Margaret Harding McGill

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers dropped a bill directing the Federal Communications Commission to hold a public auction of coveted midband airwaves. The Clearing Broad Airwaves for New Deployment (C-BAND) Act is led by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle (D-PA), Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA), Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH), and Rep Greg Gianforte (R-MT).

Opponents of the T-Mobile-Sprint merger are piling on the deal in the hopes of convincing a judge the Justice Department’s settlement isn’t good enough. The DOJ’s agreement with the wireless companies has to receive final sign-off from Judge Timothy Kelly of the DC District Court, and critics want to make it a tough decision. Historically, the federal court review of a merger settlement has been an uneventful affair.

A recent Census Bureau report found that several of the states that have fallen furthest behind on broadband access also have some of the highest levels of poverty in the country. From the beginning, broadband access was promoted as a means to reduce inequality between urban and rural America, but despite these programs to bridge this original "digital divide," stubborn gaps remains.

President Donald Trump and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai had lunch at the White House the day the FCC won a major legal battle over its repeal of net neutrality regulations. Apparently, the timing of the Oct. 1 lunch was a coincidence. Two people familiar with the gathering described it as a "family" event.

A group of state attorneys general met with US Attorney General William Barr  to discuss antitrust concerns related to major tech companies, as the Justice Department launches a review of whether online platforms are reducing competition. New York, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana, sent representatives to the Justice Department for the meeting with senior officials. 

The federal government's struggles to rein in Facebook are driving some Democrats and consumer advocates to a stark conclusion: The agency charged with regulating Silicon Valley is not up to the task. The 105-year-old Federal Trade Commission is a main enforcer of Americans' consumer protections but it has only a small fraction of the money and workforce of the nation's largest tech companies — and a privacy staff less than half that of the Irish agency that regulates Facebook's European operations.

The White House is pushing Commerce policy director Earl Comstock out of the Trump administration -- the first round of house-cleaning after the 2020 census debacle and clashes over tech policy.

The Federal Trade Commission has sent top antitrust officials into the heart of Silicon Valley to seek out complaints about anti-competitive behavior, an unusual move that offers yet another hint about the government’s growing interest in policing the industry's giants. The weeklong tour included private meetings between leaders of the FTC's new technology task force and more than a dozen industry players to discuss the state of their businesses and market competition challenges, apparently.

Busting up the nation’s tech giants would be much harder than making a campaign pledge. Corporate breakups are a huge, and rare, undertaking for the government, and a social media company like Facebook presents unique challenges that didn't exist with past antitrust successes like the dismembering of AT&T in the 1980s. Here are some of the obstacles standing in the way of turning this rallying cry into reality:

The Trump administration is feuding internally over the fate of airwaves critical to 5G networks, threatening to undermine the country's push to speed development of the super-fast wireless service and set the global standards around the technology.