The International Economic Development Council (IEDC) and I teamed up to survey the association’s members. The 2019 survey analysis report addresses: 1) the state of broadband, 2) broadband’s impact on local economies, 3) broadband-driven education and healthcare, and 4) community broadband money matters. There's a good deal of valuable data here. This report should generate a lot of questions to be asked and answered in your community.

[Craig Settles assists cities and co-ops with business planning for broadband and telehealth]

Four different universal service initiatives, each aimed at solving a different problem, are funded by a single surcharge on interstate and international telecommunications revenue. Over the past two decades, each program has grown independently without much regard to cost, or to the activities of the fund’s other programs. As a result, the surcharge has risen from 3 percent in 1998 to a whopping 24.4 percent today. The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering whether to impose a hard cap on the Universal Service Fund (USF). While it has taken steps recently to rein in costs of each individual program, the fund-wide cap represents the agency’s first effort to assess universal service in a more holistic fashion. The proposed cap can improve universal service policy by promoting greater efficiency, encouraging coordination among USF programs, and ultimately assuring the long-term sustainability of the fund in the face of rising costs and a declining revenue base.

As a short-term fix, a hard budgetary cap will help promote efficiency and extend the life of the universal service program. But in the long run, America’s universal service needs will outgrow its existing programs, while the declining revenue base makes the current funding mechanism unsustainable. Ultimately, Congress must redesign its universal service program, breaking it out of its landline-telephone-era box and subjecting it to the same budgetary process and congressional oversight as most other safety net initiatives. A hard budget cap can help us get there by highlighting to Congress the flaws in the current design, while also helping the FCC set a more holistic universal service policy that yields results greater than the sum of its parts.

[Daniel Lyons is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at Boston College Law School, where he teaches telecommunications, administrative, and cyber law, among other courses.]

Common Networks, a Silicon Valley startup founded by former executives from payment company Square, announced the next stage in its fixed wireless broadband strategy with the launch of a symmetric 300 Megabits per second (Mbps) service for $49 per month. Common Networks is roughly three and a half years old, and said its fixed wireless broadband is made possible through the use of proprietary software built on open 5G technology, millimeter wave (mmWave) radio and its own software stack. The company currently covers 100,000 people in the Bay Area with its 802.11ac/ad wireless network running in the unlicensed 5GHz and 60GHz bands. The company’s aim is to provide fast broadband using wireless technology in dense urban areas, relying on homes in a single community as distributed infrastructure.

The Florida League of Cities and three communities filed a renewed constitutional challenge to a state law that is expected to help telecommunications companies install wireless technology on city-owned utility poles and in public rights of way. The league and the FL cities of Fort Walton Beach, Naples, and Port Orange filed the lawsuit Aug 12  in Leon County circuit court, about three months after filing a similar challenge to a 2017 state law. The new case incorporates changes the Legislature made in 2019 to the law, which involves the installation of antennas and other equipment that telecommunications companies need for new 5G technology. The revised case, in part, targets a change that lawmakers made in 2019 that could open cities to lawsuits in state or federal courts — including being required to pay costs and attorney fees — if they violate the wireless-technology law. Attorneys for the cities contend that the change violates the constitutional separation of powers. Other parts of the new case are similar to the earlier lawsuit, including challenging the constitutionality of a limit on how much cities can charge for telecommunications companies to install equipment on publicly owned poles. The lawsuit contends that the limit, $150 per pole per year, is an unconstitutional taking of property because it is below the market rate for use of the poles.

2020 Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke announced a sweeping policy plan to counter hate speech and gun violence in America that specifically proposes changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, one of the tech industry’s most pivotal legal protections. Outside of proposing a nationwide gun licensing system/registry and requiring universal background checks, O’Rourke laid out a plan aimed at making social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube more responsible for hateful content on their platforms. In the proposal, O’Rourke says that he supports amending Section 230 to “remove legal immunity from lawsuits for large social media platforms” that refuse to be proactive in removing hate speech and terrorist content. The proposal calls on tech companies to more aggressively enforce policies against hate speech — with the potential withdrawal of 230 protections if they don’t — which may raise legal issues if implemented. Historically, bills requiring companies to moderate against legal speech have faced significant constitutional challenges under the First Amendment. Under O’Rourke’s proposal, companies like Facebook could be sued for not adopting terms of service requirements banning users from posting hateful content that “incite[s] or engage[s] in violence, intimidation, harassment, threats, or defamation” against others based on demographics like race, religion, immigration status, and gender identity.

It’s likely that a robust antitrust enforcement regime, in tandem with a suite of economic policies could create a market more amenable to sustaining journalism. But in the absence of that, and the uncertainty as to whether the market is fundamentally able to provide the necessary journalistic coverage to inform and serve a functioning democracy and civic life, it’s worth considering what no Democrat has dared advocate for 50-some years: a renewed and robust public investment in media. Yet the fate of (public) media has gotten surprisingly little attention in the 2020 cycle. Despite a number of policies being introduced that might work as a market corrective to rein in some of the monopoly players at the various levels of the media ecosystem (and a proposal from Elizabeth Warren to curtail private equity), the question of public-sector journalism has gone largely ignored. The return to a public option in media would not only be popular; it would dovetail readily with a spate of small-d democratic reforms like automatic voter registration and campaign finance reform, both of which were hallmarks of the 2018 House bill HB-1. And it could even prove politically expedient in the general election against President Donald Trump: “There’s a real opening,” noted Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron, “for presidential candidates to actually get at this loss of journalism going against Trump, who spent all this time with fake news.”