Level of Government

It may seem as though the Competitive Carriers Association (CCA) has been talking about the lack of adequate Rip and Replace funding for years—and it has been. But now things are really starting to hit the fan. Congress created the Rip and Replace program in 2020 to get Chinese components out of US wireless networks, but the funding fell $3 billion short of what’s needed to finish the job.

The Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Broadband Labels were implemented by internet service providers with more than 100,000 customers on or before April 10. I've looked at a lot of labels so far, and I have some observations. The first is that the labels are generally hard to find—they are not prominently displayed on provider websites because the FCC's rules say they only have to be displayed at 'points of sale.' One of the features of the labels is that a provider is supposed to provide a plain English description of its technology and network practices.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to vote on April 25 to restore its authority over the companies we pay to get online, and reinstate federal net neutrality protections that were jettisoned by the Trump administration in 2017.  Net neutrality protections are supposed to ensure that we, not the internet service providers (ISPs) we pay to get online, get to decide what we do online.

On April 15, a coalition of 271 civil-society groups and local, state and Tribal governments sent a letter to the House of Representatives that urges all members to sign a discharge petition filed by Rep Yvette Clarke (D-NY) in support of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) Extension Act. By filing a discharge petition, a member of Congress can bring a bill out of committee to be voted on by the entire chamber.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has now accepted digital equity plans from all 50 States, DC, and Puerto Rico.

AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon are quietly trying to weaken a $42.5 billion federal program to improve internet access across the nation, aiming to block strict new rules that would require them to lower their poorest customers’ monthly bills in exchange for a share of the federal aid. In state after state, the firms have blasted the proposed price cuts as illegal—forcing regulators in California, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and elsewhere to rethink, scale back, or abandon their plans to condition the federal funds on financial relief for consumers. The lobbying ca

The US Department of Commerce and Samsung Electronics have signed a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms (PMT) to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen the resilience of the U.S. semiconductor supply chain, advance U.S. technology leadership, and fuel U.S. global competitiveness.

To connect more Americans, Congress designated a slice of the $1.2 trillion 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Infrastructure Act), as well as a portion of the $350 billion 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) that passed to provide financial relief during the COVID pandemic, to fund projects that would cross this digital divide. All told, the bills provide around $90 billion in funding for connectivity spread across a plethora of initiatives. The question remains: Will this colossal sum be enough to bridge the digital divide?

In the course of the Federal Communications Commission's Office of Economics and Analytics’ (OEA) review of George Ford's Regulation and Investment in the U.S. Telecommunications Industry, staff determined that the underlying data relied upon by the author of this study has been revised by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) since the author’s analysis and the corrected data changes the results. Staff submitted a link to the original BEA data used by Dr. Ford, a link to the revised BEA data, and a comparison Dr. Ford’s two baseline model regressions using the different data sets. 

With the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) on the line, internet service providers (ISPs) want to ensure their low-income subscribers don’t lose internet access—and that nobody falls through the cracks. Identity verification company SheerID has launched a tool allowing telcos to verify that households are eligible for government assistance programs.