“From my first day as Chairman, the FCC’s top priority has been closing the digital divide. It’s heartening to see these numbers, which demonstrate that we’ve been delivering results for the American people,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. “In just three years, the number of American consumers living in areas without access to fixed broadband at 25/3 Mbps has been nearly cut in half. I’ve personally met some of these consumers, from Mandan, North Dakota to Ethete, Wyoming. And over the last two years, the percentage of rural Americans without access to mobile broadband with a median speed of 10/3 Mbps has been slashed from over 35% to under 10%. Moreover, at the end of 2019, mobile providers offered 5G service to approximately 60% of Americans, a figure that is substantially higher today. These successes resulted from forward-thinking policies that removed barriers to infrastructure investment and promoted competition and innovation. I look forward to seeing the Commission continue its efforts to ensure that all Americans have broadband access. Especially with the success of last year’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Phase I auction, I have no doubt that these figures will continue to improve as auction winners deploy networks in the areas for which they got FCC funding.”

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said, "Since 2017, the FCC’s top priority has been to close the digital divide. And today’s report confirms that our efforts have enabled the private sector to build out high-speed Internet infrastructure at an unprecedented pace. Indeed, the digital divide has nearly been cut in half since the end of 2016. All of these new connections have been enabled by common sense reforms to our infrastructure rules—reforms that allowed the private sector to build a record-breaking 46,000 new cell sites in 2019 alone, which is more than the combined number of sites previously built from 2015 through 2018. The FCC also worked tirelessly to free up the airwaves needed to power these new cell sites. Indeed, the Commission has recently made more than six gigahertz of spectrum available for licensed 5G services in addition to thousands of megahertz of unlicensed spectrum. I am grateful for the chance to have led the FCC’s wireless infrastructure reforms over the past three years, and I hope that the Commission continues to advance the proven and successful approaches to infrastructure and spectrum that are now delivering results in communities across the country."

"We are in the middle of a pandemic," said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. "So much of modern life has migrated online. As a result, it has become painfully clear there are too many people in the United States who lack access to broadband. In fact, if this crisis has revealed anything, it is the hard truth that the digital divide is very real and very big. So it confounds logic that today the FCC decides to release a report that says that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. If you want evidence this is not right, it’s all around us. There are people sitting in parking lots using free Wi-Fi signals because they have no other way to get online. There are students who fall in the homework gap because the lack the high-speed service they need to participate in remote learning. There are mayors in towns across the country clamoring for better broadband so their communities have a fair shot at digital age success. Across the country there are state authorities developing new plans, maps, and initiatives at the behest of their residents. Then there’s Congress, which took its cues from all of this, and just passed legislation committing $7 billion to new nationwide broadband efforts—and more is likely to come. What I take from all of this activity is that the job is not done. There is progress. But we have not yet reached all Americans. We have real work to do before we can claim that 100% of this country has access to broadband service. I dissent"

FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said, "Over the last two years, I have decried the unwarranted victory laps these reports seem to spawn. Now—as tens of millions of Americans find themselves unable to access online school, work, and healthcare during the pandemic—patting ourselves on the back is particularly unseemly. My views on the flaws in the data and analysis underlying this Report are well documented, and I will not repeat them here. But I am compelled to note that this Report should not have been released at all. After the election in November, congressional leaders wrote to Chairman Pai to demand that the Commission stop work on all partisan and controversial items during the presidential transition. This item is both. Nonetheless, Chairman Pai declined to withdraw the Report as Commissioner Rosenworcel and I requested. His rationale—that the Report has no legal significance—is plainly inconsistent with the Telecommunications Act, which directs the Commission to take “immediate action” if it determines that advanced telecommunications capability is not being deployed to all Americans on a reasonable and timely basis. That determination should have been left to the next administration, which could have addressed the question before the statutory deadline. For this reason and the substantive reasons I outlined at the Notice of Inquiry stage, I dissent."

 Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), Senator John Thune (R-SD), and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) led a bipartisan letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and fellow commissioners regarding implementation of programs to help close the digital divide in rural America. With the recent completion of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, the letter urges the FCC to ensure recipients of broadband deployment funding can deliver on their commitments. In total, 157 Representatives and Senators joined Walberg on the letter. They wrote: "We urge the FCC to validate that each provider in fact has the technical, financial, managerial, operational skills, capabilities, and resources to deliver the services that they have pledged for every American they plan to serve regardless of the technology they use. We also strongly encourage the FCC to make as public as possible the status of its review and consider opportunities for public input on the applications. Such transparency and accountability will be essential to ensure the success of this program and to minimize any opportunities for fraud or abuse."

Social-media giants are under attack for censorship, but a few years ago they positioned themselves as champions of free speech. At issue was “net neutrality,” the Obama-era policy that treated internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T as common carriers—akin to the old Ma Bell monopoly—by prohibiting them from discriminating among content providers, including the social-media sites. Facebook and Twitter turned out to be more threatening than under threat. Broadband providers haven’t attempted to block content or competitors since the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality. But social media, app stores and cloud providers, which were never subject to the rules, all have engaged in censorship repeatedly in recent weeks. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s deregulation encouraged broadband investment, which helps explain why carriers haven’t had to slow speeds amid increased user demand for bandwidth. Mr. Pai also required carriers to make public disclosures of their network-management practices, performance and commercial terms of service and asked the Federal Trade Commission to take action against those that engaged in anticompetitive or unfair and deceptive practices. All this has served consumers well.

[Finley is a member of the Journal’s editorial board]

Wireless carriers clearly believe their own press about 5G. And they are wagering a huge sum to prove it. The latest auction of wireless spectrum licenses by the Federal Communications Commission ended on January 15 with a total of $80.9 billion. Adding in an estimated $13 billion to $14 billion in clearing costs to help move satellite operators to new frequencies will bring the total bill for this latest auction to around $95 billion—roughly triple what many analysts had projected. All for the purpose of securing the necessary capacity for the latest standard of wireless networking known as 5G. AT&T and Verizon likely paid the most -- because they needed the most. Winning the licenses is one thing; paying for them is another.

The Supreme Court waded into a two-decade long debate over the extent to which the Federal Communications Commission can relax media ownership rules. At stake are recent FCC moves toward deregulation, allowing the common ownership of a newspaper and broadcast stations in the same market, as well as giving more leeway for media companies to own more than one TV and radio outlet in the same city. The dispute stretches back two decades, a few years after the FCC began a new, congressionally mandated requirement to regularly review its media ownership rules to determine whether they were still necessary in the public interest. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has repeatedly rejected the FCC’s efforts to modify the rules, and most recently a 2017 effort to overhaul the ownership restrictions. The appeals court determined that that effort failed to adequate analyze the effect that the rule changes would have on women and minority ownership of broadcast stations. 

Attorney Ruthanne Mary Deutsch was the lead counsel for a coalition of public interest groups, led by Prometheus Radio Project and including the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, contends that the FCC has “historically considered the values of localism and five different types of diversity: ‘viewpoint, outlet, program, source, and minority and female ownership diversity.'” The groups wrote in a brief last month that the FCC majority, in relaxing the ownership limits, “justified its action based on an arbitrary analysis of the same facts: It asserted that wholesale deregulation would not harm this public-interest goal—even though any reasonable analysis of the record showed that past deregulation caused harm.”

Ajit Pai’s four years atop the Federal Communications Commission outlasted many senior officials in the Trump administration where tenure was often measured in months. Some of that longevity owed to the independence of the commission, where Senate-confirmed officials are hard to remove during their terms. It also reflected Mr. Pai’s skill for navigating politically perilous rules for cellular networks, television broadcasters and big media mergers—topics about which the president often opined. “It’s very important for the FCC chair to maintain its independence because otherwise, instead of putting your finger on the problem, you’re putting your finger in the wind,” said Chairman Pai. “That’s not a good place to be for any independent leader.”