Daily Digest 3/4/2020 (Broadband DATA Act)

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society
Table of Contents

Universal Service

Federal Universal Service Support Mechanisms Quarterly Contribution Base for the Second Quarter 2020  |  Universal Service Administrative Company
Federal Universal Service Support Mechanisms Fund Size Projections for Second Quarter 2020  |  Universal Service Administrative Company

Broadband/Internet

Broadband DATA Act, meant to improve FCC's broadband mapping, passes House again  |  Read below  |  Marguerite Reardon  |  C|Net
Why ‘rural broadband’ may no longer be an oxymoron  |  Read below  |  Rob Pegoraro  |  Fast Company
Alaskan Telephone Co-op to Connect Remote Village With Fiber, Wireless Middle Mile  |  Read below  |  Katie Kienbaum  |  Institute for Local Self-Reliance
ReConnect Funding a Shot in the Arm for Virginia Co-op Fiber Broadband Deployment  |  Institute for Local Self-Reliance
Op-ed: The FCC wants to shut out the public — again  |  Progressive, The

Platforms

All the Ways Congress is Taking on the Tech Industry  |  Read below  |  Makena Kelly  |  Analysis  |  Vox
Bipartisan SHOP SAFE Act to Protect Consumers and Businesses from the Sale of Dangerous Counterfeit Products Online  |  House Judiciary Committee
Facebook spies on us but not by recording our calls. Here's how the social network knows everything  |  USA Today
Media Observers Raise Concerns Over Daily Caller Being Given Fact-Checking Power by Facebook  |  Wrap, The
Congress, DOJ take aim at Sec 230  |  Washington Post

Education

Broadband and Student Performance Gaps  |  Read below  |  Keith Hampton, Laleah Fernandez, Craig Robertson, Johannes Bauer  |  Research  |  Quello Center for Media & Information Policy

Health

Lawmakers Push Again for Info on Google Collecting Patient Data  |  Wall Street Journal
Coronavirus Misinformation Lives Online, Despite Efforts to Stamp It Out  |  Wall Street Journal

Wireless

'White Space' Tech Could Soon Bring Better Broadband to Rural America  |  Read below  |  Karl Bode  |  Vice
Did Apple throttle your iPhone? Settlement will give you a whopping $25  |  Read below  |  Jon Brodkin  |  Ars Technica
The 5G of T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T all rank badly for different reasons  |  Fierce
American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials to FCC: 5.9 GHz spectrum proposal could risk lives  |  Multichannel News

Government & Communications

Trump campaign sues Washington Post for defamation, week after similar legal action against New York Times  |  CNBC
Voice of America journalists fight claims that it is Trump propaganda  |  Axios

Elections & Media

Bloomberg's online tactics test the boundary of disinformation  |  Bloomberg

Privacy

The case against smart baby tech  |  Vox

Televison

Major Pay-TV Providers Lost About 4,915,000 Subscribers in 2019  |  Leichtman Research Group

Policymakers

Supreme Court weighs giving presidents more power over semi-independent agencies  |  Los Angeles Times

Stories From Abroad

How the internet shutdown in Kashmir is splintering India’s democracy  |  Fast Company
Today's Top Stories

Broadband

Broadband DATA Act, meant to improve FCC's broadband mapping, passes House again

Marguerite Reardon  |  C|Net

The House passed a new version of a bill meant to improve the accuracy of maps detailing where broadband is and isn't available in the US. The legislation is now on a fast track to the Senate, where it's expected to pass before going to President Donald Trump for signing. The bipartisan Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (DATA) Act was passed by the House late in 2019 as part of a broader package of legislation intended to improve the Federal Communications Commission's broadband maps. The Senate also passed a version of the bill. The new House version of the bill (S 1822) reconciles the two versions of the legislation. But because there was an amendment on the House floor, the latest bill still must go back to the Senate. The Senate is in agreement with the change, and the legislation is expected to pass that chamber without issue. 

