The Federal Communications Commission has revised the 2019 Broadband Deployment Report to reflect a thorough review of the initial draft triggered by the discovery that a company submitted drastically overstated deployment data to the FCC. But the FCC still concludes that significant progress has been made in closing the digital divide in America. The revised report shows that since the last report, the number of Americans lacking access to a fixed terrestrial broadband connection meeting the FCC’s advanced telecommunications capability benchmark speed of 25 Mbps/3 Mbps has dropped by over 18%, from 26.1 million Americans at the end of 2016 to 21.3 million at the end of 2017. Moreover, the majority of those gaining access to such high-speed connections, approximately 4.3 million, live in rural America, where broadband deployment has traditionally lagged.

The number of Americans with access to at least 250 Mbps/25 Mbps broadband grew in 2017 by more than 36%, to 191.5 million. And the number of rural Americans with access to such broadband increased by 85.1% in 2017. In addition, the number of Americans with access to 100 Mbps/10 Mbps broadband grew in 2017 by more than 18%, to 288.4 million, while the number of rural Americans with access to such broadband increased by 44% in 2017, to 37.4 million.

Free Press was able to discover the huge error that led to the revision. Free Press General Counsel and VP of Policy Matt Wood said:

We're very glad to see that the FCC has addressed the error Free Press identified. While Chairman Pai isn't a big-enough person to say our name or to mention Free Press's role in discovering an error that had eluded staff, we will take heart in the good result and leave Pai's pettiness out of it. Of course, fixing this error doesn't fix the other huge flaw we cited in our letter about BarrierFree: the Pai FCC keeps trying to take credit for broadband deployment and speed increases well under way before and during Title II's reinstatement. So when Chairman Pai takes credit for ISP investment and improvements he quite literally had nothing to do with, it's an ongoing embarrassment that simply revising the numbers down cannot fix.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said she won't support the report's conclusions.

While it's a good thing the FCC has finally fixed this mess with its data, the fact of the matter is that millions of American households—in rural and urban communities—have no access to high-speed service. That's a problem. With tens of millions of Americans without access to broadband, it's simply not credible for the agency to conclude that broadband deployment across the country is reasonable and timely.

This report explores the availability and adoption of broadband Internet access services by veterans throughout the nation. While the FCC finds that many veterans have access to both fixed and mobile broadband options, a significant number still lack access to fixed broadband, mobile broadband, or both. Specifically, for 92.5% of veterans at least one provider of 25 Mbps/3 Mbps fixed broadband services is available, while only 78.4% of veterans have 10 Mbps/3Mbps mobile LTE broadband coverage. Among households with veterans, approximately 85%, or 14.4 million, reported that they had paid connections to the Internet in their homes. However, households with veterans subscribe to mobile broadband services at lower rates than households without veterans. For those veterans who lack a broadband connection, barriers to broadband adoption may include lack of deployment where they live, price, and digital illiteracy or perceived irrelevance. Ensuring that all veterans enjoy the benefits of broadband access implicates not only Commission efforts, but collaboration across other federal agencies, industry stakeholders, and local communities to ensure lasting universal broadband access.

To safeguard the privacy and safety of American consumers, Commissioner Rosenworcel sent letters to major phone companies to confirm whether they have lived up to their commitments to end location aggregation services. The FCC needs to do more to protect the privacy and security of American consumers. It needs to do more to provide the public with basic information about what is happening with their realtime location information. That’s why I’m taking steps to ensure for the public that carriers are living up to their commitments to protect their customers’ most sensitive information, because this agency has failed to do so to date.

As the head of the Federal Communications Commission, I’ve been working for the past two-plus years to advance a market-based strategy to promote US leadership in 5G. As part of what we call our 5G FAST Plan, the FCC finished its first 5G spectrum auction in Jan, and we’re holding a second right now that’s already generated almost $2 billion in bids. The recipe for US leadership in wireless technology is proven and simple: Free up airwaves to accommodate the increase in wireless traffic. Get rid of the red tape that slows the deployment of wireless infrastructure. Provide targeted investments in a fiscally responsible way to extend coverage to areas where there isn’t business case to build. And then get government out of the way as much as possible.

As Mark Zuckerberg filled in the details of his new, privacy-oriented vision of Facebook at the F8 developers conference, he left out a key episode from the past: Long before Facebook's pivot to privacy, the company pivoted to make everything more public. There's a reason Facebook's new "digital living room" where you are "free to be your true self" sounds familiar. You've already been there, if you were one of the hundreds of millions of people who used Facebook before roughly 2010. Facebook's original superpower — and the reason so many users flocked to it from the untamed wilds of the wider web — was that it gave you an assurance of semi-privacy and a respite from the anonymity that fueled so much online conflict. But roughly a decade ago, as the company turned its gaze from user growth to making money, it started deprecating privacy and altering its default settings toward more public interactions. Public pages were more valuable as ad inventory. Privacy, Zuckerberg said in 2010, was no longer a "social norm."