Reporting

Two months after President Biden took office, his top digital adviser emailed officials at Facebook urging them to do more to limit the spread of “vaccine hesitancy” on the social media platform. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials held “weekly sync” meetings with Facebook, once emailing the company 16 “misinformation” posts. And in the summer of 2021, the surgeon general’s top aide repeatedly urged Google, Facebook and Twitter to do more to combat disinformation.

One day after a Louisiana federal judge set limits on the Biden administration’s communications with tech firms, the US State Department canceled its regular meeting with Facebook officials to discuss 2024 election preparations and hacking threats. State Department officials said all future meetings, which had been held monthly, have been “canceled pending further guidance." The cancellation shows the immediate impact of the order by US District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee.

The Association of American Railroads (AAR) seeks to void a Virginia bill streamlining railroad crossing requests for broadband providers, claiming it shifts permitting power from the railroad owners to broadband providers. The law, which took effect on July 1, caps railroad crossing fees at $2,000 per crossing and requires broadband providers to reimburse railroad companies no more than $5,00

Announcements of GoNetspeed fiber market launches have been coming at a rapid pace. GoNetspeed President and CEO Richard Clark said the company has been able to do this thanks to its reliance primarily on private funding. “By privately funding our infrastructure, we are able to build at a faster pace with access to additional resources.

AT&T and Charter Communications are best positioned to benefit from the multi-billion-dollar Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program based on state-by-state allocations and the presence of each operator in those states, reckon analysts that have broken down the numbers. "The larger the presence an operator has in a state with a sizable allocation of BEAD funding, the greater the opportunity there is for it to see benefits from a build-out near its existing footprint and fill-in additional pockets across its DMAs [designated market areas] with edge-outs," the analysts at IS

Aside from the incumbent operators, there are plenty of smaller broadband players striving to make a name for themselves. But how can broadband providers use branding to stand out from the rest of the crowd? Three providers have shared their reasons behind their branding decisions:

The Vermont Community Broadband Board announced that the state will receive $229 million in federal funding from a White House initiative to expand high-speed broadband access. That figure is some $50 million more than state officials had anticipated — good news for the effort to wire up rural Vermont. In the lead-up to the announcement, officials worried that Vermont would get too small a piece of the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program pie.

Judge Terry Doughty of the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana restricted parts of the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about broad swaths of content online.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) beat its June 30 deadline to announce the amounts it will award each state through its $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, but now the clock is ticking as states and broadband service providers await another milestone.

Verizon won broadband funding from two Pennsylvania counties recently. Verizon Vice President of Business Operations for Wireline Networks Doug Sullivan offered details about the wins, which are for areas where the company has begun deploying its Fios fiber broadband service. The Pennsylvania awards were for Washington and Westmoreland counties.