Daily Digest 6/7/2018 (NTIA: digital divide is showing signs of giving way)

During my tenure at the Commission, many of our nation's most prominent broadband Internet service providers (ISPs) have created or participated in programs that promised to lower affordability barriers that prevent low-income communities from bridging digital divides. Over the past several years, some have offered stand-alone broadband service offerings at discounted rates for those families that meet certain criteria. Unfortunately, it is difficult for us to measure the success of those programs due to a lack of publicly available data. We are confident that these programs have the potential to help, but we don’t know what kind of impact they have actually had. To measure that, we need data, including how consumers are informed of these offerings, whether any artificial barriers exist within these programs that prevent otherwise qualified families from signing up, the number of low-income families that subscribe to them, and how long these families remain on these plans. Transparency and collaboration among state and federal policymakers, Internet service providers, and local communities are essential to the success of any effort to close the digital divide. Each stakeholder has critical insight to bring to the table as we strive for universal service in this country. With respect to existing programs, ISPs have insight and expertise in terms of how to market these programs effectively and raise awareness of lower cost broadband offerings among target populations, and critical data to share that would reveal lessons learned over many years of efforts. This insight and data would be beneficial to all involved. In that spirit, I urge ISPs to look for ways to improve their outreach and bring more attention to their low-income programs, disclose relevant data on these programs, and detail their progress in connecting low-income consumers through both voluntary or mandated affordable broadband offers. Digital literacy training is also an important component to close the opportunities divide, and public disclosure of any data detailing outreach and digital literacy initiatives also would be very helpful. We have reached a critical moment for deployment and adoption of broadband—an essential service. We all need to pitch in to finish the job.

Crown Castle filed a letter on June 1, 2018, attaching a railroad crossing memorandum in support of its request for the Federal Communications Commission to exercise its section 253 authority and preempt state and local laws that allow railroads to act as gatekeepers to the rights-of-way (ROW). Crown Castle said obstacles related to infrastructure placement in public ROW controlled by the railroads has been raised as a barrier to deployment in both the wireless and wireline broadband proceedings, and requested the Commission exercise its section 253 authority to preempt such state and local legal requirements to the extent railroads use them to prohibit telecommunications services, as further detailed in the memorandum.

Gov Chris Sununu (R-NH) signed a bill this that supporters say will improve high-speed Internet access in rural areas like the Monadnock Region. NH Senate Bill 170 allows municipal governments to issue bonds for building broadband infrastructure in areas not served by a commercial provider. NH State Sen Jay V. Kahn (D-Keene), introduced the bill in January 2017 and described the legislation as an attempt to provide rural communities with an opportunity to “level the playing field” by giving them an important economic development tool. According to State Sen Kahn, opposition to that bill grew out of a concern among some legislators that it would allow municipalities to compete directly with businesses. Kahn said that criticism didn’t apply to SB 170, arguing that the present bill allows for a wide range of public-private partnerships for municipalities looking to expand broadband services.

There is, of course, a digital divide among low-income Americans, but there is also what we at TechSoup call an organizational digital divide. Many nonprofits themselves are low-income and benefit greatly from low-cost, uncapped broadband. This is a groundbreaking study on how charities use this resource for both their staff and their clients. Nearly a third of nonprofit respondents report relying on Mobile Beacon service as their main Internet connection. A majority of respondents reported that unlimited data has allowed them to expand their program services. One hundred percent of the respondents say they would recommend Mobile Beacon service to other charities.

[Jim Lynch is a TechSoup staff writer]

More than half of US households — 53.9% — rely entirely on cellphones, according to a survey from the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2006, only 15.8% of survey respondents said they didn’t have a landline telephone. The iPhone and its Android counterparts launched the next year, and the rate of landline abandonment has since steadily climbed. “There are countries in Europe where 80 to 90% of households are wireless only, so this trend could continue for some time,” said Stephen J. Blumberg, one of the researchers who compiled the NCHS report. The health statistics center’s survey also found that members of cellphone-only households were more likely to engage in risky behaviors such as smoking, binge drinking, lacking health insurance and driving without seat belts, although the survey did not delve into why that might be. Ten years ago, cutting a landline was itself considered a riskier behavior, Blumberg said, because having a landline was associated with home ownership, adulthood, settling down and stability. “That’s not the case anymore,” he said.

