Daily Digest 3/18/2020 (Coronavirus and Connectivity)

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society
Table of Contents

Coronavirus  Response

HHS Secretary Azar Announces Historic Expansion of Telehealth Access to Combat COVID-19  |  Read below  |  Press Release  |  Department of Health and Human Services
FCC Waives Lifeline Rules to Help Keep Low-Income Consumers Connected  |  Read below  |  Kris Anne Monteith  |  Public Notice  |  Federal Communications Commission
FCC Grants US Cellular Temporary Spectrum Access During Coronavirus  |  Federal Communications Commission
FCC Provides Coronavirus-Related Relief for Repack Stations  |  Broadcasting&Cable
Chairman Pai Commends Broadcasters' Coronavirus Response  |  Federal Communications Commission
Chairman Pai Calls for Retransmission Calm from Broadcasters and Pay-TV Providers Amid Coronavirus Storm  |  Broadcasting&Cable
Internet Traffic Surges As Companies And Schools Send People Home  |  Read below  |  Shannon Bond  |  National Public Radio
OpenVault: Residential Internet Usage Surges 98% Amid COVID-19-related Social Distancing  |  Multichannel News
The coronavirus is creating an 'enormous stress test' of America's internet  |  Read below  |  Brian Fung  |  CNN
Our Internet Isn’t Ready for Coronavirus  |  Read below  |  Josephine Wolff  |  Op-Ed  |  New York Times
The FCC should send Wi-Fi hotspots to schools to close the homework gap  |  Read below  |  FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel  |  Op-Ed  |  Vox
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on staying connected during a pandemic  |  Read below  |  Makena Kelly  |  Vox
FCC Must Act Quickly As COVID-19 Threatens Healthcare, Education  |  Read below  |  Press Release  |  Schools Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition
Coronavirus Fight Lays Bare Education’s Digital Divide  |  Read below  |  Raymond Zhong  |  New York Times
What the coronavirus reveals about the digital divide between schools and communities  |  Read below  |  Nicol Turner Lee  |  Analysis  |  Brookings Institution
Tech shapes a new stay-at-home economy  |  Read below  |  Scott Rosenberg, Kia Kokalitcheva, Ina Fried  |  Axios
The Coronavirus Crisis Is Showing Us How to Live Online  |  New York Times
News Publishers Perform Essential Function During COVID-19 Health Crisis  |  News Media Alliance
On Fox News, suddenly a very different tune about the coronavirus  |  Washington Post
Telemedicine companies are struggling to serve ‘extreme volumes’ of patients as coronavirus calls surge  |  CNBC
Meet the 17-Year-Old Behind a Website Tracking Coronavirus Cases That Is Now a Vital Global Resource  |  Democracy Now
Charter engineer quits over “reckless” rules against work-from-home  |  Ars Technica
DOJ Tweaks Merger Review Process to Accommodate Teleworking  |  Multichannel News
Announcing $1 Million in Grants to Support Coronavirus News Reporting  |  Facebook
Mass Telework Causes Operational Strains for Agencies  |  Government Executive
U.S. government, tech industry discussing ways to use smartphone location data to combat coronavirus  |  Washington Post
Sens Warner, Blumenthal Slam Google Over 'Predatory' Coronavirus Ads  |  Multichannel News
Latest Hot Spot for Coronavirus Hoarders: The Public Library  |  Wall Street Journal
To Track Virus, Governments Weigh Surveillance Tools That Push Privacy Limits  |  Wall Street Journal
Glued to TV for Now, but When Programming Thins and Bills Mount …  |  New York Times
Facebook was marking legitimate news articles about the coronavirus as spam due to a software bug  |  Vox

Broadband/Internet

Commissioner O'Rielly Letter to RUS Administrator Chad Rupe Re: Second Round of ReConnect Program  |  Read below  |  FCC Commissioner Michael O'Reilly  |  Letter  |  Federal Communications Commission
FCC Releases Preliminary List and Map of RDOF Phase I Eligible Areas  |  Federal Communications Commission
Latest Telco and Electric Cooperative Fiber Broadband Partnership Offers a Unique Model  |  Read below  |  Carl Weinschenk  |  telecompetitor

Wireless

Commissioners Rosenworcel, O'Rielly Signal CTIA's 6 GHz Proposal Isn't Way to Go  |  Multichannel News
Stanford's Human Screenome Project Digs Deeper Into Teenage Smartphone Use  |  Wall Street Journal

