March 2018

Citizens Against Government Waste has a bone to pick with President Donald Trump's infrastructure plan, which leaves the distribution of $50 billion in rural infrastructure seed money to the states and localities. In a letter to Office of Manqagement and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, CAGW, joined by Americans for Tax Reform and others, said that while they generally support states spending money over the feds, they are worried about the potential for waste, fraud and abuse and duplication of spending given the focus on rural broadband.

Sinclair Broadcast Group's new plan to help it win federal approval to become the nation's largest broadcaster is pretty brazen, critics say. The Maryland-based company recently proposed selling two major TV stations to satisfy the government's ownership limit and secure its deal to buy Tribune Media for $3.9 billion. The problem with the arrangement, critics say, is that the stations' prospective buyers have close ties to Sinclair's executive chairman.

AT&T's proposed purchase of Time Warner would raise the total amount Americans pay for TV service by $436 million a year, the US Department of Justice alleges in its lawsuit attempting to block the merger. AT&T scoffed at the government's calculations, disputing the methodology and saying that even if the DOJ is correct, the average customer bill would rise by only 45 cents a month.

This paper examines differences in fixed location broadband adoption rates among households of various demographic and socio-economic characteristics and in different geographic locations utilizing the Federal Communications Commission's census tract level adoption data, demographic data from American Community Survey and the census block level broadband availability data from National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Ordered probit models are estimated and used to conduct simulations in order to analyze the determinants of the broadband adoption rate.