Politico

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), who opposed the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of the network neutrality order, said he would not support efforts to restore the Obama-era rules via the Congressional Review Act. “The CRA is a non-starter for me as it defers again to agency rulemaking,” Rep Coffman said at the Incompas policy summit .

Roughly half of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) consists of Trump administration hires. More than 20 new people have joined the office since the start of President Donald Trump’s term.

The gap between haves and have-nots in American health care isn't just driven by insurance and access to doctors. It’s exacerbated by a deep structural problem: Many poor people suffer from long-term ailments that the system has little financial incentive to treat. But now a New York City start-up thinks it can use Google-level tech savvy to help make progress on that challenge—and save the government money.

The U.S. technology industry has grown into one of America's most powerful and prestigious business sectors, now including 4 of the 5 most valuable companies in the world. But as the United States becomes a more diverse country overall, tech has increasingly come under fire for its striking lack of diversity. Even the most sincere efforts to fix the problem face one big obstacle, however: There are frustratingly few corporate policies that have been shown to work, over the long term, to improve diversity.

[Commentary] If tech companies start to include seniors in their business models from the start, they will find a significant upside. Seniors are a vast and underserved market. If technology becomes friendlier to the whole population, especially the booming numbers of older Americans, companies will find their business landscapes expanding along with their consumer base. Everyone will benefit from having happy, healthy, active grandparents — not least of all, grandparents themselves.

Google’s Translate tool “learns” language from an existing corpus of writing, and the writing often includes cultural patterns regarding how men and women are described. Because the model is trained on data that already has biases of its own, the results that it spits out serve only to further replicate and even amplify them. It might seem strange that a seemingly objective piece of software would yield gender-biased results, but the problem is an increasing concern in the technology world.

Both maps illustrate just what a patchwork broadband access remains in the United States, with well-connected areas right next to disconnected areas. Overall, more than 30 percent of rural America still lacks access to what the Federal Communications Commission considers adequate broadband. That’s a stark contrast from urban areas, where only 2.1 percent lack this connectivity.

Rural Indian reservations have lower rates of coverage than anywhere else in the nation. About 35 percent of Americans living in tribal lands lack broadband access, according to the most recent report by the Federal Communications Commission. In Idaho, the FCC estimates that 83 percent of the tribal population lacks broadband, making the Nez Perce tribe among the least-connected groups in the country.

House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) isn’t joining fellow rural state lawmakers in pushing for dedicated funding for broadband in the infrastructure package. She wants to focus on bills to streamline permitting and clear away regulations impeding new networks, and attach them to the infrastructure legislation. “I want to see how much bipartisan support we can end up building for simplifying this process,” she said.

Apparently, the Senate has now received official notice of the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality repeal. That procedural development is important because it could be the first step to triggering a 60-day clock for Congress to undo the FCC’s decision. (That is, 60 legislative days.) The Senate’s 47 Democrats and two independents plus Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) have said they would support such a maneuver, using the Congressional Review Act. That’s 50 votes, still one vote short of the number needed for approval in the Senate.