Platforms

Twitter Suppresses Speech by Calling It ‘Manipulated Media’  |  Read below  |  FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr  |  Op-Ed  |  
Lessons From China on the Coronavirus and the Dangers of App Consolidation  |  Read below  |  Jennifer Daskal, Mia Shuang Li  |  Op-Ed  |  Slate
It's Not Just the Content, It's the Business Model: Democracy’s Online Speech Challenge  |  Read below  |  Nathalie Maréchal, Ellery Roberts Biddle  |  Research  |  New America

Elections and Media

Campaigns turn to texting as coronavirus spreads  |  Axios

Privacy

Other countries use surveillance to fight coronavirus. Privacy advocates worry the U.S. could follow.  |  Washington Post
Stuart Brotman: Broadband network expansion has to tackle digital privacy protection  |  Hill, The

Television

Fox buys Tubi for $440 million as it attempts to join the streaming wars  |  Vox

Stories From Abroad

China Announces That It Will Expel American Journalists  |  Read below  |  Marc Tracy  |  New York Times
Coronavirus Outrage Spurs China’s Internet Police to Action  |  Read below  |  Paul Mozur  |  New York Times
Why Is South Korea a Global Broadband Leader?  |  Read below  |  Ernesto Falcon  |  Analysis  |  Electronic Frontier Foundation
 
Today's Top Stories

Coronavirus  Response

HHS Secretary Azar Announces Historic Expansion of Telehealth Access to Combat COVID-19

The Trump Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced unprecedented steps to expand Americans' access to telehealth services during the COVID-19 outbreak. The Centers for Medicare & and Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded Medicare coverage for telehealth visits, the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced it will waive potential HIPAA penalties for good faith use of telehealth during the emergency, and the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) provided flexibility for healthcare providers to reduce or waive beneficiary cost-sharing for telehealth visits paid by federal healthcare programs.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar released the following statement: "Thanks to the Public Health Emergency I declared in January, more older Americans will be able to access healthcare they need from their home, without worrying about putting themselves or others at risk during the COVID-19 outbreak. Providers will be allowed to use everyday technologies to talk to telehealth patients, more telehealth services will be covered for millions more Medicare beneficiaries, and providers will be allowed to offer these telehealth benefits to Medicare beneficiaries at a lower cost than traditional services. From the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, President Trump has been knocking out every bureaucratic obstacle possible that stands in the way of a rapid and effective response. We are grateful to the hard work of those across HHS who put together these actions, and we're grateful to American healthcare providers for working to take advantage of these options and continue their heroic work serving patients during the outbreak."

FCC Waives Lifeline Rules to Help Keep Low-Income Consumers Connected

Kris Anne Monteith  |  Public Notice  |  Federal Communications Commission

The Federal Communications Commission announced changes to the Lifeline program to assist program participants potentially affected by the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic and aid community efforts to slow its spread. The FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau waived the Lifeline program’s recertification and reverification requirements for participating low-income consumers for 60 days. The Bureau also waived for 60 days the 2019 Lifeline Order’s requirement that participating carriers’ enrollment representatives register with the Lifeline program administrator, the Universal Service Administrative Company. These changes are aimed at easing burdens on Lifeline subscribers during the coronavirus pandemic and allow Lifeline carriers to focus their efforts on assisting customers.

The changes are part of the FCC’s Keep Americans Connected Initiative to ensure that consumers stay connected during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Internet Traffic Surges As Companies And Schools Send People Home

Shannon Bond  |  National Public Radio

More people are shifting to the digital world as life outside the home is put on hold. That's putting a lot of pressure on companies to keep connections up when all their employees are trying to telework at the same time. It's also posing challenges for Internet video conferencing services. Internet infrastructure and security company Cloudflare says US Internet traffic jumped 20% on March 13, after President Donald Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency. In hard-hit Seattle, Internet use was up 40% last week compared to Jan.

The coronavirus is creating an 'enormous stress test' of America's internet

Brian Fung  |  CNN

The US' internet and wireless networks are coming under immense pressure to deliver reliable connectivity as schools and businesses confronting the novel coronavirus have shifted their day-to-day operations out of the workplace and into homes, according to industry analysts and government officials. "This is going to be an enormous stress test for our communications networks," said Blair Levin, a former Federal Communications Commission chief of staff and author of the agency's 2010 plan to improve internet access nationwide.

