Upcoming policy issue

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government today approved by voice vote its fiscal year 2023 bill. For fiscal year 2023, the bill includes $29.8 billion in funding, an increase of $4.3 billion (17 percent) over fiscal year 2022. The bill provides annual funding for certain federal agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel shared with her colleagues new draft rules to improve the reliability and resiliency of wireless networks during emergencies. If adopted by a vote of the full FCC, the rules would help reduce wireless phone outages for the public and support faster service restoration after hurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters. In September 2021, the FCC adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to improve communications during disasters.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act made it clear that Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program grants should be made available to everybody—commercial entities, non-profit entities, Tribes, and municipal entities. But there will be an eventual showdown since many states have barriers or restrictions against municipal participation in building, owning, or operating commercial broadband networks. If there is any one area where politics creep into building broadband, it is with state restrictions on municipalities.

House and Senate leaders released a discussion draft of a comprehensive national data privacy and data security framework. The draft legislation is the first comprehensive privacy proposal to gain bipartisan, bicameral support. The American Data Privacy and Protection Act would:

For more than two decades, E-Rate has provided vital support to help connect schools and libraries to high-speed, modern communications all across the country. It got its start as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Over 25 million children take the bus to school every day. In rural areas that ride can be long. It can easily be an hour to school and an hour to return home at the end of the day.

House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-SC) joined Glen Echo Group CEO Maura Corbett for a conversation at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society’s 40^th Anniversary celebration. In the wake of the unprecedented investment in broadband included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Corbett asked Clyburn where he thinks we’ll be in five years. “Oh, in five years,” Clyburn answered, “I think this is going to be a successful venture.” Representative Clyburn said attention now turns to states, like his home, South Carolina.

The Biden administration arrived in Washington with an ambitious agenda for taming Big Tech, which it portrayed as concentrating too much power in the hands of a few billionaires — the moguls of a new, digital Gilded Age. Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy Twitter has put that critique into sharp relief, underscoring how badly Biden’s tech agenda has stalled in the 15 months since taking the White House.

In just the last few years, Europe has seen a landmark law for online privacy take effect, approved sweeping regulations to curb the dominance of the tech giants and is nearing a deal on new legislation to protect its citizens from harmful online content. For those keeping score, that’s Europe: three.

Will the Federal Communications Commission raise the definition of broadband to 100/20 Mbps? It looks like that probably doesn’t happen until Congress approves a fifth FCC commissioner. But we  need to understand that a 100/20 Mbps definition of broadband is not forward-looking and will start being obsolete and too slow from the day it is approved. We need a mechanism to change the definition of broadband annually, or at least more often than we have been doing. The market has already told the FCC that 100 Mbps is quickly becoming last year’s news.

In a series of confirmation hearings starting March 21, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will question Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s pick to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court — and while tech policy is not expected to be a major area of focus for either party, two issues in particular could come up. Critics of the tech industry’s treasured liability shield often claim judges have interpreted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act too broadly.