Daily Digest 12/24/2019 (Randy Suess)

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Headlines Daily Digest

Headlines will return Thursday, January 2. Happy Holidays


Don't Miss:

California Invests $12.7 Million in Broadband Infrastructure

How Your Phone Betrays Democracy

Trump elevates Mulvaney aide to telecom post weeks after he defied impeachment subpoena

Table of Contents

Broadband/Internet

California Invests $12.7 Million in Broadband Infrastructure and Access for Unserved California Households  |  Read below  |  Press Release  |  California Public Utilities Commission
Bridging the Broadband Availability Gap  |  Read below  |  Broadband Communities Magazine
Internet Essentials: A Record-Setting Year  |  Read below  |  Davis Cohen  |  Press Release  |  Comcast
How net neutrality defined a decade of internet activism  |  Daily Dot

Wireless

T-Mobile/Sprint deal is good actually, Feds tell court in states’ lawsuit  |  Read below  |  Kate Cox  |  Ars Technica
Internal T-Mobile documents show the company considering a Comcast merger  |  Vox
2020 Preview: A new chapter in wireless competition  |  Fierce
Looking back at 2019 in wireless—the good, the bad and the ugly  |  Fierce
2020 Preview: 5G devices go mainstream  |  Fierce
Pentagon wants open-source 5G plan in campaign against Huawei  |  Financial Times

Telecom

2019 Was a Big Year for Telecom Mergers and Acquisitions  |  telecompetitor
Toronto-based Brookfield Infrastructure Buying Cincinnati Bell for $2.6 billion  |  Cincinnati Business Courier

Emergency Communications

911 in 2019: A Look Back and a Look Ahead  |  Federal Communications Commission

Privacy/Security

How Your Phone Betrays Democracy  |  Read below  |  Charlie Warzel, Stuart Thompson  |  New York Times
Video: You Should Be Freaking Out About Privacy  |  New York Times
Editorial: Total Surveillance Is Not What America Signed Up For  |  New York Times
States Press Ahead With Privacy Laws Even as Congress Stalls  |  Bloomberg
Where Even the Children Are Being Tracked  |  New York Times

Elections & Media

Bloomberg campaign to use Hawkfish, the secretive company he founded, for digital strategy  |  Hill, The

Television

8 Ways Netflix and the Streaming Revolution Upended Hollywood This Decade  |  Wrap, The
Half of US Homes Now Stream Video Daily  |  Multichannel News

Content

The 2010s were supposed to bring the ebook revolution. It never quite came.  |  Vox

Journalism

These Reporters Lost Their Jobs. Here Are the Stories They Couldn’t Tell.  |  New York Times

Policymakers

President Trump elevates Mulvaney aide weeks after he defied impeachment subpoena  |  Read below  |  Kyle Cheney  |  Politico
President Trump Taps Arizona State University's Sethuraman Panchanathan to be the Director of the National Science Foundation  |  White House
Chairman Simons Announces Departure of Economics Bureau Director Bruce Kobayashi, Appointment of Andrew Sweeting  |  Federal Trade Commission

Company News

Inside Documents Show How Amazon Chose Speed Over Safety in Building Its Delivery Network  |  ProPublica
5 things Facebook got right in 2019—and 5 it got wrong  |  Fast Company
Today's Top Stories

Broadband

California Invests $12.7 Million in Broadband Infrastructure and Access for Unserved California Households

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved $12,689,849.72 in grant funding to build high-speed broadband Internet infrastructure and access to unserved Californians. The awards, under the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) broadband infrastructure grant program administered by the CPUC, will serve households in Lassen, Modoc, Kern, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties, and include affordable subscription options. Collectively, the grants—primarily for fiberoptic infrastructure investments—will provide high-speed Internet service to 542 unserved households. The grants were awarded to:

  • Frontier Communications for the Phase I Northeast Project in the amount of $10,912,972.96 (Resolution T-17671)
  • Frontier Communications for the Taft Cluster Project in the amount of $399,701.79 (Resolution T-17668)
  • Charter Communications for the Country Squire Mobile Home Park, Highland Orchid Drive and Silver Wheel Ranch Mobile Home Park Projects in the amount of $1,377,174.97 (Resolution T-17680)

Bridging the Broadband Availability Gap

At Broadband Communities’ 2019 economic development conference, held in October in Alexandria, Virginia, participants shared stories about how communities are improving broadband access to facilitate economic development, digital literacy and consumer choices. Followi the link to some of the highlights of the conference sessions.

Internet Essentials: A Record-Setting Year

Davis Cohen  |  Press Release  |  Comcast

In August, Comcast announced the most sweeping eligibility change in Internet Essentials' eight-year history.  Comcast is now offering Internet connections to all low-income Americans, wherever Comcast offers service.  Since the program launched in 2011, more than eight million low-income Americans have connected to the Internet at home, roughly 90 percent of whom were not connected prior to joining Internet Essentials. Comcast has invested more than $650 million in digital skills training, benefiting nearly 9.5 million people. Internet Essentials has provided 100,000 heavily discounted and subsidized laptop or desktop computers.

Wireless

T-Mobile/Sprint deal is good actually, Feds tell court in states’ lawsuit

Kate Cox  |  Ars Technica

In a Dec 20 court filing,  the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission argued that T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint is in the best interest of the US, and any nationwide injunction holding up the merger would block "substantial, long-term, and procompetitive benefits for American consumers." The argument, in large part, boils down to: trust us, we're the experts. "Both the Antitrust Division and the FCC have significant experience and expertise in analyzing these types of transactions and do so from a nationwide perspective," the agencies write. "Thus, their conclusions that the merger as remedied is in the public interest deserve appropriate weight in this remedy inquiry by this honorable court."

Privacy/Security

How Your Phone Betrays Democracy

Charlie Warzel, Stuart Thompson  |  New York Times

Granular surveillance is still new. But some experts argue the window to define our cultural values around tracking citizens may be closing. In the United States, and across the world, any protester who brings a phone to a public demonstration is tracked and that person’s presence at the event is duly recorded in commercial datasets. At the same time, political parties are beginning to collect and purchase phone location for voter persuasion. “Without question it’s sinister,” said Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism at Columbia University and former president of Students for a Democratic Society, a prominent activist group in the 1960s. “It will chill certain constitutionally permitted expressions. If people know they’ll be tracked, it will certainly make them think twice before linking themselves to a movement.” The hundreds of thousands of phones that light up the sky in places like Hong Kong are the expression of peaceful opposition to authority. But the inspiring images and the democratic spirit the glittering devices represent only work if the lights are eventually able to vanish.

Policymakers

President Trump elevates Mulvaney aide weeks after he defied impeachment subpoena

Kyle Cheney  |  Politico

President Donald Trump has promoted a central figure in the House impeachment inquiry who defied a subpoena to testify. Robert Blair — a top aide to acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney — was named the special representative for international telecommunications policy, a position that puts Blair in a central role atop a US effort to “promote a secure and reliable global telecommunications system.” “In this new capacity, Mr. Blair will support the Administration’s 5G efforts led by the Assistant to the President for Economy Policy, Larry Kudlow,” the White House said in a statement. “Mr. Blair will continue to serve as Assistant to the President and the Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff.”

Democrats subpoenaed Blair on Nov. 3 to testify about his awareness of Trump’s order to hold military aid to Ukraine, which they allege was part of an effort to coerce an ally — desperately fighting off a Russian invasion — to investigate his political rivals. Blair refused to appear for a Nov. 4 deposition under orders from the White House.

Submit a Story

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

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:

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society All Rights Reserved © 2019