The recently signed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act makes the largest federal investment into universal broadband access in history. In doing so, Congress gave broadband responsibility to the states, with the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) providing oversight.  This piece lays out eight steps NTIA should take to improve the odds of success in achieving universal connectivity:

1. Protect against risky deployment decisions while advocating for states with other federal agencies.
2. Enable and encourage state-to-state education to quickly scale up operations.
3. Borrow and hire personnel from other agencies with expertise in broadband grants.
4. Encourage processes that result in lower-cost structures for communications networks.
5. Determine whether there are baseline requirements beyond those delineated by Congress.
6. Provide states with expertise on maximizing competitive dynamics in the grant process.
7. Assist with enforcement mechanisms to ensure grant recipients keep their promises.
8. Improve coordination of federal and state broadband programs.

[Blair Levin is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro.]

To accomplish the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act's broadband goals, Congress made states the key decision-makers, with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration providing oversight. This piece lays out nine actions every state should take in the development and implementation of its broadband plan:

• Publicly establish a vision for using broadband to improve residents’ lives
• Build institutional capacity to achieve the plan’s goals
• Develop and publish a comprehensive timeline
• Engage communities and stakeholders in development of the plan
• Improve mapping, data collection, and modeling—and bookmark the funding to pay for it
• Develop a comprehensive plan for availability, adoption, and utilization
• Coordinate state and local action to lower the cost of deployment
• Establish a competitive grant process
• Establish a process to enforce commitments

[Blair Levin is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro.]

The Vermont Community Broadband Board launched a $116 million broadband construction grant program that is set to fund projects beginning spring 2022. Vermont’s nine communications union districts, plus the small communication carriers and internet service providers that are working alongside the communication districts, can all apply for the funding.  “These grants are important to drive down the entry cost,” Christine Hallquist, executive director of the Community Broadband Board, told the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday. Funding broadband through grants, rather than bonds, decreases the consumer cost, she said. The community broadband board’s goal is to provide universal broadband access throughout Vermont with upload and download speeds of 100 megabits per second. Currently, just 29.2 percent of Vermont households meet that standard, according to the Department of Public Service. In addition to the $116 million in construction grants, Gov Phil Scott (R-VT) wants to use a lot of federal money — $95 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds and $100 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — to support broadband buildout. Those requests are part of his budget proposal for the fiscal year that starts July 1.

In the absence of a comprehensive federal law, a handful of large states have passed or begun to enact data privacy legislation. More states are likely to pass similar laws in the coming years, which would create a patchwork of different and sometimes conflicting state privacy laws regulating the commercial collection and use of personal data. Not only do these laws create significant costs for in-state businesses, both in terms of direct compliance costs and decreases in productivity, but they also raise costs for out-of-state businesses that can find themselves subject to multiple and duplicative rules and create confusion for consumers. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has estimated that, in the absence of Congress passing privacy legislation, state privacy laws could impose out-of-state costs of $98 billion and $112 billion annually. Over a 10-year period, these costs would exceed $1 trillion. The burden on small businesses would be substantial, with U.S. small businesses bearing $20–23 billion annually. ITIF’s economic model also shows the impact of privacy laws on each state. These estimates highlight the high costs of states creating a patchwork of privacy laws and the need for Congress to move quickly to pass legislation to create a national privacy framework that streamlines regulation, preempts state laws, establishes basic consumer data rights, and minimizes the impact on innovation.

Midco’s chief technology innovation officer Jon Pederson says the operator’s use of fixed wireless access (FWA) technology to serve certain remote locations is actually benefitting its efforts to expand its fiber network. Pederson, who has worked for the regional US broadband provider for more than three decades, explained Midco deploys fixed wireless access service for customers in some of the most remote parts of its footprint. As it runs fiber to new towers for that service, he said it’s also taking the opportunity to push fiber into nearby communities along the way. Midco is currently pressing on with a $500 million fiber project which aims to deliver multi-gigabit service to 300,000 homes and businesses over the coming years. Right now, only a single-digit percentage of Midco’s more than 400,000 broadband subscribers are on fiber, but “we will increase that progressively over time,” Pederson said.

Facebook says it’s helping millions of the world’s poorest people get online through apps and services that allow them to use the internet data-free. Internal company documents show that many of these people end up being charged in amounts that collectively add up to an estimated millions of dollars a month. To attract new users, Facebook made deals with cellular carriers in countries including Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines to let low-income people use a limited version of Facebook and browse some other websites without data charges. Many of the users have inexpensive cellphone plans that cost just a few dollars a month, often prepaid, for phone service and a small amount of internet data. Because of software problems at Facebook, which it has known about and failed to correct for months, people using the apps in free mode are getting unexpectedly charged by local cellular carriers for using data. In many cases, they only discover this when their prepaid plans are drained of funds. In internal documents, employees of Facebook parent Meta acknowledge this is a problem. Charging people for services Facebook says are free “breaches our transparency principle,” an employee wrote in an October 2021 memo. In the year ended July 2021, charges made by the cellular carriers to users of Facebook’s free-data products grew to an estimated total of $7.8 million a month, when purchasing power adjustments were made, from about $1.3 million a year earlier, according to the company.