February 2016

In a letter to eight Republican senators, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler tried to ease concerns about the FCC’s support for municipal broadband networks. The senators had asked him four questions:

1. Please provide the total dollar amount that the FCC has committed to municipal broadband providers through the Universal Service Fund's Rural Broadband Experiments program. Do any limitations exist to prevent government-owned networks from using universal service funds to compete with private sector networks?
2. Please clarify whether there is a situation in which the emergence of a new governmentowned network could result in the loss of universal service funding for an existing private sector provider.
3. Please detail any plans the FCC has to adopt additional policies relating to municipal broadband. For example, does the FCC intend to extend its February 2015 decision to additional states?
4. Please highlight the FCC's outreach plans for fiscal year 2016 with respect to government-owned networks. Please identify any state or local officials with whom the FCC plans to meet and why.

Chairman Wheeler replied saying the kinds of scenarios the senators fear aren't happening and the FCC hasn't authorized any municipal networks to receive that cash so far. He also disclosed that the agency has no more petitions pending that would prompt it to preempt state laws that limit muni broadband.\

The US lagging behind the rest of the world in LTE is not a particularly new phenomenon. The gap is, though, getting starkly worse. “A year ago, an average 4G speed of 20 Mbps would have been a truly impressive feat,” says an OpenSignal report, “but today there are 15 countries and 52 individual networks that meet or exceed that mark.” There’s been a slosh of improvement stateside as well; US speeds averaged out at just 7Mbps in 2015. That puts us on pace to catch up with the most world’s most capable carriers sometime late in the next decade.

Thanks to a cluster of technological and political hurdles, it might just take that long. The last time a major chunk of spectrum became available in the United States, though, was in 2008, just a year after the first iPhone was released. In cellular terms, it may as well be the Mesozoic Era. The Federal Communications Commission has penciled in another spectrum auction for sometime this year, but OpenSignal’s Kevin Fitchard cautions against getting one’s hopes up. “The FCC has delayed it many times. It’s a really complicated thing,” he says. “Unlike other auctions in which they basically take frequencies that have been cleared out from the defense department, or satellite spectrum, something like that, the spectrum that they’re talking about now is being used by TV broadcasters.”

[Commentary] It’s been 20 years — 20 years!? — since John Perry Barlow handed out paper copies of his “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” to the government and corporate leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF): “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.” Twenty years later, at Davos, what I struggled with the most wasn’t the sheer excess of Silicon Valley in showcasing its value but the narrative that underpinned it all. I’m quite used to entrepreneurs talking hype in tech venues, but what happened at Davos was beyond the typical hype, in part because most of the non-tech people couldn’t do a reality check. They could only respond with fear. As a result, unrealistic conversations about artificial intelligence led many non-technical attendees to believe that the biggest threat to national security is humanoid killer robots, or that AI that can do everything humans can is just around the corner, threatening all but the most elite technical jobs.

In other words, as I talked to attendees, I kept bumping into a 1970s science fiction narrative. Conversations around tech were strangely juxtaposed with the broader social and fiscal concerns that rattled through the halls. Faced with a humanitarian crises and widespread anxieties about inequality, much of civil society responded to tech enthusiasm by asking if technology will destabilize labor and economic well-being. A fair question. The only problem is that no one knows.

[boyd is a social media scholar, youth researcher, and advocate working at Microsoft Research]