Op-Ed

A demolition team rolled in to 9 Broadcast Plaza in early June, tearing down Northern New Jersey’s only broadcast television studio.

Charter’s renaming of itself—after a megamerger with Time Warner Cable in 2018—as “Spectrum.” But changing your name doesn’t mean that you aren’t liable for misbehavior under your previous moniker. This is what Charter…er, Spectrum… found recently when, following a lengthy investigation, New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, filed an extraordinary lawsuit against the company. The company’s 2.5 million New York subscribers (of its 22 million nationwide) have been told they’re getting X (in terms of download and upload speeds) when actually they’re getting a lot less than X.

No industry should be free from antitrust scrutiny, including big tech. But the splitting of this tech antitrust review across two federal agencies (the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division), despite the many similar competition issues that will be investigated, illustrates the absurdity of having two federal agencies handling civil antitrust enforcement.

Even though community broadband has proven itself incredibly valuable and viable, broadband is taking a beating in some areas of the country thanks to what has become a siege against municipal broadband by the large telecommunication incumbents, including AT&T, Comcast, and others.

While social media companies and digital networks are relatively new, the problems of information laundering and manipulation are not. Of course, verbatim application of 20th-century media policy won’t work for today’s digital environment; some of it didn’t work very well last century either. But its core concerns should be taken seriously and its principles—especially transparency, responsibility and structural design to promote news investment—can be adapted for the 21st century.

Everyone who’s concerned about community broadband needs to contact your economic development agency, department, whoever spearheads your community’s economic development. I’m surveying these professionals about broadband’s impact on local economies. Community broadband is advancing in many places nationwide. But it’s also taking a beating in some areas. The only way we can fight back, capture opportunities, and win challenges is to start with reliable data from those in the trenches. This is insanely important!!

According to recent National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) survey data, roughly 28 million households in the United States still do not use the Internet at home (Goldberg, 2019). In its survey, the NTIA also asked why households did not use the Internet at home, with 58 percent citing a lack of interest as their main reason for being offline and every fifth household (21%) stating that it is too expensive.

The chatter about 5G is everywhere. Lost in the glowing headlines is the fact the US is making choices that will leave rural America behind. These choices will harm our global leadership in 5G and could create new challenges for the security of our networks. 

In 2012, the Federal Communications Commission released its eighth Broadband Deployment Report (the "706 report") and found that approximately 19 million Americans at the end of 2011 lacked access to high-speed internet access. The FCC concluded that "broadband is not yet being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion." On May 29, 2019, the FCC distributed a press release summarizing findings from its revised 2019 Broadband Deployment Report and stated that at the end of 2017, 21.3 million Americans lacked access to broadband networks.

I recently traveled to Brussels to see my long-time friends Gerry Salole and Rien van Gendt at the European Foundation Centre. As usual, we spoke about the status of philanthropy in Europe and the United States. A huge topic, indeed.