The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is seeking public comment on a direct final rule to help expand access to capital to deploy broadband infrastructure in rural areas. The changes apply to USDA’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Loans and Loan Guarantees program and are in accordance with the provisions of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (the Farm Bill). The Telecommunications Infrastructure Loans and Loan Guarantees program provides investment capital to eligible entities to help deploy telecommunications infrastructure, including broadband facilities in rural areas. Eligible entities are corporations, limited liability companies, cooperative or mutual organizations, Indian tribes or tribal organizations, and state and local governments. USDA will make several improvements to streamline the application process. The department is seeking comments on the following reforms that will enable USDA to:

• Issue a notice to applicants who may be eligible to receive grant assistance through the Farm Bill Broadband Program, under 7 CFR 1738.
• Remove the requirement for applicants to provide a Certificate of Convenience and Necessity, which grants a company the authority to operate a public service.
• Expand refinancing limits to 100 percent for Rural Utilities Service (RUS) loans and expand limits to 50 percent for non-RUS loans. Refinancing limits will be published in funding opportunity announcements and will be based on funding amounts that are authorized in a given fiscal year.
• Add public notice filing and response requirements. This change will enable service providers to respond to pending applications that propose to provide broadband service outside of their territory.
• Add reporting requirements to ensure similar data is reported and collected across multiple USDA broadband programs.
• Set standards to ensure that programs are able to meet funding deadlines while maintaining the integrity of the environmental review process.
• Define “Retail Broadband Service.”

The White House Competition Council held its inaugural meeting on September 10, 2021. The Council’s members – including eight cabinet members and the leaders of seven independent agencies – met to discuss the actions they are taking to help lower prices for American families by boosting competition and to plan the group’s priorities over the coming months. The July 9 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy established the Competition Council to drive forward the Biden Administration’s whole-of-government effort to promote competition. The Council’s mandate includes delivering on the 72 initiatives identified in the Executive Order, collaborating on addressing pressing competition problems across the economy, and finding new ways of delivering concrete benefits to America’s consumers, workers, farmers, and small businesses. As of today, agencies have met each deadline set forth in the Executive Order. In the Council’s inaugural meeting, Council Chair and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese commended the Council members on the over a dozen initiatives they have already taken to promote competition and help lower costs for Americans in the two months since the Order was signed. Middle-class Americans will feel the impact at the grocery store, when they travel to see loved ones, when they shop for internet plans, and when they purchase the medicine they need to stay healthy.

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued her verdict in the closely watched battle between Apple and Epic Games, saying Apple’s prohibition against developers sending users to alternative ways of making in-app purchases was anticompetitive and permanently prohibited it from doing so. “The Court does not find that Apple is an antitrust monopolist in the submarket for mobile gaming transactions,” the judge wrote. “However, it does find that Apple’s conduct in enforcing anti-steering restrictions is anticompetitive.” Epic, the maker of “Fortnite,” brought the lawsuit, claiming that Apple was improperly using its monopoly power and harming competition. It had sought to force Apple to allow users to download its games outside of the iPhone maker’s App Store. The high-profile case highlights a broader concern about online platforms and digital commerce; regulators and lawmakers in Washington, Brussels and beyond are seeking to rein in big tech companies. Even before the judge’s ruling, Apple had been making concessions on the so-called anti-steering provision as it worked to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by smaller developers and an investigation by Japanese authorities.

A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the Internet to a Florida company in January 2021 — just minutes before President Trump left office — has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department retaking control of 175 million IP addresses. At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6 percent of a section of the Internet called IPv4. The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market, and had never been sold or leased to Global Resource Systems. They were merely put under its control for the pilot program created by an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense and bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” that solves emergency problems and conducts experimental work for the military. The Pentagon shed little new light on exactly what the pilot program was doing or why it now has ended, but it's clear that its mission has been extended even as it comes more formally under Pentagon control.