The Federal Communications Commission is required by law to initiate a notice of inquiry and report annually on whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. This annual broadband report is incredibly important because the findings and conclusions are designed to help Congress and the FCC develop policies that ensure all Americans have robust broadband access. Reports with inaccurate data on broadband availability can skew the findings and prevent unserved and underserved areas from gaining access to broadband. The public has not yet seen the draft 2019 Broadband Deployment Report, but the FCC published a news release about the key findings. Based on the few statistics cited in the release, the FCC concluded that access to modern broadband networks has narrowed substantially and broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely basis. There are serious concerns with these findings. There are obvious problems with the reported data, and the FCC’s conclusion ignores the reality that millions of Americans still live without access to broadband. The FCC must be honest with the American people about the true state of broadband deployment. It is hard to grapple with the idea that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion because it clear to millions of Americans that it is not.

CTIA, the US mobile industry's top lobbying group, is opposing a proposed California state law that would prohibit throttling of fire departments and other public safety agencies during emergencies. CTIA recently wrote to lawmakers to oppose the bill as currently written, saying the bill's prohibition on throttling is too vague and that it should apply only when the US president or CA governor declares emergencies and not when local governments declare emergencies. The group's letter also suggested that the industry would sue the state if the bill is passed in its current form, saying the bill would result in "serious unintended consequences, including needless litigation." Despite CTIA's opposition, the bill sailed through a CA Assembly committee April 24. The bill's next stop is an April 30 hearing with the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. 

DirecTV owner AT&T and DISH Network both dodged giving specific breakdowns to House Judiciary Committee leaders about how many subscribers rely on a satellite law involving the importation of broadcast signals, which expires Dec. 31, 2019. The key justification in private responses: “competitively sensitive.” Lawmakers want this data as they debate whether to reauthorize the expiring satellite law, known as STELAR. “The total number of DISH and DirecTV subscribers that currently receive one or more stations through a distant signal license … are approximately 870,000,” DISH wrote.

Broadcasters derided the letters as inaccurate and argue only about a half-million subscribers may rely on these signals. “It is disappointing but not surprising that DirecTV and DISH are refusing to provide the House Judiciary Committee with adequate answers to evaluate the impact of this expiring law,” National Association of Broadcasters spokesman Dennis Wharton said. Broadcasters want the law to simply expire and have been downplaying the impact of that happening, in part to avoid a likely bigger fight over media marketplace rules.

Black activists say hate speech policies and content moderation systems formulated by a company built by and dominated by white men fail the very people Facebook claims it's trying to protect. Not only are the voices of marginalized groups disproportionately stifled, Facebook rarely takes action on repeated reports of racial slurs, violent threats and harassment campaigns targeting black users, they say. Many of these users now think twice before posting updates on Facebook or they limit how widely their posts are shared. Yet few can afford to leave the single-largest and most powerful social media platform for sharing information and creating community. So to avoid being flagged, they use digital slang such as "wypipo," emojis or hashtags to elude Facebook's computer algorithms and content moderators. They operate under aliases and maintain back-up accounts to avoid losing content and access to their community. And they've developed a buddy system to alert friends and followers when a fellow black activist has been sent to Facebook jail, sharing the news of the suspension and the posts that put them there. They call it getting "Zucked" and black activists say these bans have serious repercussions, not just cutting people off from their friends and family for hours, days or weeks at a time, but often from the Facebook pages they operate for their small businesses and nonprofits.

Former Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE) will be vying for the White House in a very different tech climate than what he experienced in the Obama era. In the short time since Biden was in office, tech phobia has replaced tech euphoria, and the networks once viewed as connectors of the world are now among its most divisive forces. When Biden became vice president in 2009, the companies that now represent “big tech” were only a few years removed from being scrappy startups, and several of them quickly became chummy with the Obama White House. These days, the industry faces a much frostier Washington reception. So where will Biden come down on tech policy? It remains to be seen what Biden’s track record and present support mean for his position on tech and telecom issues. Here’s what we know.

Biden was once an advocate for cracking down on online piracy of movies, music, and books. In 2015, as he toyed with a possible presidential run, that stance made Biden popular among Hollywood leaders and major media industry organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America. But the cozy relationship put him at odds with internet players who worried that measures aimed at beefing up digital IP protections would stifle free speech online and punish tech platforms. During the 2018 midterm election cycle, Biden’s PAC, American Possibilities, counted among its contributors former Facebook president and Napster co-founder Sean Parker, as well as Hollywood producers Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Comcast executive David Cohen is behind the big Biden fundraiser expected to take place in Philadelphia.