Reporting

Facebook's newly formed Oversight Board—a group of 20 lawyers, professors and other independent experts who consider appeals to decisions made by the company—has been charged with interpreting Facebook’s numerous detailed rules governing everything from the depiction of graffiti to swearing at newsworthy figures.

By one estimate, three million students nationwide, roughly the school-age population of Florida, stopped going to classes, virtual or in person, after the pandemic began.

The wireless industry is beginning to wind down 2G and 3G networks in an effort to repurpose that spectrum for ultra-fast 5G. But lawmakers and public interest groups are increasingly concerned that shutting down those old networks could leave millions of people who still rely on them without service, particularly in rural areas. And there’s new pressure for the Federal Communications Commission to intervene.

The web itself is built on an English-first architecture, and most of the big social media platforms that host public discourse in the United States put English first too. And as technologies become proxies for civic spaces in the United States, the primacy of English has been magnified. For Asian-Americans, the move to digital means that access to democratic institutions—everything from voting registration to local news—is impeded by linguistic barriers. 

Frontier Communications emerged from bankruptcy. The company's new strategy has everything to do with deploying more fiber. Frontier plans to double its fiber network to ultimately pass more than 6 million homes and businesses. In 2021, it plans to extend its fiber to pass 495,000 more locations. It’s already extended the network to pass an additional 100,000 new locations in the first quarter. Frontier’s network, comprised of fiber and copper connections, spans 25 states.

Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge highlighted the company’s potential to upsell broadband customers as data usage grows but noted it didn’t yet feel the need to pursue a rollout of symmetrical capabilities. The broadband provider saw "significant growth in data usage per internet customer” in Q1 2021, stating this had reached an average of about 700 GB per month.

Apollo Global Management agreed to pay about $5 billion to acquire Yahoo and AOL from Verizon as the wireless company exits its ill-fated foray into the media business. The private-equity firm is paying $4.25 billion in cash for a 90% share of the media assets. Verizon will keep a 10% stake and $750 million of additional preferred stock in the new company, called Yahoo, that will be formed to operate the business. Verizon Media, which mostly struggled to grow against Alphabet's Google and Facebook, generated $7 billion in revenue in 2020.

Tennessee officials are moving forward with a plan to map out just where hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans without access to high-speed Internet live, following the lead of other states that no longer rely on federal maps that overstate coverage in some communities. The plan involves collecting and validating service data from broadband providers in Tennessee for about a year, with an anticipated completion of summer 2022, said Crystal Ivey, broadband director for the state Department of Economic and Community Development.

Trade groups representing AT&T, Verizon and other telecom companies are opening fire on a new law requiring them to provide discounted internet service to low-income households in New York. USTelecom, CTIA, the New York State Telecommunications Association, and others representing smaller companies