House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Greg Walden (R-OR) and Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Bob Latta (R-OH) agreed with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai that the FCC's latest Sec. 706 broadband deployment report shows "significant progress" in closing the digital divide. "This report shows that the FCC’s efforts to reduce regulatory burdens are helping more Americans gain access to broadband and bringing us closer to finally closing the digital divide,” Ranking Member Walden said. “But despite these breakthroughs, there is still more work to be done — and that’s why Republicans want to find a bipartisan solution for net neutrality. We need open internet certainty without the excessive and unrelated burdens of Title II.”

“Closing the ‘digital divide’ is one of my top priorities as Republican Leader on the Communications and Technology Subcommittee, and this report shows that efforts to reduce regulatory burdens and support investment are helping more Americans gain access to high-speed broadband,” said Ranking Member Latta. “Representing a number of rural areas in Congress, I know the difference that this will make in family homes and for businesses on Main Street in these communities. At the same time, there’s still more work to be done at the FCC and in Congress to make access to high-speed internet a reality for all Americans.”

NCTA-The Internet & Television Association has proposed a three-step method for improving the broadband availability data the Federal Communications Commission uses to direct Universal Service Fund subsidy money:

1. Polygon shapefiles, instead of proposed address-based reporting, could be achieved  as early as 2020.
2. FCC to use crowdsourcing to backstop the reported data
3. Focus on pinpointing unserved areas, which the shapefiles will help do. 

The US needs a positive alternative to the Chinese 5G model, and it needs to put it forward right now, before or during Barcelona. If we don’t, this year’s Mobile World Congress risks turning into a victory lap for Huawei and Beijing. The solution is not, as some have put it, to “become like China to beat China.” China is playing to its own strengths—state-directed investment and financing, lack of checks and balances internally, and a unified decision-making structure—to support its goal of wireless domination.

To counter this, we should play to our own strengths in turn: A culture of innovation, the power of price discovery, and deep and liquid financial markets. Our incumbent carriers are moving too slowly on 5G, content to deceptively rebrand their existing 4G networks as suddenly “5G” rather than deploy the networks of the future. Decisive action building a public-private partnership in the near term demands that we make shared spectrum available for a carrier-neutral, wholesale-only, nationwide 5G network to be built in the next two to three years across the entire country. This could be a kind of wireless moonshot (but with private capital) that will spur microelectronics manufacturing here at home, accelerate the deployment of next-generation networks, and show the world that Chinese wireless dominance is not inevitable.

By making the network wholesale and adhering to a principle of open access (rather than limited access for some companies) both existing industry players and new, entrepreneurial startups could get in the game. This would ensure the new spectrum would not become the plaything of one industry giant to the detriment of all others. Open access should also mean that available network capacity cannot be hoarded. This will increase utilization, expand the economically viable edge of the network, and allow price competition rather than oligopoly economics to set the cost of network access. This will increase return on new investment and accelerate investment in American 5G. The project should be nationwide, with broad geographic coverage—in contrast to current operators’ plans for targeted, urban-specific 5G rollouts, which leave rural America in a 3G or 4G world.

[Newt  Gingrich  was speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999]

The surprisingly complex journey a text message takes every time we hit 'send.'

Engineers would say that, when the phone senses voltage fluctuations over the ‘send’ button, it sends the encoded message to the SIM card (that tiny card your cell provider puts in your phone so it knows what your phone number is), and in the process it wraps it in all sorts of useful contextual data. By the time it reaches my wife’s SIM, it goes from a 140-byte message (just the text) to a 176-byte message (text + context).

My wife’s message is massaged into the 279-byte SS7 channel, and sent along to the local base transceiver station (BTS) near the bakery. From there, it gets routed to the base station controller (BSC), which is the brain of not just our antenna, but several other local antennas besides. The BSC flings the text to AT&T Pittsburgh’s mobile switching center (MSC), which relies on the text message’s SCA (remember the service center address embedded within every SMS? That’s where this comes in) to get it to the appropriate short message service center (SMSC). The SMS has to go from the SMSC to a global switchboard and then potentially bounce around the world before finding its way to my phone.

[Scott B. Weingart is an historian of science, a data scientist, and a librarian at Carnegie Mellon University.]

Consumer advocates are furious that the Senate Commerce Committee's initial witness list for its upcoming hearing on data privacy consists entirely of industry-backed groups. The panel, led by Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS), announced a slate of witnesses headlined by representatives from prominent tech trade groups. A Senate staffer familiar with the committee described the Feb. 27 session as a starting point on privacy discussions that will lay the groundwork for future hearings. But privacy advocates said the snub reflected a lack of regard for consumers.

 “Senator Wicker’s initial witness lineup makes a mockery of protecting the privacy of consumers,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called it “unconscionable for the Senate Commerce Committee to hold a hearing on consumer privacy and to not invite a single consumer privacy advocate to testify.” And India McKinney, legislative analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the “witnesses will not portray an accurate assessment of the current status of privacy protections.”

In 2018 the panel, then led by John Thune (R-SD), faced similar blowback from advocacy groups after convening a hearing that featured only industry representatives from companies like AT&T, Apple, Amazon and Google. After the uproar, the panel later held a second session featuring voices more critical of tech’s privacy practices, including the European Union’s top privacy official and one of the architects of California’s privacy push.

The goal of antitrust is to preserve competition and free flowing markets, but some industries have no competition to preserve, and instead need regulation to help competition flourish. Antitrust enforcement can punish companies that are out of line, but often not in time to save competition, and strong regulation is the best and fastest way to revive competition. We need new tech sector-specific guardrails to open the door to new competition, ensure diversity of ownership and viewpoints in our public discourse and prevent dominant companies from abusing their power — both economic and political. Achieving more competitive economic markets that expand the marketplace of ideas and protect our democracy requires both antitrust law and regulation working hand in hand.

[Gene Kimmelamn is President and CEO of Public Knowledge]

President Donald Trump’s war on the press hasn’t stopped. This week, he praised a $250 million libel lawsuit against the Washington Post, got some support from a Supreme Court Justice to review the nation’s libel laws, and issued his sharpest words yet against the New York Times, calling the newspaper “a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” Political journalists often ask the question: Is Trump winning his war on the media? Winning or losing, the point is that the war is ongoing. As we stated a year ago, the question should be: Are the American people the losers in this fight? And after this week, we have to ask: Is this what winning looks like?