Government & Communications

As a staunch supporter of limited government and free speech, I have regularly objected to government attempts to own and control the nation’s communications networks. I have been a staunch critic of government projects to build and operate broadband networks. Beyond flirting with a perverse form of socialism, municipalities’ overbuilding of private providers creates market inefficiencies, distorts competitive outcomes, encourages regulatory favoritism towards state-owned networks, and can be a waste of taxpayer money. Even in instances where municipal, or muni, broadband reaches unserved a

According to the Federal Communications Commission’s last-published report, 24 million Americans lack access to high-speed internet service, with 19 million of them in rural areas. But last week the New York Times offered new numbers and they’re problematic, too. It found that 162 million people across the country do not use internet service at broadband speeds. There’s a big delta between 24 million and 162 million. 

Four different Time covers feature journalists from around the world. Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi embassy in Turkey earlier in 2018, appears alone in one, while staff from the Capital Gazette, the US newspaper where five people were killed this year, feature in another. Pictures of Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo appear on the final two. Ressa is the editor of Rappler, a Philippine news website critical of the country's leadership, while Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were imprisoned in Myanmar for investigating the massacre of Rohingya Muslims.

On Sept 13, 2018, Sens Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to encourage the FCC to improve the National Broadband Map "by using consumer-reported data to increase the accuracy of the FCC's mobile coverage maps." On Sept 7, all six of Oklahoma's congressional delegates wrote to Chairman Pai to concerning the Mobility Fund PHase II (MF-II) challenge process, writing that, "it is important that that (sic) any funding allocation decisions are based on accurate data." 

According to unnamed sources, the Justice Department is investigating whether crimes were committed when potentially millions of people’s identities were posted to the Federal Communications Commission’s website without their permission, falsely attributing to them opinions about net neutrality rules. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has delivered subpoenas to at least two organizations related to the comments.

On Nov 4, the Federal Communications Commission released broadband speed test data for the first time in two years, after ignoring months of inquiries about why the annual speed test reports hadn't been released since Ajit Pai became chairman. The FCC's Measuring Broadband Program hadn't issued a new report since December 1, 2016. Now, the FCC has released a draft of two Measuring Broadband America reports, one for 2017 and one for 2018.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that roughly 500,000 comments submitted during the debate over the controversial repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules were linked to Russian email addresses. The disclosure was made in a statement in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests submitted by The New York Times and BuzzFeed. In the statement, Chairman Pai refers to "the half-million comments submitted from Russian e-mail addresses."

A Treasury-led task force is proposing that the US Postal Service charge more for certain package deliveries, going after Amazon and other online retailers that President  Donald Trump has said benefit at the post office’s expense. The task force’s report recommends:

The Defense Department is giving industry more time to come up with plans to quarantine the agency’s internal networks using the cloud. The Defense Information Systems Agency extended the deadline for vendors to submit white papers on how to build a cloud-based system that cuts off agency networks from the public web while still allowing employees to access the internet. The tech would close many of the digital doorways hackers and other online bad actors use to attack the Department of Defense Information Network, or DODIN, according to the solicitation.

The House GOP campaign arm suffered a major hack during the 2018 election, exposing thousands of sensitive emails to an outside intruder, according to three senior party officials. The email accounts of four senior aides at the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) were surveilled for several months, apparently. The intrusion was detected in April by an NRCC vendor, who alerted the committee and its cybersecurity contractor. An internal investigation was initiated and the FBI was alerted to the attack.