Kevin Taglang

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act not only provides the means to make broadband service more available by funding deployment of broadband middle-mile and last-mile networks, it also aims to make the service provided more affordable so more people can subscribe and use it.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Congress has allocated many billions of dollars to states, territories and Tribal lands to extend the reach of broadband, including over $42 billion in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In February 2021, a bipartisan group of senators (1) introduced the Telecommunications Skilled Workforce Act, legislation to address the shortage of trained workers necessary to fill jobs in the telecommunications industry in communities throughout the country.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will facilitate more work to improve broadband service on Tribal lands.

Last week, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that on November 24, USDA will begin accepting applications for up to $1.15 billion in loans and grants to expand the availability of broadband in rural areas. USDA's Rural Utilities Service is making the funding available through the ReConnect Program and plans to make ava

For many, the digital divide is the gap between who has access to broadband infrastructure or who does not. But a truer definition is the gap between who's actually using our most powerful communications tools and who is not. Using this broader measure and examining use around the world, we see that women are being left offline. And this gender gap costs everyone.

We might be tempted to remember this as Mark and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. A series of damaging articles in the Wall Street Journal, a whistleblower testifying before Congress, and a massive outage of the platform. But Facebook's problems date back much farther than this week. The ramifications could last long into the future—and impact much more than the social media giant.

The Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security convened a hearing to hear from former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. Recent Wall Street Journal investigations have revealed troubling insights regarding how Instagram affects teenagers, how it handles children onto the platform, and other consumer protection matters related to Facebook. In prepared testimony, Haugen said:

As you might imagine, we thought there would be exciting news to share today about broadband. Not so much. As we wait for a vote on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (could it come today?

This week, the Department of the Treasury released guidance for the Coronavirus Capital Projects Fund program established by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.