The second application filing window for the Federal Communications Commission's $7.17 billion Emergency Connectivity Fund is open from September 28 to October 13, 2021. The FCC’s Emergency Connectivity Fund, established by the American Rescue Plan of 2021, will help provide relief to millions of students, school staff, and library patrons and help close the Homework Gap for students who currently lack necessary internet access or the devices they need to connect to classrooms. Eligible schools and libraries can submit requests for funding to purchase eligible equipment and services received or delivered between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022.  The funding can be used to purchase laptops and tablets, Wi-Fi hotspots, modems, routers, and broadband connections to serve unmet needs for off-premises use by students, school staff, and library patrons. On September 24, the FCC announced the first funding wave in the program committing over $1.2 billion to connect over 3.6 million students.  Additional funding commitments will be made on a rolling basis in the coming weeks. You can find more information about the program here or instructions on how to apply here.

To help close the digital divide, federal programs provide funding to support broadband deployment in unserved areas. According to the Federal Communications Commission, these programs rely on data the FCC collects from broadband providers to identify which areas are and are not served to target their limited funds. This report describes the FCC's progress in developing a location fabric and the challenges stakeholders identified that the FCC faces in doing so. The GAO reviewed relevant documents; surveyed officials in 54 states and territories; and interviewed officials from data companies, broadband providers, federal agencies, and states. Stakeholders said that the FCC's challenges can be overcome by using multiple sources of data. The four key data types to be used are:

1. County parcel data to identify property boundaries;
2. County tax data for property type (agricultural, residential and commercial);
3. Building Footprints for building location and shape to verify its use; and
4. Addresses with geocoordinates (broadband serviceable locations).

Cox Communications unveiled a new pilot program with the city of Las Vegas to deploy one of the first Managed Private Networks (MPN) launched by a US city to facilitate Smart City use cases. Together, Cox and the city will leverage Citizens' Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) to power Smart City solutions that deliver insights into visitor attendance and after-hours activities at Baker Park through parking lot management, safety detection and trend analytics. The learnings from this pilot will empower Cox and Las Vegas to push the boundaries of how networks of the future can be used to scale and support solutions and services. Leveraging a CBRS private network will allow the city of Las Vegas to ramp up testing and support of smart solutions, beginning with the 12-month pilot program in Baker Park. The network will deliver the private wireless connectivity needed to deploy a myriad of Smart City and lnternet of Things (IoT) solutions. The combination of Cox’s existing fiber network with the city’s infrastructure will accelerate the ability to deploy solutions and will provide an ideal path to a long-term, sustainable solution should the pilot prove successful.

Facebook has come under increasing fire for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future. The company formed a team to study preteens, set a three-year goal to create more products for them and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business opportunities presented by these potential users. In one presentation, it contemplated whether there might be a way to engage children during playdates. The Facebook documents show that competition from rivals, in particular Snapchat and TikTok, is also a motivating factor behind its work. Earlier this year, a senior researcher at Facebook presented to colleagues a new approach to how the company should think about designing products for children. It provided a blueprint for how to introduce the company’s products to younger children. Rather than offering just two types of products—those for users 13 and older, and a messenger app for kids—Facebook should tailor its features to six age brackets, said a slide titled “where we’ve been, and where we’re going.” The age brackets included: adults, late teens ages 16 to maturity, teens ages 13 to 15, tweens ages 10 to 12, children ages 5 to 9, and young kids ages zero to four.

To Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, people are tired of how today’s Internet operates. He says the social media era of the Internet, a charge led by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, has separated commerce from the general audience, herding users together and directing them to targets of the company’s choosing rather than allowing free exploration. “Now we’re in a closed platform wave, and Apple and Google are surfing that wave too,” Sweeney said. “As we get out of this, everybody is going to realize, ‘Okay we spent the last decade being taken advantage of.'" For years now, he has eyed a solution: the metaverse. And steadily, over several years, Epic has been acquiring a number of assets and making strategic moves with the goal of making Sweeney’s vision for the metaverse a reality. Today’s always-online, smartphone-centric culture of curated feeds revolves around social media and monetization through advertising, a dynamic Sweeney believes various companies have exploited to their benefit and the detriment of users. For creators, the promise of the Internet goes beyond haggling for likes and competing for space on an infinitely scrolling feed. “You’re going to have hundreds of industries entering this, each one cognizant of the need to protect their brand,” Sweeney said. “I think that’s going to be the ultimate checks and balance system in a way that it was not in the social media revolution. … I think that’s going to lead to very robust development in the way the Internet was.”