The Supplementing the Pipeline for Efficient Control of The Resources for Users Making New Opportunities for Wireless (SPECTRUM NOW) Act has been introduced to ensure there is enough money to fund efforts to get federal spectrum users to give up spectrum or share spectrum with commercial users. Sens Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) in the Senate, and Reps Doris Matsui (D-CA) and Rep Brett Guthrie (R-KY) in the House have introduced the bipartisan bill. It "would allow the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), to use existing Spectrum Relocation Fund (SRF) funding (approximately $8 billion) to support research-related activities that examine the feasibility of federal spectrum users relocating or sharing spectrum with non-federal users as long as those monies are not already obligated to support federal agencies." The SRF was created in 2004, but in 2015, the Spectrum Pipeline Act broadened the expenses that could be covered by the fund and, while it also authorized $500 million specifically to exploring spectrum re-purposing, that money is running out, say the Senators. But the bill also says the SRF research money can only be spent if 1) "a research and development (R&D) plan by the incumbent federal spectrum user to explore relocating of sharing spectrum has been submitted and approved by the Technical Panel, which was established by Congress and is composed of three members representing the NTIA, OMB, and Federal Communications Commission; 2) as of the date of certification to Congress by NTIA and OMB that the R&D plan is approved, Spectrum Pipeline Act funds are insufficient to support that R&D plan; and 3) R&D payments will leave sufficient amounts in the SRF to complete ongoing transition plans from previous auctions."

Brad Parscale, President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign manager, is calling for a single, privatized 5G mobile network across the country, arguing the current system is outdated. Parscale’s position contrasts with a reported proposal floated by the White House earlier in 2018 that included a plan to nationalize 5G networks in an attempt to guard against China. "It is time for America to have a single 5G network for all carriers. The days of dropped calls, slow speeds, and no service need to end. It is time for the US to have the world’s best cell service," Parscale tweeted June 5.  Perscale followed up with a tweet the next day, saying, "A great 5G network, in my personal opinion, consists of an open wholesale market with a privatized company that isn’t a carrier. Government doesn’t own or operate it but does provide the spectrum. An open bidding process for bandwidth! No more dead spots!"

Why exactly is it so important for the US to build 5G networks before China? The benefits of 5G are obvious, but today the US doesn't have the fastest home broadband speeds, nor the fastest or most widely available 4G networks, and often lags countries such as Finland, Japan, and South Korea in such metrics. Why would the US's economic strength erode if it's a bit late to the 5G party? A widely cited 2016 report by consulting firm Accenture estimates that the construction and maintenance of 5G networks in the US could result in 3 million jobs and a $500 billion boost to GDP. But would all those jobs end up overseas if China is the first country with a nationwide 5G network? Not necessarily says Sanjay Dhar, a managing director at Accenture who worked on the report. "Even if China wins the race to build various 5G technologies, it won’t be a zero-sum game,” he says. Telecommunications industry analyst Jeff Kagan says the competition between the US and China keeps the US motivated to push 5G forward, but he doesn't believe that it will make a big difference to the US economy in the long term if the US is second or third. 

In this Order, the Federal Communications Commission authorize Audacy Corporation to construct, deploy, and operate a non-geostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) satellite system to provide continuous, high-speed communications between other NGSO satellites and gateway earth stations, using frequencies in the intersatellite service (ISS) and fixed-satellite service (FSS). Grant of this application will enable Audacy to provide global line-of-sight visibility to low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites enabling operators of LEO satellites to have continuous access to their satellites through the Audacy system, rather than having to use individual uplink and downlink frequencies at multiple, worldwide earth station locations.

At our hearing with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, bipartisan members of the committee asked direct questions about Facebook sharing personal data with third-parties. Clearly, the company’s partnerships with Chinese technology companies and others should have been disclosed before Congress and the American people. The spirit of our questions about third-party access to user data should not have required technical knowledge of the legal agreements Facebook has with device manufacturers to get clear answers for the public. As the committee continues to examine these issues closely with the ongoing audit of Facebook data practices, and awaits response to our written questions from the hearing, we strongly encourage full transparency from Facebook and the entire tech community.

