Reps Paul Tonko (D-NY) and Susan Brooks (R-IN) announced the introduction of the ACCESS BROADBAND Act (HR 1328), bipartisan legislation that would expand broadband access in underserved areas and create a simpler process for small businesses and local economic developers to access federal broadband resources. The bill would also fund local training workshops to help small businesses and economic developers put federal broadband resources to work. Similar legislation passed in the House in the 115th Congress but was never taken up in the Senate. Rep Tonko said, “Despite its importance, federal resources supporting broadband expansion are poorly tracked with little coordination across agencies or departments that are doing this work, making it harder our local businesses and community leaders to access them. This bill is a step towards better broadband access for our communities and better government for all of us.” A companion bill was introduced in the Senate by Sens Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Doug Jones (D-AL), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). 

Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) announced that he is proposing new legislation to protect children from the dangers of the internet. The bill, called the Kids Internet Design and Safety (KIDS) Act, lays out six areas for new regulation:

1. Ending “manipulative and damaging design features” that push children to spend more time with screens, such as autoplay video
2. Implementing rules that dictate how and what ads kids see online
3. Creating rules that make sure algorithms do not surface extreme content to children
4. Requiring companies give parents guidance on “kid-healthy content”
5. Establishing incentives for “positive content creation”
6. Creating a transparency requirement for tech companies around automated systems, enforced by the Federal Trade Commission

House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) and House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Doug Collins (R-GA) reintroduced The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, making the case that the legislation is needed to level the playing field between tech giants and local news publishers. "It grows out of a recognition that we need to do something to give local media, local news publishers the ability to survive," Chairman Cicilline said. He argues that as ad revenue shifts from news publishers to Facebook and Google, it's time for Congress to intervene. Under current antitrust laws, news publishers are barred from working together as they seek deals with the tech platforms. But under their proposed  bill, publishers would be granted a four-year safe harbor exempting them from those rules and allowing them to team up to negotiate better deals with tech companies. That could give publishers more power as they negotiate how their content is distributed, as well as better deal terms around such things as revenue splits or content licensing fees.

In an innocuous-sounding "rule change" to the Communications Act of 1984, the Federal Communications Commission would allow cable providers to deduct "in-kind" services from a local franchise fee to municipalities required by the Act, specifically a maximum five-percent levy on gross revenues. "In kind" is currently a term without a clear definition, and in a particularly diabolical twist, the FCC plans to leave it to the cable companies to determine the monetary value of such nebulous services (and exactly what those services are) before deducting that value from their mandated fee. Without a check applied by the federal government the cable giants can't be trusted to do anything other than what benefits them financially. 

Clearly, the FCC under the Trump administration is no friend of consumers (Chairman Ajit Pai, for example, used to be a Verizon lobbyist), and this latest proposed action typically ignores the damage it might do to the public's interest in favor of awarding more profits to industry fat cats. We encourage Sen Ed Markey (D-MA), as well as members of the public, to create a situation where it becomes politically untenable for the FCC to more forward with its unfair and confiscatory plan.