Following his July 23 announcement establishing the Arkansas State Broadband Office, Gov Asa Hutchinson (R-AR) announced “Arkansas Rural Connect,” a new $25 million grant program within the Arkansas State Broadband Office. The goal is to provide high-speed broadband to rural communities throughout Arkansas by 2022, as outlined in the State Broadband Plan released in May. The Arkansas Rural Connect (ARC) program will provide grants to qualifying communities of at least 500 people to deploy high-speed broadband to its residents. The high-speed broadband must have a rate of at least 25 megabits per second for download and 3 megabits per second for upload (25/3). Of this $25 million plan, the Arkansas Legislative Council is able to approve $5.7 million this year, and the balance will need to be appropriated in next year’s fiscal session.

The ARC program builds on the work of the Arkansas state legislature, which, on February 26, 2019, opened up new possibilities for Arkansas towns by enacting Act 198 of 2019. Before Act 198, government entities were forbidden to provide broadband to the public by the Telecommunications Regulatory Reform Act of 2013. Act 198 gave municipalities and other public entities new options to apply for funding to deploy broadband, but at that time, no state program existed that would allow municipalities to exercise their new powers under Act 198. With the introduction of the ARC grant program, towns will now have opportunities for funding from the state.

Lawmakers are working through the August recess to cobble together legislation on data privacy after missing a deadline they set to unveil a bill before the summer break. Advocates for a federal data privacy standard are feeling a time crunch as they fret over the limited number of days left in this session and the upcoming 2020 elections. Most importantly, CA's strict new privacy law is slated to take effect in Jan, raising the stakes for lawmakers who were hoping to pass a federal law before the stringent state-level rules go into place. Most eyes are on Senate Commerce Committee leaders Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA). 

Just before the recess, a series of leaks revealed that Sen Cantwell’s office was passing around a privacy framework that would allow consumers to sue companies for mishandling their data. That “private right of action” is a non-starter for industry and Republicans.  “We’re not going to have a private right of action,” Sen Wicker said. Despite the hiccup, he offered a new deadline for releasing a draft privacy bill: Labor Day.

House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Democratic colleagues have expressed interest in legislation to allocate prime 5G airwaves known as the C-band and to use auction proceeds to help fund broadband buildout. But House Commerce Ranking Member Greg Walden (R-OR) is signaling some reservations. “I’m a little skeptical,” Ranking Member Walden said before leaving for the August recess. The current satellite holders of the spectrum licenses “aren’t being forced to give it up or sell it,” Walden said, adding that other players are “starting to raise concerns about potential interference problems in those bands.” The Senate may also wade into the debate — top appropriator Sen John Neely Kennedy (R-LA), who like Chairman Doyle is a critic of a privately held auction, said that he’s still “talking about” trying to hitch a C-band provision to government funding legislation but declined to outline contours of such a rider. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, meanwhile, has pledged to come to some sort of decision on these airwaves fall 2019. 

President Donald Trump’s vow to scour “the dark recesses of the internet” came as deadly gun violence provoked ire over fringe online platforms like 8chan, an anonymous message board that has hosted a racist manifesto linked to Aug 3's deadly shooting in El Paso (TX). But any effort to curb dangerous extremism online will run into a host of obstacles:

1. US law offers a safe harbor: The First Amendment protects even racist, misogynistic, and other hateful speech. And online sites enjoy broad legal immunity through another statute — Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act — that has become a major focus of the bipartisan congressional backlash against online sites like Facebook.
2. Fringe sites often escape scrutiny: The fringe quality means it's harder to get such sites to remove content than it was to get big social media companies to remove videos and posts by Islamic State supporters.
3. Even the big sites still provide gateways to radicalism.
4. Racially divisive speech can fail to trigger the necessary alarms, as Washington fails to treat white supremacy as a serious threat. 
5. The real decision-makers — internet infrastructure companies — don’t want the responsibility: The real power brokers at the moment are the internet infrastructure companies that have the power to erase whole sites from the web, at least for a time. But they don't want to take on the responsibility of determining what content is good or bad. 

House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) and Ranking Member Greg Walden (R-OR) sent a letter to US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer expressing their concerns regarding the export of language mirroring Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in trade agreements. “As you may know, the effects of Section 230 and the appropriate role of such a liability shield have become the subject of much debate in recent years.  While we take no view on that debate in this letter, we find it inappropriate for the United States to export language mirroring Section 230 while such serious policy discussions are ongoing,” the Commerce Committee leaders wrote. “For that reason, we do not believe any provision regarding intermediary liability protections of the type created by Article 19.17 are ripe for inclusion in any trade deal going forward.  Given that our committee closely oversees Section 230 and all portions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, we also hope in the future the Office of the United States Trade Representative will consult our Committee in advance of negotiating on these issues.”