North Carolina officials are streamlining a self-reporting tool that allows residents to document their internet speed, in hopes of mounting a challenge against the Federal Communication Commission’s broadband coverage map data. Jeff Sural, director of the NC Department of Technology’s broadband infrastructure office, said the goal is to get federal broadband expansion funding for the parts of his state that remain unserved. Sural and his team are partnering with the Measurement Lab, or M-Lab, an open-source team of international researchers and industry and public-interest partners that specialize in broadband policy and geographic-information-system visualization and telecommunications technologies. “So far, one thing we have gleaned from our crowdsourcing tool is that there are a number of locations in areas where the FCC says there is [download coverage of 25 megabits per second and an upload rate of 3 Mbps] that are not getting those speeds,” Sural said. M-Lab’s tests will also consider whether a user is contracted to receive high-speed broadband in the first place. That could reveal whether a user is underserved and could raise a case against the FCC’s coverage data. If not, Sural said he’d like to know that too. “What we’d like to do is find out more about pricing and really focus on going after and identifying the unserved areas so we can report that to the FCC to make sure that we’re getting our fair share of funding to all of those areas,” he said.

How lawmakers plan to keep the pressure on Big Tech heading into Fall 2019. 

1. Pushing a national privacy law. Lawmakers have yet to reach a consensus despite optimism that 2019 would be the year Congress finally got its act together to pass a bill to protect consumers' date. Lawmakers have just a few months left to pass a federal privacy bill before CA's sweeping state privacy law takes effect in 2020. There are several of privacy bills floating on both sides of the aisle, but few proposals have gained traction.
2. Intensifying antitrust scrutiny through hearings in both chambers. There’s a push for lawmakers to complete a broad investigation of competition in the tech industry before the 2020 race heats up, but don’t hold your breath for any actual legislation to pass until after the election. It's likely Congress will move slowly on antitrust, but lawmakers could play a key role in oversight of the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, which have opened antitrust investigations into Silicon Valley companies.
3. Scrutinizing Section 230, tech's prized legal shield that grants companies broad immunity for content third parties post on their platforms. But expect partisan divisions to persist over why it needs to change.