Federal Agency

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr announced the appointment of Bradley Craigmyle as Deputy General Counsel of the FCC. Craigmyle will serve as the FCC’s Deputy General Counsel for litigation. He joins the FCC from the U.S. House of Representatives Office of General Counsel, where he served as Associate General Counsel and managed the office’s high-priority and high-profile litigation. 

The Missouri Office of Broadband Development announced that the year’s first round of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment funding is closed. During this initial round, OBD received a total of 519 applications, which would bring broadband to more than 192,000 of the state’s residents and businesses. OBD said this represents 90 percent of the locations eligible for the funding. Nearly $4 million in funding was requested. The next step will be for OBD to review those applications.

We’re creeping closer to the one-year mark since the federal government axed the Affordable Connectivity Program due to lack of funding, which left over 23 million low-income households without affordable internet. But folks didn’t just lose the $30/month subsidy and a reliable broadband connection.

The Pew Charitable Trusts is recommending that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration make public all past waivers issued regarding the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program.

New York's law requiring Internet service providers to offer broadband for $15 or $20 a month has spurred legislative efforts in other states to guarantee affordable service for people with low incomes.

The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) will hear oral arguments on March 26 in the case of FCC v. Consumers’ Research regarding the constitutionality of the Universal Service Fund (USF). The Court will be reviewing a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that said that the USF is unconstitutional. That ruling conflicted with rulings from two other appeal courts that largely blessed the Federal Communications Commission and USF. The case that drove this to the Supreme Court was filed by Consumers’ Research, a nonprofit activist group.

A federal appeals court’s rejection of the Federal Communications Commission’s decade-plus push for stronger oversight of the internet was a crushing defeat for “net neutrality” as it has been pursued since the Obama administration. But the ruling could also be seen as the latest indictment of the inability of Congress to regulate at anywhere near the speed of tech.

The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund was the biggest attempt at the time to solve the rural broadband gap. The Federal Communications Commission had originally slated $20.4 billion to award to internet service providers in a reverse auction, meaning the ISP willing to take the smallest subsidy for a given area won the funding. Winners were to collect the funding over 10 years and had up to seven years to build the promised networks. The program ran into problems in several dramatic ways.

On November 1, 2024, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC) and its Wisconsin Broadband Office (WBO) received over $13 million in Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program funding from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). With this funding, WBO will implement the activities in its state Digital Equity Plan.

Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB) has preliminary applications from internet service providers (ISPs) to serve nearly every eligible address in the state under Vermont’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (VT-BEAD) Program. Vermont’s allocation of BEAD funds is almost $229 million. The applications were from a preliminary round, which was a mandatory step for any ISP seeking VT-BEAD funds for broadband construction.