Axios

President Biden's plan to boost broadband across the country could also be a boon to Google's internet ambitions. Biden's plan emphasizes building fiber and steering funding to community-owned networks to ensure widespread connectivity and increase competition.

Where you live, how educated you are, whether you have health insurance and whether you have access to the internet are all correlated with how likely you are to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. None of these factors has anything to do directly with an individual's risk. Instead, this emphasizes, yet again, the powerful role played by social determinants of health.

President Joe Biden's promise to cut the price of Americans' internet bills has provoked a fierce lobbying campaign by cable and telecom companies to prove that the cost of broadband has already dropped. Internet providers are desperate to fend off any move to regulate the prices they charge, while the government is increasingly viewing connectivity as an essential service.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic began towards the tail end of the first quarter of 2020. The impact was immediate and has forever changed bandwidth usage patterns. As 2020 came to an end, subscribers, on average, were consuming close to one half of a terabyte (TB) of data, up 40% from 2019. The pandemic impact is even more pronounced with the growth in upstream bandwidth. OpenVault predicts that by December 2021, the average broadband consumption per household will be around 600-650 gigabytes -- that's more than six times the average broadband consumption level since 2015.

The upcoming sale of Yahoo and AOL to a private equity firm for $5 billion represents a massive media markdown. At their dotcom bubble peaks, Yahoo and AOL were valued at more than $125 billion and $200 billion, respectively, or $193 billion and $318 billion in 2021 dollars. AOL made one giant mistake. It famously bought Time Warner for $182 billion in cash and stock in 2000, saddling the company with debt just before the dotcom bubble burst and the rise of broadband made AOL's dial-up services virtually obsolete.

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 

The behaviors of platform and social media companies have evolved under the heat of the spotlight. Regulation takes time, and a lot of hearings, to produce tangible results. One upshot of four years of high-profile hearings is that tech companies now know how to play the game. Sometimes the goal isn't to pass a law. Congress uses the bully pulpit to force companies to self-regulate.