On June 5, President Donald Trump tweeted an unfounded conspiracy theory that originated in some of the internet’s worst “fake news” corners. “Strzok-Page, the incompetent & corrupt FBI lovers, have texts referring to a counter-intelligence operation into the Trump Campaign dating way back to December, 2015,” the president wrote. “SPYGATE is in full force!” The supposed source for this claim is text messages between two FBI employees, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were having an affair during the 2016 campaign. Their text messages reveal that they were openly hostile to Trump and supportive of Hillary Clinton. The problem is that, as far as we know, none of those texts mentioned anything about there being a counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign as early as December 2015. So where did the president come up with that idea? It seems that a conspiratorial interpretation of texts between two FBI employees, one entirely unfounded in the actual evidence, got laundered from the fringe right-wing media to the right-wing mainstream through Fox News personalities — and eventually reached up to a member of Congress and the president of the United States. This says something profound about the way the country is broken today — about how President Trump and the conservative media have combined forces to warp the way millions of Americans understand the world around them.

A response to FCC Emails Show Agency Spread Lies to Bolster Dubious DDoS Attack Claims.

Whether the correct phrase is denial of service or “bot swarm” or “something hammering the Application Programming Interface” (API) of the commenting system — the fact is something odd was happening in May 2017. My quick analysis of the ratio of 35,000 API requests per minute we were receiving relative to the number of 90,000 comments being filed in the first half of the day, indicated that ratio to be extraordinarily high and lopsided (the Team also relayed that the API requests were continuing to increase, so we were seeing at least 2 million API requests per hour around the middle of the day — yet not a similar number of comments being received). If folks want evidence, there were emails sent by the Team as their analysis of the logs observed the API requests per minute continue to spike. Separate from actual people wanting to comment, I was concerned we were also being spammed by something automated. If this continued, it might deny system resources from actual people wanting to comment on the high-profile issue. This was my biggest concern.

Increasingly, members of Congress are confronting a wide array of complex policy debates posed by inventions like artificial intelligence and problems like the rise of Russian propaganda online. And policymakers themselves admit they aren’t fully prepared to deal with the issues. To address that digital knowledge gap, some in Washington are now angling to revive the Capitol’s old science-and-tech think tank, the Office of Technology Assessment, which lawmakers disbanded amid partisan squabbles in the 1990s. Its foremost advocates, emboldened by recent tech mishaps, say it could aid the U.S. government at a moment when objective advice seems to be in short supply. Not everyone believes that new institutions are the solution. “I wholly agree that Congress can better its game on technology issues but initiative, much more than resources or a dedicated office, is the biggest factor limiting expertise,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD)

In the remainder of this statement, allow me the opportunity to highlight a number of consequential decisions: 

Decisions I was honored to make, or influence, in order to safeguard consumers and competition: Title II classification of broadband providers and the enactment of strong open internet rules in 2015; Enhancing access to affordable communications services; Inmate calling reform; Enhancing wireless competition through interoperability; Encouraging small businesses to enter the commercial wireless industry; Allocating more licensed and unlicensed sp ectrum to fuel wireless competition; Circulated proposal to eliminate Sports Blackout Rule; Formation of the Connect2Health Task Force; Modernizing AM Radio; Infrastructure siting ; Enhancing access to diverse and independent programming; Supporting landmark broadband consumer privacy protections; Championed the collection of better media ownership data to support policies to promote media diversity.

Decisions I wish came out differently: Repeal of the Commission’s 2015 Open Internet Order; Repeal of rules limiting media consolidation; Reinstatement of the UHF Discount; Launched review of the National TV Ownership Cap; Deregulation of the Business Data Services market; Proposed “reforms” in the Lifeline program that jeopardizes our efforts at ubiquitous and affordable services across the country; Adopted a mobile competition report using flawed and truncated analysis which erroneously concluded that the market for commercial mobile wireless services was effectively competitive; Eliminated the main studio rule that has ensured those entrusted with use of the public airwaves have a local presence in their community; Other actions that do not put consumers first.

On my trips around the country, I saw where the policies we put in place are making a real difference in peoples’ lives and what is clear is this: that this agency can either be an enabler of opportunities or it can stifle opportunities. I have seen firsthand where our policies have done much good, but I have also witnessed where inaction or bad decisions have created undue hardship. Fulfilling these obligations requires the Commission to strike a sometimes difficult-to-achieve balance between making sure that consumers are protected and trying not to get in the way of market-driven innovation—but at the end of the day, the public interest must be served. That is non-negotiable. Thank you all for the opportunity to serve for nearly nine amazing years.