Reporting

Land O'Lakes started taking on the challenge of the rural digital divide over the last year with its American Connection Project, through which it’s increased access to free wifi by working with partners to make 3,000 local network spots public in 49 states. But, the co-op is now taking further action to build digital infrastructure in rural corners around the country—by recruiting college graduates, in a national service-style program, to go back to their hometowns and work with local institutions to roll out broadband, and familiarize local residents with the tech.

Nearly every major social platform has recently introduced some form of tipping, allowing users to directly support their favorite personalities in real time. The popularity and availability of payment platforms such as Venmo, CashApp and Stripe are making it easier for tech companies to enable peer-to-peer payments on their platforms. For creators, getting money from users directly is critical because platforms are not financially incentivized to pay out most people directly.

The US government has built robust programs to track terrorists and criminals through warrantless access to commercial data. Many vendors now provide global location information from mobile phones to intelligence, military and law-enforcement organizations.

The Biden administration’s ambitious infrastructure proposal, the American Jobs Plan, includes $100 billion in broadband funding, with the goal of connecting every American to high-speed broadband by the end of the decade. But with Senate Republicans set to dramatically cut total investment in their counter-proposal, the future of the package is unclear.

The Supreme Court curbed the Federal Trade Commission’s longtime practice of seeking to recover ill-gotten gains in court from companies and individuals who cheat or mislead consumers, upending a central enforcement tool the agency has relied on for decades. The court, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, ruled unanimously that a 1973 law, which gives the FTC the right to seek court injunctions to stop fraudulent or deceptive commercial activity, doesn’t grant the commission the power to seek financial judgments as well.

Comcast offered the latest hint of a future in which its cable customers won't be limited to 35Mbps upload speeds. Announcing a recent lab test, Comcast said its research team "deliver[ed] upstream and downstream throughputs of greater than 4Gbps" and that "future optimization" will allow "even greater capacity." This was "the first-ever live lab test" of a Broadcom "system-on-chip (SOC) device that will pave the way for Comcast to deliver multigigabit upload and down

A group of Senate Republicans released the outline for a $568 billion infrastructure plan, putting out a GOP alternative to President Biden’s $2.3 trillion plan as lawmakers seek a bipartisan compromise on the issue. The two-page Republican plan—which includes spending on roads, transit systems, and broadband internet over five years—doesn’t provide specifics on how it would cover the cost of the bill, a central issue in the talks.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman David Scott (D-GA) is pressing to expand by the end of 2021 high-speed internet access to all 24 million Americans without it. The deadline from Chairman Scott comes as bipartisan lawmakers and the broadband industry call for a permanent solution to internet access hurdles in remote locales, instead of relying on pilot loan programs.

The particulars of how the Biden Administration will execute the American Jobs Plan are scant for now, and it’s far from guaranteed that all of the $100 billion will make it through Congress unscathed. As more details emerge on how exactly this $100 billion would be spent, though, here are some major considerations that could determine how successful the plan will be.