This shift in Americans' internet consumption patterns may soon reveal weak points in the complex ecosystem of companies, services and products that make up the internet, said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. From aging home Wi-Fi routers and digital collaboration tools to exchange points in the internet backbone, there can be many potential areas of failure, Commissioner Rosenworcel said. "There are a lot of different elements of bringing internet into the home, and a lot of places where we could find stress in the system," she said.

Our Internet Isn’t Ready for Coronavirus

Josephine Wolff  |  Op-Ed  |  New York Times

Just as our public health system appears unable to cope with the spread of the coronavirus, our residential broadband, video conferencing platforms and VPNs are about to face unprecedented strain. That strain will have serious consequences, not just for the performance of our broadband networks but also for student access to education and the security of corporate data and networks. The performance issues might be worse in rural areas, where internet service is already less reliable than it is in big cities. Roughly three million children in the United States do not have internet access at home, which means that schools in poor, rural areas may face much greater obstacles trying to provide remote learning to students than those in urban or more affluent areas. On top of performance concerns, there are also new online security issues. 

Unfortunately, improving the quality and availability of broadband isn’t something that can be done overnight. In the long term, in order for working from home to be a viable emergency response to situations like these, we will need to invest more heavily in residential broadband than we previously thought necessary. In the short term, we need to rethink how technology can best be used to support remote work and education efforts. This could mean relying less on the potential of video conferencing technologies to recreate in-person classrooms and meetings, and instead exploring how lower-bandwidth, asynchronous technologies — such as message boards, emails and recorded lectures — can be used more effectively. The future of working from home may be more low-tech than we imagined.

[Dr. Wolff is an assistant professor at Tufts University]

The FCC should send Wi-Fi hotspots to schools to close the homework gap

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel  |  Op-Ed  |  Vox

The Federal Communications Commission should use its power in this emergency to provide schools with Wi-Fi hotspots to loan out to students who lack reliable internet access at home. It has the authority to do so under the Telecommunications Act. This law, now more than two decades old, directed the agency to set up a program to support internet service in schools across the country, through a program known as E-Rate. Today, E-Rate funds broadband for educational purposes in every state. In fact, it is our nation’s largest education technology program. Under the law, support for internet service is available for “educational purposes” to enhance, to the extent technically feasible and economically reasonable, school classrooms. With schools closing and learning migrating online, this is the right moment to adjust FCC rules to expand how we think about internet access and the traditional classroom. Moreover, there is already support for doing so from major program beneficiaries, like schools and teachers. Furthermore, the E-Rate program offers support on a sliding scale. More is available for schools with higher percentages of students receiving lunch at free or reduced cost. That means the schools receiving the greatest E-Rate support are most likely to be ones with students who lack access to broadband at home. Alternatively, Congress may wish to step in and support this kind of initiative in upcoming efforts to address the coronavirus crisis. There are already homework gap-focused bills in both chambers of Congress, including legislation introduced by SenChris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Rep Grace Meng (D-NY). These efforts could include legislation to expand student access to devices, too.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on staying connected during a pandemic

Makena Kelly  |  Vox

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel.

Asked, "What are the immediate short-term steps that the FCC and the broadband companies can take, and what are the medium and long-term steps that could help us be better prepared in the future?"

Commissioner Rosenworcel said, "I’m going to try to describe what the FCC has done to date, and I’m also going to talk a little bit about what else I want the agency to do. Last week, it announced a pledge. It got several dozen of the nation’s broadband providers to commit to doing a few things. First, they would not shut anyone off during this time. If you’re a small business or a home and you can’t pay your bills, we’re not going to shut you off. Second, they are going to waive late fees during this period. And third, to the extent that they have private Wi-Fi routers that are out there, they’re going to make sure that they’re out there publicly. Everyone who has signed onto that pledge deserves credit. I think we need to go further, and some carriers have made plans to make sure some low-income households can get online for free for 60 days. Some have made clear that they will not have data caps. And these things are good, but the bottom line is: I don’t want us to just rely on their generosity. We need a nationwide plan for addressing the digital divide. I like their kindness. I want to clap for it. I want to support it. But I think, as a nation, we need a policy that addresses how we’re going to connect all of us. What are the plans we want in place to make sure it happens?"

