The Federal Communications Commission selected 707 participants for the Schools and Libraries Cybersecurity Pilot Program, including 645 schools and districts, 50 libraries, and 12 consortia. Participants in the three-year pilot program will receive support to defray the costs of eligible cybersecurity services and equipment and provide the FCC with data to better understand whether and how universal service funds could be used to improve school and library defenses against increasing cyberattacks.  All 50 states, in addition to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and several Tribal lands are reflected by the Pilot participants. The Cybersecurity Pilot Program's $200 million budget uses reserved, unused universal service funds to ensure that gains in enhanced cybersecurity do not come at the cost of undermining E-Rate success in promoting digital opportunities for all and basic connectivity. To select Pilot participants, FCC staff first looked at qualifying applicants’ discount rate and National School Lunch Program percentages, prioritizing the highest percentages.  To ensure diversity in the participant pool, including geographic diversity, staff also considered applicants’ entity type, size, and location, among other things, as directed by the FCC.  

In this Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the FCC seeks to unlock the full potential of broadband in the 896–901/935–940 MHz band (900 MHz band) by proposing a framework that will enable increased broadband deployment on all ten megahertz of the band’s spectrum while also maintaining the option of narrowband operations to meet the needs of incumbents in the band.  The FCC believes this to be an important step toward ensuring the band is efficiently and intensively utilized and that the increasing spectrum capacity and private broadband network needs of industries, such as utilities, railroads, critical infrastructure, and business enterprises, are met.  In an effort to build upon the FCC’s previous decision to realign and partially open up the band for the deployment of broadband services and technologies, the Commission proposes to update the existing 900 MHz broadband licensing framework to further facilitate a voluntary, market-driven transition and to allow 900 MHz users the opportunity to increase their broadband capacity for more advanced and robust communications networks nationwide. 

On January 13, 2025, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced its approval of Louisiana’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Final Proposal. Delaware’s approval followed the next day. With those two landmarks, coming as the fourth year since the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) begins to elapse, the BEAD program is at last beginning to bear fruit. As Louisiana and Delaware move toward signing contracts with subgrantee Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who should then initiate the construction of networks, one more state Final Proposal, Nevada’s, is being reviewed. Most states are well behind these frontrunners and are just getting started with subgrantee selection. But once BEAD network construction begins, it will only accelerate, probably hitting its stride in 2026 and 2027. For ISPs interested in contributing to the nationwide BEAD solution by expanding their coverage with its subsidies, now is prime time for preparing and submitting projects.

AT&T has made it official that it plans to shut down copper networks everywhere except California by the end of 2029. This is not exactly news since the company has been quietly shutting down copper all over the country. California is a special situation because the California Public Service Commission has never deregulated AT&T as a local telephone company and the state is going to make AT&T prove to it that customers will not be stranded when the copper comes down. AT&T says it will offer an alternate technology to customers—either fiber or wireless. AT&T announced in early December that it plans to build fiber to 45 million additional passings by the end of 2029. That will certainly cover a lot of remaining DSL neighborhoods in cities and towns. But I have to wonder if AT&T is really planning on building fiber everywhere in cities.

The Federal Trade Commission finalized changes to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule to set new requirements around the collection, use and disclosure of children’s personal information and give parents new tools and protections to help them control what data is provided to third parties about their children. The final rule requires parents to opt in to third-party advertising and includes other changes to address the emerging ways that consumers’ data is collected and used by companies, and particularly how children’s data is being shared and monetized. The FTC made several amendments to the rule, including:

• Requiring opt-in consent for targeted advertising and other disclosures to third parties: Website and online service operators covered by COPPA will be required to obtain separate verifiable parental consent to disclose children’s personal information to third-party companies related to targeted advertising or other purposes.
• Limits on data retention: The rule requires covered operators to only retain personal information for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfill a specific purpose for which it was collected. This provision explicitly states that operators cannot retain the information indefinitely.
• Increasing Safe Harbor programs’ transparency: The  FTC-approved COPPA Safe Harbor programs, which are self-regulatory programs that implement the protections of the COPPA Rule, will be required to publicly disclose their membership lists and report additional information to the FTC as part of efforts to increase accountability and transparency in the programs.