The purpose of the Broadband DATA Act is to ensure the FCC collects more-granular information about where broadband does and doesn't exist. The bill requires the agency to deliver new rules for data collection and "establish a process to verify the accuracy of such data, and more."  

Why ‘rural broadband’ may no longer be an oxymoron

Rob Pegoraro  |  Fast Company

Traditionally, the story of rural broadband in America has ended with a two-letter word: no. No, the local cable or phone monopoly isn’t going to extend service to this county or that town. No, the satellite broadband that does reach there isn’t going to get rid of its data caps or sluggish latency. No, states won’t let anybody but incumbent telecom providers enter the market. A new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts, however, suggests the future might be less bleak. No one connectivity technology or funding mechanism that will bring broadband to the Great Unwired. “One of the key findings in our report is that this is a multi-faceted challenge and there is no single solution,” summed up Kathryn de Wit, manager of Pew’s broadband research initiative. Put aside 5G hype; she added that wireless technology remains mostly a last-mile solution at the end of conventional wired connectivity, saying “there’s a lot of wire in wireless.”

Much of the advice here could be fairly summarized as “do representative government right.” As in, practice the consensus-building and accountability methods that would figure in any playbook for a public-funded, multi-stakeholder project. But if you establish measurable goals, have a governor or influential legislators champion broadband expansion, ensure that dedicated and visible staff oversee the program, and loop in both existing private actors (internet providers, electric utilities, tech firms) and local governments and advocates, good things can happen.

Alaskan Telephone Co-op to Connect Remote Village With Fiber, Wireless Middle Mile

Katie Kienbaum  |  Institute for Local Self-Reliance

In 1999, Yakutat (AK) became home to one of Alaska’s first surf shops. Now, two decades later, the coastal community of 600 people is looking at another first for the community — high-speed Internet access. Cordova Telecom Cooperative (CTC) will be expanding its broadband network to Yakutat from the co-op’s headquarters 220 miles away in Cordova (AK). Already, CTC offers wireline and mobile connectivity in and around Cordova. The new project, codenamed NICEY or New Internet Communications for Everyone in Yakutat, will bring high-quality Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Internet access to the village, which has a large Native Alaskan population. NICEY will be financed in large part by a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) ReConnect grant of nearly $19 million awarded to CTC in Dec. This money will help fund not only the deployment of the fiber network in Yakutat but also the construction of several remote wireless towers to connect the village to the broader Internet.

Platforms

All the Ways Congress is Taking on the Tech Industry

Makena Kelly  |  Analysis  |  Vox

In 2020, lawmakers have lots of ideas about how to regulate tech companies. New bills are introduced every day, creating a sea of regulatory threats that’s difficult to keep straight as time goes on. A majority of these measures will never make their way into a committee hearing, and even fewer will be signed into law. But taken as a whole, they give us a sense of what a major tech regulation bill might look like this Congress. And as the 2020 election season takes off, that picture is more urgent than ever.

  • Crafting a federal data privacy framework: The biggest regulatory target is all of the data tech companies collect from their users, so many legislators are pushing for a far-reaching federal law to regulate personal data, akin to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 
  • Updating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Some lawmakers fear that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) isn’t tough enough to take on Big Tech’s abuses over children’s data.
  • Rules for Digital Advertising. The Honest Ads Act (S 1356) was first introduced in 2017, but the discussion surrounding political ads has evolved tremendously in the three years since it was proposed.
  • Deception and Interoperability: Sen Mark Warner (D-VA) has spearheaded a handful of efforts to get other lawmakers talking about tech regulation over the past few years, including measures that ensure platforms aren’t designed in deceptive or anti-competitive ways. In April 2019, Sen Warner sponsored the DETOUR Act with Sen Deb Fischer (R-NE) to target so-called “dark patterns” — deceptive practices used to convince users to engage with them in ways that benefit the company.

