Reporting

You might think Washington state director of broadband Russ Elliott would be pleased about private companies winning $223 million in federal subsidies to expand broadband in rural WA. Instead, Elliott is frustrated. He’s under direction from WA’s Legislature to bring the entire state up to superfast internet speeds by 2028. Yet in Dec, the federal government announced plans to award hundreds of millions of dollars to companies Elliott is afraid won't meet the state’s standards. For Elliott, the awards to private-sector companies such as SpaceX and CenturyLink pose another problem as well.

Congress' December Covid-19 relief bill included $3.2 billion to help low-income Americans pay for broadband service, as the country continues its push toward recovery from the health and economic crisis. Registration for consumers are expected to begin next month.

The Senate — following a grueling vote-a-rama on March 5-6 — has finally approved a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill, bringing it one step closer to becoming law. The House is slated to take up the Senate version of the bill shortly and send it to President Joe Biden for his signature. Included in the bill is a provision that establishes a $7.6 billion Emergency Connectivity Fund, to be implemented by the Federal Communications Commission, to expand internet connectivity to students and teachers during the pandemic.

Senate Democrats aren’t setting aside quite as much money as their House counterparts for Federal Communications Commission online learning efforts, according to the latest legislative text for the $1.9 trillion pandemic aid package. Although House Democrats had wanted $7.6 billion in FCC funding, the Senate version includes just $7.17 billion. Senators are gearing up for final votes on the bill soon.

TracFone is the largest wireless reseller in the U.S., with about 21 million subscribers and prepaid brands including Straight Talk and Simple Mobile.

Windstream is looking to leverage funds from two Federal Communications Commission programs as it expands broadband Internet and related services to new markets and customers. Kinetic, Windstream’s community broadband business, announced that it plans to participate in the FCC’s $3.2 billion Emergency Broadband Benefit program. “As soon as the FCC is ready to take this program live, we are ready to implement it so any e

Cable broadband operators want the Federal Communications Commission to confine its emergency E-rate Universal Service Fund broadband subsidies, where possible, to existing providers rather than spending on new infrastructure deployments, and to provide a streamlined application process.

AT&T announced it would be spinning off its TV business — including DirecTV, AT&T TV, and U-verse — in a deal it claimed would greatly benefit the company’s customers, employees, and shareholders. The deal provides AT&T with a $7.8 billion cash infusion to pay down debt and recent wireless spectrum purchases, and a 70 percent stake in the “new” DirecTV.

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry. In 2022 Google plans to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet. The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital-advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) signed data privacy legislation into law, making Virginia the second state in the nation to adopt its own data protection rules. The law, known as the Consumer Data Protection Act, had broad support from the tech industry, including Amazon, which is building an Arlington (VA) headquarters. The legislation will allow residents of the commonwealth to opt out of having their data collected and sold, similar to a California law that went into effect in 2020.