Analysis

The paper stems from a platform competition research project led by Public Knowledge and supported by Omidyar Network. The paper explores the challenge of balancing the significant gatekeeper control that dominant platforms like Apple and Google have over both their operating systems and app stores, with the benefits that app stores create for both developers and users.

A new weekly Household Pulse Survey from the US Census Bureau offers a rich opportunity to quantify the impact of COVID-19 on children’s education during this time. It includes questions about the availability of digital devices and the internet in homes across the US, which allow us to explore the concern that access to distance learning is out of the reach of many of the most vulnerable students. Based on four weeks of data, our findings are bleak:

If we have learned anything during this pandemic, it is that access to broadband is now a social determinant of health, education, work, and economic security. What do we hope that our legislative and government agency leaders will consider?

Healthcare providers are hurting. As positive coronavirus cases increase in many rural parts of the country, hospitals and health clinics struggle to keep pace with the heightened demand for telehealth visits. Physicians are now seeing 50 to 175 times the number of patients via telehealth than they did prior to the pandemic. The increase in popularity is for good reason.

As states are considering whether and how to use federal CARES Act funding to improve Internet access, Idaho is poised to enact counter-productive limits on who can use that money by excluding community-owned solutions. Though many states have been under pressure from big monopoly providers to only fund for-profit business models with broadband subsidies, those voices seem largely absent in this Idaho fight.

Less than 20%, or one in five people, live in a geographically rural area. Although each community is unique, certain trends have been observed – rural America has become older, poorer, and less populated. One step the US government is taking to improve conditions in rural areas is investing almost $700 million in rural broadband internet and e-Connectivity.

This report lays out a roadmap in which all stakeholders play a role in advancing a safer, more equitable digital world, one which will lead to a brighter and more prosperous future for all. Based on recommendations from the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel for Digital Cooperation convened from 2018-2019, and further informed by a series of roundtable discussions with key stakeholders the following set of actions are envisaged:

This week, the Federal Communications Commission established procedures for the first phase of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund auction (Auction 904, if you're scoring at home).

This memo briefly explains how Facebook and Google have come to dominate modern communications networks, what that means for American democracy, and how to fix it.

With the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrating the critical need for communications connectivity, local governments are striving to improve local broadband service and fill broadband service gaps. At the same time, localities may be able to generate much-needed revenue from broadband and telecommunication assets they already own, including towers, fiber optics, rooftops, conduit, and poles.  Indeed, many cash-strapped communities possess a range of assets, including fiber strands and tower and conduit space, that have spare capacity and could be maximized.