Education

Broadband and Student Performance Gaps

Keith Hampton, Laleah Fernandez, Craig Robertson, Johannes Bauer  |  Research  |  Quello Center for Media & Information Policy

This study was designed to understand the repercussions of absent or poor home Internet connectivity on student performance and the associated costs to society. The focus is on Internet connectivity outside of school among middle and high school students enrolled in rural and smalltown schools. This report examines how differences in the type and quality of home connectivity (eg, broadband vs. cell phone) relate to school performance and other student outcomes in grades 8-11, in fifteen predominantly rural, Michigan, school districts. Inequalities related to income and race are often used to explain why some people still do not have Internet or broadband access at home. Often overlooked in this discussion is the role of geography. The role of location is not well understood because of difficulties in finding and studying contexts where Internet access is unavailable. In this study, many students do not have Internet access because they live in small towns, rural areas, or on farms that do not have an infrastructure to provide broadband Internet access or any Internet or cell phone service. If Internet access is available, it is often slow, and cell phone data access can be spotty and congested. Although poverty is also prevalent in these areas, many students live in households that would purchase high-speed home Internet access if it were available.

Wireless

'White Space' Tech Could Soon Bring Better Broadband to Rural America

Karl Bode  |  Vice

On Feb 28 the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve a new order paving the way for the expanded use of “white space broadband,” a promising technology that uses the spectrum freed from the shift to digital television to beam broadband into traditionally harder to reach rural areas. In 2017, Microsoft announced an ambitious plan to bring the technology to more than 2 million rural Americans across a dozen states by July 2022.

Consumer protection lawyer and wireless policy expert Harold Feld was quick to note while the new order is a good thing, delays by the FCC—and what he called a “deliberately sloppy” effort to repack remaining TV stations after white space spectrum was auctioned off—eroded much of the technology’s original potential. “The FCC basically threw everybody back together in a manner that in the more crowded urban markets meant that there isn’t a heck of a lot of space for TV white spaces to operate,” Feld said. He added that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai previously shot down more thoughtful repacking proposals. “If they’d done it the way we’d wanted to do it six or seven years ago, then it could have been a significant add on to urban broadband,” Feld said. “But you needed to have enough contiguous space in the urban areas to make that happen, which required the FCC to handle the repacking with care and precision—which they did not.” Once the technology no longer posed a threat to their urban dominance, incumbent broadband providers backed off their opposition to it. He added that the National Association of Broadcasters and Microsoft also sat down and crafted a spectrum sharing compromise to mitigate potential interference.

While white space broadband isn’t a silver bullet, it’s going to be a useful tool in the toolchest in addressing America’s stubborn broadband availability problems. And a lot of the advancements made during its meandering, decade-plus path to market should prove helpful in the development of other new technologies aimed at bridging the digital divide.

Did Apple throttle your iPhone? Settlement will give you a whopping $25

Jon Brodkin  |  Ars Technica

iPhone users are slated to get $25 each from an up-to-$500 million settlement of a class-action lawsuit over Apple's decision to throttle the performance of iPhones with degraded batteries. People eligible for the payments are US residents who used affected versions of iOS before December 21, 2017, on the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, 7, 7 Plus, or SE.

The settlement, which was submitted to a judge for approval, stems from numerous class-action complaints that were consolidated into a case against Apple in US District Court for the Northern District of California. The consolidated complaint said that, in fall 2016, iPhone users experienced a shutdown problem that "resulted from a significant design defect: the battery was not designed with enough power to meet the peak demands of the phone's processor as the battery aged. The result was that iPhones worked as expected when new, but even after a few months or years, began to cease functioning, i.e., switching off at random intervals, when the iPhone processor required too much power of its flagging iPhone battery." Apple was accused of concealing the defect by intentionally slowing down phone performance with a software update. "Throughout 2017... Apple failed to inform customers that the 'fix' to the shutdown problem in iOS 10.2.1 came with a significant—and undisclosed—tradeoff: the update artificially slowed down the processors in Apple's Devices," the complaint said.

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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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