Op-Ed

In a period of only nine days—April 25 to May 3, 2023—the the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced initiatives to look at unfair and deceptive acts involving AI and proposed banning Meta Platforms from targeting young users. These come on top of two years of antitrust aggressiveness and consumer protection assertiveness. But both actions beg the question, “Are the tools strong enough for the task?” Both the AI and Meta activities are indications of the limitations that FTC Chair Lina Khan and the agency face as a result of being tied to industrial-era statutes and procedures.

Legislation aimed at regulating telecommunications operators is in the works and companies should hasten to prepare for what’s to come. A bill introduced to the Senate in March 2023 proposes to do away with “junk fees,” which are financial charges that President Joe Biden denounced in his State of the Union address.

 A rift at the heart of the telecommunications sector risks reversing decades of progress and plunging digital allies into a new phase of conflict. Europe’s telecom companies want US corporations such as Alphabet/Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Meta to pay for the increasing video traffic they generate. These US giants originate data accounting for around 50 percent of network loads.

What can make people enthusiastic about broadband? What if a community, using the creation orientation, views broadband as the means to build or invent things that didn’t exist before? Essential Families is a 501c3 nonprofit that provides virtual parental education and mental healthcare services. The organization conducted a telehealth pilot in one of the poorest communities in Kansas City (MO) with stellar results.

Too often policymakers, political leaders, contractors, and consultants want to tell communities just how broadband should work for their unserved and underserved.

As economies around the world rebound from the pandemic, there are significant variations in the pace and strength of the recovery.

The internet is facing multiple crises. From algorithmically fueled misinformation on Facebook to communities abandoned by large internet service providers, the tension between digital monopolies’ profit interests and the public interest is glaringly evident. Consensus is growing that the internet we have is not the internet that we want or need. In recent years, a diverse array of thinkers has begun to coalesce around bold ideas for radically democratizing the internet—from the pipes that connect us to the internet to the platforms that distribute news and information.

Sitting atop a backdrop of economic imbalance are Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms that daily manage hundreds of billions of dollars, leveraging debt to acquire companies, then firing workers, and stripping the carcasses of American industry for asset sales. This destructive way of running our economy is bad news in many sectors. Nowhere is it more pernicious than in communications and the media. Two massive Wall Street funds, Standard General and Apollo Global Management have set out to purchase the second-largest local TV station group in the U.S.—Tegna.

Years of working on deployments with varying geographic issues and operational challenges have imparted valuable lessons about timely project execution despite uncontrollable variables. Here are seven best practices and the stories behind them:

In the metropolitan hubs of the world, access to ubiquitous high-speed fiber within city limits is almost taken for granted these days. But for many people in rural areas, such access is limited. Service providers understandably often can’t provide fiber access to the last mile in rural areas because of the sheer expense of laying and maintaining fiber to each home in sparsely populated areas. This has left many people underserved for decades, relying on legacy copper networks to attempt to bridge the digital divide.