The preliminary results of the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction are now public and while it is a long road from auction results to authorization of funding to actual deployment, the results have significant implications for US broadband policy. The results suggest that the cost of fully addressing the broadband availability gap may be much less than many currently anticipate. The results raise important questions around how much subsidy will be needed to attract deployment to serve the remaining unserved locations that will be auctioned in Phase II. If all the RDOF winners meet their commitments, we may be on track to resolve a big part of the rural broadband “availability” gap, but it will not resolve the “affordability” gap in these areas, which is likely to persist, particularly for services at 100 Mbps or better.

In 2000, just two years after it was founded, Google reached a milestone that would lay the foundation for its dominance over the next 20 years: It became the world’s largest search engine, with an index of more than one billion web pages. The rest of the internet never caught up, and Google’s index just kept on getting bigger. Today, it’s somewhere between 500 billion and 600 billion web pages, according to estimates. Now, as regulators around the world examine ways to curb Google’s power, including a search monopoly case expected from state attorneys general as early as this week and the antitrust lawsuit the Justice Department filed in October, they are wrestling with a company whose sheer size has allowed it to squash competitors. And those competitors are pointing investigators toward that enormous index, the gravitational center of the company.

Freedom of the Press Foundation's newest report shows that there have been at least 117 verified cases of a journalist being arrested or detained on the job in the US in 2020. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is also still investigating more than a dozen additional reports of arrests or detentions. Arrests of journalists skyrocketed by more than 1200% in comparison to 2019. In just one week, from May 29 - June 4, more reporters were arrested in the U.S. than in the previous three years combined. Arrests occurred in more than two dozen cities across the country. And more than 36% of the arrests were accompanied by an assault: journalists were beaten, hit with rubber bullets or other projectiles or covered in chemical agents, like tear gas or pepper spray. The vast majority of these arrests occurred while journalists were documenting the historic, nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter.

Adam Candeub, the acting head of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, has been named deputy associate attorney general. The political appointment does not require congressional confirmation. Candeub helped lead President Donald Trump’s crackdown against social media companies. Candeub has played a central role in carrying out Trump’s executive order targeting social media companies like Twitter and Facebook over allegations they censor conservative viewpoints. The executive order asked federal agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, to narrow the scope of a crucial set of liability protections that shield online companies from lawsuits over the user content they host. One of Candeub’s advisers at the NTIA, Nathan Simington, was confirmed to a five-year term as an FCC commissioner. Candeub, who first joined NTIA earlier in 2020, has a long history of bashing the social media giants over allegations of an anti-conservative bias. In 2018, Candeub represented a white nationalist in a lawsuit against Twitter alleging the social network censored him.