FCC Must Act Quickly As COVID-19 Threatens Healthcare, Education

The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition asked the Federal Communications Commission to expedite affordable broadband solutions for unconnected Americans. The novel coronavirus is driving schools to online learning and increasing healthcare providers’ reliance on telehealth solutions. The SHLB Coalition letter proposes several practical, immediate actions the FCC could take to swiftly connect those without home internet access. SHLB urges the FCC to take the following actions in the next week: 

  • Authorize emergency funding from the Universal Service Fund for hot-spot lending programs through schools, libraries, and community organizations. 

  • Encourage internet service providers (ISPs) to expand their low-cost broadband service offers. 

  • Provide a subsidy to ISPs offering free or low-cost broadband to students at home in areas that schools have closed. 

  • Allow schools and libraries to extend their networks to the home, without losing E-rate money.

  • Adopt a final Order expanding funding for the Connected Care pilot program. 

  • Extend the deadline to file RHC applications to June 30.

  • Approve technical rules to promote TV White Space broadband use and availability. 

  • Allow rural schools and educational nonprofits to claim Educational Broadband Service licenses.

  • Authorize funding for wireless internet service providers to deploy broadband in unserved areas where schools are closed.

Coronavirus Fight Lays Bare Education’s Digital Divide

Raymond Zhong  |  New York Times

For all of China’s economic advancements in recent decades, the rudiments of connected life — capable smartphones, reliable internet — remain out of reach for large segments of the population. As the virus has turned online conveniences into daily necessities, these people, most of whom live in China’s rural hinterland, have been cut off from their regular lives, especially when it comes to education. The epidemic’s disparate impact on rich and poor, city and country, is a reality that more of the rest of the world is fast beginning to confront. More than 770 million learners worldwide are now being affected by school and university closures, according to the United Nations. In China, many parents cannot afford to buy multiple devices for themselves and their children, even though many of the world’s cheapest smartphones — and most of the fanciest ones, too — are made in China. The nation is blanketed in 4G service, yet the signal is spotty in parts of the countryside. Home broadband can be expensive outside big cities. Between 56 million and 80 million people in China reported lacking either an internet connection or a web-enabled device in 2018, according to government statistics. Another 480 million people said they did not go online for other reasons — for instance, because they didn’t know how. It is one thing for this digital divide to prevent people from streaming movies or ordering barbecue during the coronavirus. It is another for it to disrupt young learners’ educations.

What the coronavirus reveals about the digital divide between schools and communities

Nicol Turner Lee  |  Analysis  |  Brookings Institution

With a disproportionate number of school-age children lacking home broadband access, the breadth of the US digital divide has been revealed as schools struggle to substitute in-school resources with online instruction, electronic libraries, streaming videos, and other online tutorials. In the US, there are approximately 480,000 school buses that transport about 25 million students on a  weekly basis to school and back. With newly installed Wi-Fi hotspots, these buses can maintain the integrity of current social distancing. Across the country, students eligible for free or reduced-price meals are being sent to onsite and mobile sites. In fiscal year 2018, the National School Lunch Program provided low-cost and free lunches to 29.7 million children in households with incomes at or below 130% in poverty. Schools and local libraries can partner to bring lending programs for hardware and other internet-enabled devices, including Wi-Fi hotspots, to needy students while they are at these centers.

Assuming most people are online would be the first mistake of policymakers as they work to mitigate our current health risks. The second mistake would be not thinking more globally about why everyone needs to be connected. Today, the problems of the digital divide are manifesting among students. In the future, it will challenge workers forced to move to telework. As we assess the broader impacts and implications of the coronavirus, one thing is clear—we are not effectively using and disseminating 21st century tools to alleviate current and unforeseen problems.

Tech shapes a new stay-at-home economy

Scott Rosenberg, Kia Kokalitcheva, Ina Fried  |  Axios

As the coronavirus crisis forces daily life across the US into a new homebound template, the tech industry is swooping in to reshape how we shop, eat and entertain ourselves. Trends toward e-commerce, delivery services and online entertainment have long been underway, but this moment is accelerating them — and pushing the companies and industries behind them into a new position of dominance. The longer our public health crisis lasts, the more deeply these changes will etch themselves into the economy. As one of its side effects, the coronavirus pandemic could seal the fate of the digital economy's off-line competition.

