Internet/Broadband

The ongoing Farm Bill negotiations may mean linking millions of Americans to the 21st-century economy and taking a step toward the broader dream of high-tech agriculture. Since the last Farm Bill was passed in 2018, the federal government has spent billions to try to bring high-speed internet to the nearly 12 million rural households that don’t have it.

A bipartisan effort to push the Federal Communications Commission to expand internet access to rural areas will finally get a Senate hearing, two years after the bill was first introduced. The Reforming Broadband Connectivity Act has support in both the House and Senate and will get its day in the Senate Commerce Committee Thursday, May 11th, 2023. The bill — introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in the Senate and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) in the House — orders the FCC to determine ho

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened enforcement action against Google that could include holding the company in contempt of Congress for failing to produce documents the committee subpoenaed. In a letter to a lawyer for Google shared exclusively with CNBC, Chairman Jordan called the company’s compliance so far “insufficient” and demanded it hands over more information.

Dfinity is building what it calls the internet computer, a decentralized technology spread across a network of independent data centers that allow the software to run anywhere on the internet rather than in server farms that are increasingly controlled by large firms, such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. The company will be releasing its software to third-party developers, who it hopes will start making the internet computer’s killer apps. Rewinding the internet is not about nostalgia.

Frontier Communications reported first-quarter 2023 results:

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released a new dashboard highlighting federal investments in high-speed Internet programs. NTIA developed the dashboard to accompany the Federal Broadband Funding Report.

According to the US Census Bureau, between 2017 to 2021, about 28% of households in Ohio’s Columbiana County (more than 11,500 households) did not have an active broadband subscription. A similar problem exists across rural Appalachia in Ohio — and it is an expensive problem to fix. Regions like Southeast Ohio present a challenge to installing broadband due to the hilly and rural terrain.

West Virginia development officials have been focusing on expanding broadband internet service through a range of resources, Development Secretary Mitch Carmichael told legislators. Money is flowing from federal, state, and local sources; specifically $33 million in state and local recovery funds, $70 million in Capital Project Funds (CPF), and $44 million in private investment.

Rapidly advancing technologies are further highlighting the global impact of the digital divide, which is the gap between those with reliable access to high-speed internet services and those without it. Here are five creative ways companies are trying to bridge the divide:

Studies exploring the relationship between technology in the classroom and students’ outcomes have yielded mixed results. We contribute to the debate by examining the effects of broadband subsidies to schools on school performance measures in Florida. Specifically, using a nearly universal panel of Florida schools in the period 2016-2019, we assess the effect of federal broadband subsidies to schools via the E-Rate program on school grades.