A large, bipartisan majority of Americans (73%) support reinstating net neutrality, including 82% of Democrats, 65% of Republicans, and 68% of Independents. Support for net neutrality, while very high now, is a bit lower than in 2017 and 2018 when net neutrality was in place voters were asked about repealing it (83% and 86% respectively).  This drop may be due to what social scientists call a “status quo bias,” which is a general tendency to favor the status quo.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) led a bipartisan group of colleagues in reintroducing the Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act (S.4309), legislation that will encourage market-based competition to dominant social media platforms by requiring the largest companies to make user data portable – and their services interoperable – with other platforms, and to allow users to designate a trusted third-party service to manage their privacy and account settings, if they so choose. The legislation would increase market competition, encourage innovation, and increase consumer choice by requiring large communications platforms (products or services with over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S.) to:

• Make their services interoperable with competing communications platforms.
• Permit users to easily port their personal data in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format.
• Allow users to delegate trusted custodial services, which are required to act in a user’s best interests through a strong duty of care, with the task of managing their account settings, content, and online interactions.  

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) joined Sen. Warner in introducing the legislation.

Much ado has been made about the cost benefits that can come from operators shutting down their old copper and cable networks as they overbuild with fiber. But while Altice USA has joined the ranks of those pursuing extensive fiber rollouts, CFO Michael Grau said it’s not planning to ditch its cable assets anytime soon. Grau explained there are several reasons why its cable network will be sticking around. The first is purely logistical. While the operator recently unveiled plans to blanket around two-thirds of its footprint with fiber by the end of 2025, Grau said it will take some time to migrate its customer base off cable and onto fiber. To date, Grau noted “almost all the fiber customers we’ve gotten have been as a function of gross adds in the fiber footprint” rather than from customer migrations. However, he said the operator plans to launch a “much more proactive” migration effort within the next three to four weeks. Altice USA ended Q1 2022 with 81,000 fiber subscribers. CEO Dexter Goei has said it is aiming to reach 200,000 fiber subscribers by the end of 2022. According to Grau, Altice’s extensive Wi-Fi network is another reason for keeping the cable network afloat. He pointed to the Wi-Fi offering, which runs on its cable assets, as a “powerful” service offering and said “it would be hard to take that away” from consumers.