Broadband/Internet

Commissioner O'Rielly Letter to RUS Administrator Chad Rupe Re: Second Round of ReConnect Program

FCC Commissioner Michael O'Reilly  |  Letter  |  Federal Communications Commission

As you are aware, I have been closely following all federal broadband funding programs, including the ReConnect Program’s grant and loan disbursements, to ensure that funds are distributed as efficiently as possible and directed foremost to those communities lacking any broadband service, rather than those areas already served by an existing provider. To that end, I have voiced concerns to the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) over the use of scarce ReConnect Program funding to overbuild existing networks, whether built through private investment or via government subsidies.

Among the more troubling aspects of the second round’s framework are (1) the decision to lower the threshold at which an area must be unserved to be eligible for a 100 percent grant from 100 percent unserved to 90 percent unserved; (2) a lack of consistent and transparent practices governing the challenge process; (3) the absence of comprehensive measures to exclude from eligibility areas already subject to enforceable deployment obligations; and (4) the decision to disproportionately favor fiber technology in the application scoring process. I would respectfully request that you consider these concerns, as further outlined below, and consider appropriate programmatic revisions as you move toward awarding further funding or designing future ReConnect Program rounds.

Latest Telco and Electric Cooperative Fiber Broadband Partnership Offers a Unique Model

Carl Weinschenk  |  telecompetitor

Smithville Communications and SCI REMC–a rural telecommunications provider and an electric cooperative, respectively–are teaming to build fiber-based broadband infrastructure to serve their common Indiana service areas. The telco electric cooperative fiber partnership project will serve about 3,400 residents and businesses in Ellettsville, Lake Monroe and Gosport (IN) communities with homes served by copper-based services. SCI REMC President and CEO James Tanneberger said that residential and business customers will be able to choose services from either company and that marketing efforts by the two will be independent. The project will begin immediately and is expected to be complete by June of 2023. “This partnership is a win for everyone involved,” Tanneberger said. “By working with Smithville, we are able to meet our electric smart grid needs and ensure businesses and residents have access to world-class high-speed internet in the most expeditious, fiscally responsible way possible.” It’s a unique partnership, where both partners will market and sell services to the same customer base.

Platforms

Twitter Suppresses Speech by Calling It ‘Manipulated Media’

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr  |  Op-Ed  |  

Twitter recently rolled out a new policy aimed at “manipulated media.” Its first target: a 13-second clip tweeted by Dan Scavino, White House director of social media, featuring Joe Biden. The Biden campaign quickly denounced the video as “disinformation” and pressured both Twitter and Facebook to take it down. Twitter slapped the manipulated-media label on it. Facebook put a “partly false” screen over it. The debate that followed helped earn the clip millions of views. Imagine going after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy Girl” ad because viewers might think the child actually died in a nuclear strike.

Today’s media and political gatekeepers aren’t concerned that people will find these clips misleading; they are rightly concerned that they will be effective. Political satire works because it challenges those in power while using humor to draw people into the discussion. Internet speech, viral videos and memes threaten those seeking to control the political narrative. By bypassing self-appointed gatekeepers, an outsider can now carry a message directly to the public. The media must often play catch-up—covering the messages and story lines that are already resonating with people. This explains efforts to equate political speech with the entirely separate categories of doctored deep fakes, illegal content and deceptive cheap fakes. These attempts to curtail lawful political speech confuse the public, making it harder to identify and build consensus around media that has truly been doctored or manipulated. Many of the latter sort of videos are on their way—whether aimed at influencing elections or otherwise swaying public debate.

Lessons From China on the Coronavirus and the Dangers of App Consolidation

Jennifer Daskal, Mia Shuang Li  |  Op-Ed  |  Slate

While quarantined in her Wuhan apartment for days on end, the woman who calls herself “Sister Ma” suddenly found herself blocked from her account on WeChat, a platform used by more than 1 billion people in China. Without WeChat, she was cut off from communication with friends and family, the ability to order critical supplies, and contact with her children’s school. “My life is falling apart,” she wrote on a now-deleted but archived message on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Others who found themselves in the same situation described losing all of their digital documents, professional contacts, and access to their digital cash and paid media subscriptions. Tencent, the company that owns WeChat, has been using keywords—like using coronavirus in conjunction with U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or epidemic spread plus Xi Jinping—to silence unwanted discussions of the coronavirus on WeChat, with potentially negative effects on health and safety. But the censorship extends much further than this message-by-message suppression. As Sister Ma’s story demonstrates, Tencent also has been shutting down and suspending the WeChat accounts of those who critique the government’s handling of the virus, and not just in China. Account shutdowns and suspensions in the United States, Europe, and Canada highlight both the growing reach—and power—of China’s chilling suppression apparatus. Once kicked off WeChat, users are often cut off from communiciation with friends and relatives still in China.

