The Federal Communications Commission announced that it is ready to authorize more than $640 million through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to fund new broadband deployments in 26 states bringing service to nearly 250,000 locations. To date, the program has provided $4.7 billion in funding to nearly 300 carriers for new deployments in 47 states to bring broadband to almost 2.7 million locations. In early 2022, Chairwoman Rosenworcel established the Rural Broadband Accountability Plan (RBAP), a new effort to monitor and ensure compliance for universal service high-cost programs including the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund and Connect America Fund Phase II Auction. The RBAP made a number of changes and enhancements to existing audit and verification procedures, including doubling the number of audits and verifications, conducting the first on-site audits for the programs, and focusing audits and verifications on the largest winning bidders. A fact sheet on the RBAP is available here. The FCC also announced a number of defaulted bids, making the census blocks in those defaulted bids potentially eligible for other funding programs. Lists of the eligible census blocks covered by the winning bids and  defaulted bids are available on the Auction 904 website here.

Regional operator Ritter Communications has been awarded eight grants totaling about $44 million to provide all-fiber broadband networks in Arkansas. The grants were awarded through the Arkansas Rural Connect (ARC) program, which is funded through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The eight grants are in addition to other ARC grants previously made to Ritter, bringing the total ARC funding awarded to the provider to $67 million. Ritter will supplement the funding to “ensure ubiquitous network coverage” and make the final connections to homes and businesses. The areas will have access to Ritter’s RightFiber symmetrical 1 Gbps service. The networks can be upgraded to 10 Gbps as demand increases, according to the company.

On February 22, 2022, the Federal Communications Commission’s Broadband Data Task Force and Office of Economics and Analytics (OEA) announced the filing dates for the initial Broadband Data Collection (BDC) availability data collection. On March 9, the Task Force, OEA, the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, and the Office of Engineering and Technology released the BDC Mobile Technical Requirements Order, which adopts technical requirements to implement the BDC mobile challenge, verification, and crowdsourcing processes. The Task Force and OEA have also published two documents setting forth data specifications related to the BDC. The specifications provide guidance to filers on how to prepare and format mobile speed test data and infrastructure data for submission into the BDC system. Together with the data specifications related to the biannual submission of subscription, availability, and supporting data for the BDC, these are now available on the FCC’s Broadband Data Collection website here.

For state technology leaders, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act marks a unique opportunity to move the needle on broadband availability and accessibility. State CIOs and others in state government tasked with promoting connectivity are looking to the $65 billion earmarked for broadband as a key means to help bring affordable Internet to all Americans. Every state will get $100 million to spend on broadband once the money starts flowing, and while the final formulas haven’t been worked out, many states expect to receive significantly more over time. Executive director of the ConnectMaine Authority Peggy Schaffer has heard estimates as high as $300 million or more for her state’s piece of that pie. “It’s a significant amount of money for the state,” she said. Experts say that the infrastructure spending could go a long way toward closing connectivity gaps in underserved communities. Maryland, Maine and Utah share their plans for putting those resources to use.

The early broadcast era and our current platform era bear some striking resemblances, but one parallel looms large: In the 1940s, we lost a key battle to build a potentially liberating and wondrous medium—and we are on the cusp of doing so again. Then as now, commercial operators defined the terms by which we could use our core communication and information infrastructures. Democratic oversight, public alternatives, and social responsibilities were kept to a minimum. Democratic societies must now fight to prevent this from happening again. This essay takes a closer look at some of the underlying democratic and economic theories that were taking shape 80 years ago and considers their contemporary implications. The US has tested whether the media that democracy requires can be solely delivered by a lightly regulated commercial media system. Today, the data are in, and we can see clearly where this experiment has led us. It has ended with pervasive right-wing propaganda, with little actual journalism, and with a system that is characterized by dis/misinformation and low-quality information in general. Drawing from earlier historical lessons, one potential path ahead is twofold: First, we must reclaim an affirmative understanding regarding government’s duty to ensure that our media infrastructures serve democracy. Second, we must endeavor to remove public goods like news and information from the market entirely and create public alternatives. Pairing these two arguments—one legal-democratic and one political-economic—can help provide the intellectual foundations for a progressive policy approach toward recovering our news and information systems from monopoly power and commercial capture. If we do not learn from the miscalculations of an earlier generation of reformers, we are condemned to repeat them.

[Victor Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.]

Windstream has completed the first phase of deployment in Green County (KY) under the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) by bringing access to 109 locations in the city of Greensburg. An additional 409 homes will be given fiber access by the end of the year. The Green County RDOF award of $1.5 million will be supplemented by an investment of $2.3 million by Windstream. Windstream’s Kentucky RDOF commitment is to bring fiber to the home (FTTH) services to more than 15,700 addresses across the state during the next six years. The Greensburg deployment was the first RDOF-related work done by Windstream in the state. Windstream is in the midst of a $2 billion multi-year initiative across its 18-state footprint. It has invested more than $211 million in Kentucky from 2019 through last year and served more than 120,000 addresses as of the end of 2021. Windstream was one of the big winners from the RDOF auction, which raised $9.2 billion. In early December 2020, the FCC said that Windstream had won $522.9 million for 192,567 locations across 18 states.

Four trade groups and advocacy organizations representing the major tech companies spent roughly $2 million on Facebook advertisements opposing tech-related antitrust bills since the start of 2022. That number, which comes courtesy of an analysis of Facebook’s ad archives by Politico, will likely only increase as legislation to rein in the power of the tech giants moves through the House and Senate. Ad buys from tech trade group NetChoice made up the bulk of that spending. The group, which counts Google, Facebook and Amazon as members, spent around $1.5 million on Facebook ads targeting antitrust legislation since January 2022. The Connected Commerce Council, a business advocacy organization which receives money from Google and Amazon, came in second, with around $300,000 in ad buys opposing antitrust bills. The Taxpayers Protection Alliance spent a little less than $200,000 on similar Facebook ads, while the Chamber of Progress spent around $18,000. Robert Winterton, a spokesperson for NetChoice, said the group has used “a variety of competing ad options to educate Americans unaware of the progressive antitrust crusade against services that they rely on.” Connected Commerce Council executive director Rob Retzlaff said the group’s advertising is geared towards educating small businesses about legislation that could make their digital tools less effective. And Chamber of Progress CEO Adam Kovacevich said his group’s ads “educate voters about how the bill would impact them, and highlight Democrats who have raised concerns about the bill."