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The National Lifeline Accountability Database will ensure compliance with one of the Federal Communications Commission’s most important rules to protect the integrity of the Lifeline program: limiting Lifeline benefits to one subscription per household.

By harnessing communications and information technology to enforce this rule, the FCC will protect the universal service fund and the consumers who pay into it, promote fairness to beneficiaries and companies who play by the rules, and reduce the burden on providers. Implementation of the database will begin in Arkansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma and Washington this fall, with other states to follow shortly thereafter. Importantly, the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) will “scrub” the subscriber information to eliminate duplicates BEFORE loading it into the database. The database will be operational by the end of the year and going forward will permanently detect and prevent duplicative Lifeline support before a consumer enrolls in the Lifeline program.

House Commerce Committee leaders continued their investigation into the National Telecommunication and Information Administration’s (NTIA) decision to award a $100.6 million stimulus grant to the EAGLE-Net Alliance in Colorado.

The grant was funded through the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). In a letter to NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy (R-PA), Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), and Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) expressed concern that the EAGLE-Net project has overbuilt existing fiber lines instead of extending service to “unserved” and “underserved” areas, as the law requires.

The leaders wrote, “While the Committee recognizes the importance of expanding broadband access to rural areas of the country, we are concerned by reports that the EAGLE-Net project has overbuilt existing systems rather than extend service to areas of Colorado that legitimately meet the underserved/unserved eligibility requirements. For example, on February 11, 2013, the New York Times reported that the EAGLE-Net project built a connection to an 11-student elementary school in Agate, Colorado which already had two existing high-speed fiber optic connections. Meanwhile, those areas of Colorado which truly lack high-speed broadband connectivity – such as the communities along the Western Slope - are still waiting for the promised EAGLE-Net service to be turned on. We remain skeptical of that occurring on time and on budget in light of a February 28, 2013 report indicating that $96 million of the $100.6 million grant has already been committed or spent. Even more troubling to the Committee is EAGLE-Net’s recent acknowledgement that only $7.8 million of the original grant money remains despite reports that the project is less than half complete.”

One of the hardest things to do after a disaster is communicate. Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski and Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain have a plan to address that. The idea is for people with Internet routers and mobile devices to form little pieces of a mesh communication network. There's a name for these things: ad-hoc networks.

Twitter executive Nicole Wong is joining the Obama Administration as deputy U.S. chief technology officer.

Wong, who has been Twitter’s legal director of products since November, will be working on Internet privacy and technology issues, according to a spokesman for the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is widely admired in the industry as a leading thinker on free speech and privacy issues and has helped to shape how companies balance the need to comply with global speech laws and fulfill a role as emerging forums for global conversation.