Op-Ed

The lack of affordable broadband access in the US has resulted in large-scale educational inequities especially in rural areas where 31 percent of Americans have no choice of broadband providers. For many years, Educational Broadband Service (EBS) licensees have been dedicated to helping solve these inequities, but a proceeding at the Federal Communications Commission is putting these services at risk. EBS licensees are accredited educational institutions (or nonprofits focused on serving the needs of accredited educational institutions).

Remember when futurists told us that the internet would result in the “death of distance”? That prophecy has fallen short, as cities remain hubs for commerce and community. The growing geographic consequences of digital technologies puts new demands on decision makers at all levels of government. Bolstering their levels of expertise on these issues is clearly needed and each of the local policy issues raised above would benefit from additional analytical scrutiny.

“Something has to be done,” President Donald Trump tweeted Nov 26. Frustrated by CNN, with which he has an ongoing beef, President Trump suggested that the United States create its own “worldwide network to show the World the way we really are — GREAT!” Despite the proposal’s origin in conflict with the press, it’s a really good idea. So good, in fact, that under another president’s watch — Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 — it happened. Seventy-six years ago, the world was a dark place.

A new proposal spearheaded by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai aims to eliminate the ability of certain carriers to provide Lifeline services, disproportionately affecting rural areas. Kansas would be hit hard by the harsh new Lifeline rules. It is estimated that about 70 percent of the state’s 45,131 Lifeline households would lose service, including veterans and seniors.

What does the Federal Trade Commission need to grapple with a force like Facebook?

I want to give your readers an update on the latest move by AT&T to push people off the traditional home phone service they have relied upon for decades. This past Sept, we began to field calls from worried landline customers, including seniors on fixed incomes, who were among an estimated 5,300 customers to receive a letter from AT&T with the blunt headline: “Your Lifeline discount ends November 20, 2018.” The letter referred to the federal Lifeline program, which offers a monthly credit of up to $11.75 for qualifying low-income customers.

Instead of embracing 5G, San Jose (CA) Mayor Sam Liccardo taxed it.  Beginning in 2015, the city sought up to $3,500 per year per small cell.  Compare that to $100 in Phoenix (AZ) and $50 in Indianapolis (IN) — cities about the size of San Jose that have leapfrogged it in terms of small cell deployment. Excessive taxes charged by big cities deplete the capital needed to build broadband in suburban and rural America. That’s why several dozen mayors, county supervisors, and elected leaders called on the Federal Communications Commission to act.

Thanks to Cambridge Analytica and other scandals, the federal government is now discussing tech platform privacy issues more than ever. But localities—most recently, New York City—have been stepping in to try to fill the broadband privacy gap. Other local officials should look to New York City as a model for their own legislation or rules, and the public should be pushing their local representatives to protect broadband privacy.

When the government establishes an open forum for expressive activity, the First Amendment forbids it from selectively excluding speakers because of their viewpoints. As a federal appeals court held in a case decided four decades ago, this means that the White House can’t arbitrarily bar a journalist from White House press facilities. The record strongly suggests that the White House revoked CNN Jim Acosta’s access because of the viewpoint implicit in Acosta’s questions.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the web and the internet were new and everything was going to be different forever, and the chaos made it easy to think that bigness—the economics of scale—no longer really mattered in the new economy. After a decade of open chaos and easy market entry, something surprising did happen. A few firms—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—did not disappear. Unfortunately, antitrust law failed to notice that the 1990s were over. Instead, for a decade and counting, it gave the major tech players a pass—even when confronting fairly obvious dangers and anticompetitive mergers.