Op-Ed

The Chicago Tribune recently published test results indicating that some cellphones can emit radiation causing exposure up to five times higher than current limits allow. This shocking data comes on the heels of the government of France’s revelations that phones emit radiation between four and 11 times their allowable limits. For more than a decade, the Federal Communications Commission has knowingly relied on unrealistic test methods to evaluate radiofrequency radiation from a single phone selected for testing by major manufacturers.

Real journalism requires significant resources.

The Technology Policy Institute conducted a survey of 1,275 people on Comcast’s Internet Essentials service to explore what having service at home means to low-income households. The research shows that once people subscribe to broadband, school-age children use home access for schoolwork and streaming educational media. Their parents also quickly get hooked, using the internet to search for jobs and to manage their lives more efficiently.

While it’s wrong to characterize Google as part of the Democratic Party machine, there’s plenty of room to question how it’s affecting our democracy and society.

Facebook asked me to conduct a survey to hear from conservatives directly. Following substantial public interest in the project and in light of policy changes Facebook has recently made, we have decided to share our findings at this time. We found conservatives’ concerns generally fall within the following six buckets:

To address the loss of a mobile communications competitor that will result from the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has proposed a solution that seeks to enable DISH Network to emerge as a fourth national facilities-based wireless carrier. From an engineering perspective, however, DOJ’s approach to enabling DISH’s deployment is not guaranteed to prove adequate to maintain competition comparable to that currently offered over Sprint’s network.

The Aug 12 editorial “Stuck without Internet” outlined possible solutions to address the challenge of connecting more Americans to the Internet. We already have a broadband program to bridge the divide for poor rural Americans. It’s easy to get distracted by talk of spectrum, satellites or running expensive fiber across the entire country.

The Daily Yonder, working with the Rural Assembly, identified a dozen rural-policy advocates with firsthand knowledge about the impact of federal policy in rural communities. They asked these in-the-trenches experts to name the top policies they would like to see 2020 presidential candidates address and eventually enact. Roberto Gallardo, Assistant Director of the Purdue Center for Regional Development at Purdue University, wrote on Technology and Broadband:

The International Economic Development Council (IEDC) and I teamed up to survey the association’s members.

Four different universal service initiatives, each aimed at solving a different problem, are funded by a single surcharge on interstate and international telecommunications revenue. Over the past two decades, each program has grown independently without much regard to cost, or to the activities of the fund’s other programs. As a result, the surcharge has risen from 3 percent in 1998 to a whopping 24.4 percent today.