Op-Ed

On Feb 12, 2019 Sen Kevin Cramer (R-ND) introduced The Office of Rural Broadband Act in the Senate (S 454), which would establish an Office of Rural Broadband in the Federal Communications Commission. Sen Cramer’s Office of Rural Broadband Act is the latest effort to coordinate rural broadband planning and policy. As I recently wrote for the New York Times, this Office of Rural Broadband is best placed inside the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) of the US Dept of Agriculture, rather than the Federal Communications Commission, as S.454 proposes.

On March 12, 2019, I was honored to appear before the Senate Communications Subcommittee to testify on “The Impact of Broadband Investments in Rural America.” I provided my personal views, bringing the perspective of a former government official with 22 years of experience at the Federal Communications Commission and National Telecommunications and Information Administration, with the last decade focused on the FCC’s Connect America Fund. My five-minute opening statement follows:

“The four elements of literacy—the ability to find, understand, create and act on information—are part of the ‘new literacies’ of the modern era: information literacy, digital literacy, media literacy and news literacy. … No one is born with these literacies. Education matters,” writes the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Eric Newton for the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy. "Whose job is it to help a community understand news?” Journalism is an inextricable component of a healthy democracy.

I have a bad case of news blues. Journalism is fast becoming a vast wasteland. Newsrooms across the land are hollowed out, or in many cases shuttered.

Today, 30 years on from my original proposal for an information management system, half the world is online. It’s a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come, but also an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go.To tackle any problem, we must clearly outline and understand it. I broadly see three sources of dysfunction affecting today’s web:

People in China use WeChat for everything from sending messages to family to reading news and opinion to ordering food to paying at vending machines to paying for a taxi. For Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, WeChat is both his greatest challenge and the model for the future of his company. WeChat is what Facebook has yet to become.

Right now, Congress is considering a new federal privacy law, but nearly all of the proposals on the table have ignored the crucial issue of forced-arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. Companies use these clauses to prevent customers from suing them, often leaving no practical options for consumers whose rights have been violated.  Arbitration clauses are especially harmful when it comes to the Internet, because almost everything we do online involves a contract.

When it comes to hurting businesses, schools and families in rural Oregon, the Federal Communications Commission decision to pull the plug in 2018 on network neutrality really hurts. As the first senator who introduced net neutrality legislation in the Senate more than a decade ago, I am proud to stand on the front lines of 2019’s national fight for a solution that puts real enforceable net neutrality rules back on the books. Everybody understands consumers must pay a fee to get access to the internet.

America’s big tech companies have achieved their level of dominance in part based on two strategies: 1) Using Mergers to Limit Competition Using and 2) Proprietary Marketplaces to Limit Competition.

The Trump re-election campaign’s wireless open access proposal was a poorly vetted scheme possibly intended to score political points. It was squelched almost immediately after it became public, as shocked White House staff members complained that it contradicted the administration’s support for competing wireless networks. The twist? Open access wireless is actually a terrific idea.