It's Not Just the Content, It's the Business Model: Democracy’s Online Speech Challenge

Nathalie Maréchal, Ellery Roberts Biddle  |  Research  |  New America

This report, the first in a two-part series, articulates the connection between surveillance-based business models and the health of democracy. Drawing from Ranking Digital Rights’s extensive research on corporate policies and digital rights, we examine two overarching types of algorithms, give examples of how these technologies are used both to propagate and prohibit different forms of online speech (including targeted ads), and show how they can cause or catalyze social harm, particularly in the context of the 2020 U.S. election. The report also highlights what we don’t know about these systems, and call on companies to be much more transparent about how they work.

Key recommendations for corporate transparency

  • Companies’ rules governing content shared by users must be clearly explained and consistent with established human rights standards for freedom of expression.
  • Companies should explain the purpose of their content-shaping algorithms and the variables that influence them so that users and the public can understand the forces that cause certain kinds of content to proliferate, and other kinds to disappear.
  • Companies should enable users to decide whether and how algorithms can shape their online experience.
  • Companies should be transparent about the ad targeting systems that determine who can pay to influence users.
  • Companies should publish their rules governing advertising content (what can be advertised, how it can be displayed, what language and images are not permitted).
  • All company rules governing paid and organic user-generated content must be enforced fairly according to a transparent process.
  • People whose speech is restricted must have an opportunity to appeal.
  • Companies must regularly publish transparency reports with detailed information about the outcomes of the steps taken to enforce the rules.

Stories From Abroad

China Announces That It Will Expel American Journalists

Marc Tracy  |  New York Times

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs will expel American journalists working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. It also demanded that those outlets, as well as the Voice of America and Time magazine, provide the Chinese government with detailed information about their operations. China instructed American journalists “whose press credentials are due to expire before the end of 2020” to “notify the Department of Information of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs within four calendar days starting from today and hand back their press cards within ten calendar days.” It went on to specify that the American journalists now working in China “will not be allowed to continue working as journalists in the People’s Republic of China, including its Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions.”

Coronavirus Outrage Spurs China’s Internet Police to Action

Paul Mozur  |  New York Times

As China tries to reshape the narrative of its fumbled response to the coronavirus outbreak, it is turning to a new breed of police that carry out real-world reprisals for digital misdeeds. The internet police, as they are known here, have gained power as the Communist Party has worked to seize greater control over the thoughts, words, and even memories of China’s 800 million web users. Now, they are emerging as a bulwark against the groundswell of anger over governance breakdowns that exacerbated the epidemic. Officers arrive with an unexpected rap at the door of online critics. They drag off offenders for hours of interrogation. They force their targets to sign loyalty pledges and recant remarks deemed politically unacceptable, even if those words were made in the relative privacy of a group chat.

Why Is South Korea a Global Broadband Leader?

Ernesto Falcon  |  Analysis  |  Electronic Frontier Foundation

How did South Korea become a global broadband leader? Electronic Frontier Foundation did a deep dive into this question and has produced the following report. The key takeaway: government policies that focus on expanding access to telecommunications infrastructure were essential to success. 

Universal fiber network access, where nearly every citizen had access to high-speed broadband, has existed in South Korea for years now. In comparison, the United States is between 20 percent to 30 percent fiber to the home infrastructure.  Such an infrastructure, per EFF’s analysis, is capable of being upgraded at low costs to substantially higher speeds for decades to come. This infrastructure has also allowed South Korea to leapfrog ahead of the United States on 5G: in just a handful of months, South Korea’s telecom sector signed up 4 million 5G subscribers and counting. What led to this rapid deployment of their 5G wireless network? New infrastructure sharing policies explicitly designed to reduce the cost of deployment and ensure that wireless competitors operated on an equal playing field. 

There are no good reasons why major cities in the United States are not as connected as Seoul.

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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.


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