change in spending subject to appropriation would be insignificant. GSA currently charges a $400 fee for each domain name request to recover the amount it pays vendors to process the transaction. S 2749 would permit CISA to provide that service with or without reimbursement. A reduction in fee collections from nonfederal entities would be recorded as an increase in direct spending. CBO does not expect that CISA would waive the current fee; thus, any increase in direct spending would be insignificant over the 2020‑2029 window, CBO estimates.
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
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:
The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society All Rights Reserved © 2019