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  2. March 2017

March 2017

NTCA to Senate: Experience Counts With Broadband Subsidies

Broadband got a lot of attention from the Senate March 1 at an infrastructure hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee, including calls from a transportation official to protect the connected-car spectrum cable operators are convinced can be shared with their Wi-Fi offerings. The almost three-hour hearing dealt with infrastructure broadly, including roads and bridges, but even the roadways issues dovetailed with broadband, including pitches for dig-once policies in which dark fiber or at least conduit are part of road projects.

The broadband provider witness, Shirley Bloomfield, CEO of NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association, was busy during the hearing answering a host of broadband-related questions and offering her input on the best way to make broadband part of any infrastructure buildout. She said the best approach would be to work through the FCC's Universal Service Fund broadband subsidy program by fully funding it and targeting the money to people "who know what they are doing," a point she made repeatedly and which translated to the smaller operators she represents who already have broadband boots on the ground.

Thune Open to Moving New Broadband Infrastructure Spending Through FCC

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune said he’s open to funneling a potential tranche of broadband infrastructure funding through the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund. “I think the USF could be a way to figure out how we channel and move money in the right direction — get the most lead on the targets, so to speak, to get results,” Thune said following a hearing on how to best allocate funds under a possible infrastructure bill.

On Feb 28, President Donald Trump said he would ask Congress for a $1 trillion infrastructure package, but he did not mention broadband investment. Chairman Thune said that while he believes broadband will ultimately be included in the White House package, “it’s hard to say exactly what their plan might entail.”

Surveillance Battle in House Focuses on Number of US Citizens Affected

The House Judiciary Committee began the process of examining potential changes to a foreign intelligence-gathering program, with the panel’s top Democrat saying a key concern is how many American citizens are targeted by the law. Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI) gave varying levels of support to reforming Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that allows for the surveillance of foreigners reasonably believed to be outside of the United States, while forbidding intelligence officials from surveilling Americans. Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Goodlatte said that while the intelligence community has labeled Section 702 as the “most important tool in battling terrorism,” it has been criticized as an “overly broad” program that collects U.S. citizens’ communications “without sufficient legal process.” “We must ensure that our protection doesn’t come at the expense of cherished liberty,” Goodlatte said, adding that strong national security tools and civil liberties “can and must coexist.”

The issue of how many U.S. citizens get their communications collected under the law, known as “incidental” collection, is central to the debate as the intelligence agencies seek a reauthorization of the statute in Congress. Conyers said committee members “require that estimate” and they won’t “simply take the government’s word on the size of so-called ‘incidental’ collection.”

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