A new study has found the Federal Communications Commission’s primary justification for repealing network neutrality was indisputably false. For years, big Internet service providers and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai have told anyone who’d listen that the FCC’s net neutrality rules, passed in 2015 and repealed in 2018 in a flurry of controversy and alleged fraud, dramatically stifled broadband investment across the US. Repeal the rules, Pai declared, and US broadband investment would explode. But a new study from George Washington University indicates that Chairman Pai’s claims were patently false. The study took a closer look at the earnings reports and SEC filings of 8,577 unique telecom companies from Q1 2009 through Q3 2018 to conclude that the passage and repeal of the rules had no meaningful impact on broadband investment.

Benton Senior Fellow Gigi Sohn, a former FCC lawyer who helped craft the FCC’s 2015 rules, said she hoped the comprehensive study would finally put an end to the debate. "This paper once again validates what the FCC found in 2015 and what net neutrality advocates have said for years—that neither the net neutrality rules nor Title II classification had any impact on ISP investment,” Sohn said. “Not surprisingly, the ISPs and their friends at the FCC and the Hill keep saying the opposite, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” she added. “Hopefully this comprehensive study, which studies ISP investment over nearly a decade, will put this matter to rest.”

Derek Turner, research director for consumer group Free Press, said he doubted that would actually happen. “We don’t expect this study to kill the ISPs' zombie lies about net neutrality and investment,” he said. “The telecom companies and their defenders in Congress have long operated unmoored from reality, and no smoking gun is going to change that, certainly not one they’ll never bother to read and consider fairly.”

In cities like Denver, where broadband is so prolific that availability is estimated at 99.94%, the digital divide is no longer about lack of internet service or limited to rural areas. A plethora of reasons exist as to why the divide persists in urban areas and the issue is gaining more attention from researchers, organizations and policymakers who debate whether it’s about accessibility, affordability or lack of understanding. It’s a quandary that companies like Starry are trying to figure out. The fixed-wireless internet provider, which lights up apartment buildings, launched in Denver. It typically charges $50 a month, but a cheaper offering, the $15 Starry Connect, is made possible by partnering with public housing. It’s part of the company’s mission “that everyone deserves great broadband,” said Stephan Andrade, Starry’s Denver general manager. Starry committed to making its 30-megabits per second service available to all 26,000 Denver Housing Authority residents by the end of 2020. By offering it to an entire building, there’s no need for residents to pre-qualify on various federal programs, as some competing services require. If you’re a tenant, you qualify. Even so, only an average of 30% of tenants sign up after 90 days, said Virginia Lam Abrams, Starry’s senior vice president of communications. She cites reasons such as tenants have another provider, like Comcast, or they may not be able to afford it.  But it also may not just be about the cost, she added. One building owner decided to pay for broadband service so that all his tenants could use Starry Connect for free. One thing is clear: People don’t say no to internet because they aren’t educated or or understand why its relevant, said Reisdorf, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “There’s a stipulation that people are too uneducated to understand the value of the internet. That’s not true at all in my research,” Reisdorf said. “I’ve interviewed people who have been incarcerated for 30 to 40 years and they absolutely understand the importance of the internet.”

Sen Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has been leading private meetings in Washington with tech industry leaders and civil society groups as part of the Senate Judiciary tech task force inquiry into social media and internet companies. Now, she’s taking things on the road, planning a trip to Silicon Valley in the “near future,” aiming to look under the hood at the “backbone of some of these platforms and the way their algorithms are developed.” Sen Blackburn said the task force will likely look into concerns about anti-competitive behavior among tech giants “early next year,” though she said she’s already heard from Yelp about its grievances with Google’s search business. She said others who have spoken with the task force pushed for light-touch federal privacy regulations that can be augmented with industry-specific privacy laws, as well as a federal standard for notifying people when their digital data has been hacked.

Two House Commerce Committee subcommittees are planning a hearing on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act on Oct. 16, and Sen Blackburn thinks the Senate ought to follow suit. She said the time has come for a broader review of the 1996 law, which shields websites from liability over user content, to ensure it reflects the modern internet. But Sen Blackburn made clear she’s not ready to throw it out entirely. “We do not want to do away with it, and make it impossible for new entrants to come into compliance, or have it be something that keeps them from trying to enter the marketplace,” she said.

Congressional antitrust investigators are scrutinizing plans by Google to use a new internet protocol because of concerns that it could give the company a competitive advantage by making it harder for others to access consumer data. Investigators for the House Judiciary Committee asked Google for information about its “decision regarding whether to adopt or promote the adoption” of the protocol, which the company said is aimed at improving internet security. House investigators are also asking whether data collected or processed through the new protocol will be used by Google for any commercial purposes. The new standard would encrypt internet traffic to improve security, which could help prevent hackers from snooping on websites, and from spoofing—faking an internet website to obtain a consumer’s credit-card information or other data. But the new standard could alter the internet’s competitive landscape, cable and wireless companies said. They fear being shut out from much of user data if browser users move wholesale to this new standard, which many internet service providers don’t currently support. Service providers also worry that Google may compel its Chrome browser users to switch to Google services that support the protocol, something Google said it has no intention of doing.