Editorial

The New Yorker recently published a piece about the work of the American Accountability Foundation (A.A.F.) — a dark-money group aiming to sabotage the Biden administration’s agenda by torpedoing the confirmation of nominees to fill critical roles across the government. The group brags about having stopped the confirmation of nominees like Saule Omarova, Biden’s pick to be comptroller of the currency, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, who the pr

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) has made money for broadband and other infrastructure much less scarce than it normally is. Unfortunately, the real resources—labor and equipment—appear to be far scarcer than they normally are. Even with the additional money, the IIJA will not succeed if these constraints on real resources are not addressed. The only real-time solution is to waive the “buy American” rules on equipment and encourage more immigration to help ease the labor shortage.

It always perplexes me at a time when solving rural broadband is a top priority that governments still create policies that are huge barriers to fiber construction. The newest story comes from the State Department of Transportation in New York (NYDOT). The agency has a permitting process that is adding tons of costs to fiber projects – including fiber projects that were funded by State broadband grants. The NYDOT requires an expensive process to get onto a pole located in State rights-of-way.

I’ve worked for newspapers since I was a student at UC Berkeley, including stints at the San Francisco Examiner, the Bangkok Post, the Japan Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and now the biggest newsroom west of the Mississippi. This is my final column for the Los Angeles Times; I’ll be moving into television full-time. There’s no need for me to point out the precarious state of the newspaper business. This industry is now very different from the one I fell in love with in college.

Hopefully by now, most communities with poor broadband will have heard about the gigantic federal grants on the way to provide broadband solutions. The largest is the $42.5 Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program that will be administered by states, with the funding and the rules established by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The federal grants give priority to locations that are unserved (broadband speeds under 25/3 Mbps) and can also be used to fund underserved locations (speeds between 25/3 and 100/20 Mbps).

Federal Communications Commissioners Nathan Simington and Brenden Carr have used their positions as leaders of a federal agency to dehumanize and disrespect the immigrant community. At the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), we believe that no human is illegal and that every person deserves dignity and respect. As such, we condemn the Commissioners’ comments and statements following the release of the Affordable Connectivity Program rules and call for higher standards of morality, empathy, and humanity from those who sit on the FCC.

According to a speed test analysis released by WhistleOut, the average US internet speed increased 40 percent during the pandemic to 118.4 Mbps, versus an average of 84.5 Mbps pre-pandemic. The report, which is based on more than 717,000 internet speed tests, doesn’t explain exactly why the fixed internet became so much swifter, but it cites the fact that many US households upgraded their plans with their internet service providers, presumably to accommodate all that video streaming, those Zoom meetings, and other lifestyle changes necessitated by working and living at home 24/7.

Federal Communications Commissioner Brandon Carr released an extraordinary statement worth reading. Carr is taking exception to the final rules from the Treasury Department concerning how communities can use the $350 billion in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The commissioner is asking states to somehow intervene in the way that cities, counties, and towns elect to use these funds.

January marks the anniversary of a series of coordinated protests that led to the withdrawal of two proposed laws in the United States Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). SOPA-PIPA showed the power of collective action, rooted in shared values, to shape the future of the internet. In the decade since the SOPA fight, new issues have risen based on the development of new innovations in technology and the challenges that they create.

One of the most annoying aspects of the current federal broadband grants is the ability of incumbent internet service providers (ISPs) to challenge the validity of grant requests. In the typical challenge, the incumbents claim that they are offering fast broadband and that an applicant should not be able to overbuild them. The challenges put a burden on anybody filing for a grant since they must somehow prove that incumbent broadband speeds are slower than 25/3 Mbps.