Reporting

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly will be leaving when his term ends [either with the Senate confirmation of a successor or by January, whichever comes first] and signaled his supporters don't need to advocate for keeping him on the FCC.

Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel's screen froze just as FCC Chairman was asking for her vote during the commission's Sept 30 meeting. When Commissioner Rosenworcel rejoined the virtual meeting, she suggested the freeze was because of the demand on her home's broadband service. "We have problems in the house with multiple kids going to online school and a spouse who is working as well," she said. Commissioner Rosenworcel has been a big proponent of boosting the FCC's definition of high-speed service given that increased COVID-19-related demand on home broadband.

Saying the COVID-19 pandemic can't be allowed to create an "irreversible" learning gap for students without access to the internet, Cox is teaming up with Common Sense Media to try and do something about it. Cox is pledging $60 million over the next year to help close the digital learning divide. Cox will also extend its offer to new Connect2Compete customers. If they sign up by year's end, they will get two months free, followed by $9.95 per month internet. Cox's outdoor WiFi hotspots will also remain open to all comers.

Big tech firms could be banned from preferencing their own services in search rankings or exclusively pre-installing their own applications on devices, under new regulations planned by the European Union.

Democratic lawmakers are expected to call on Congress to blunt the power of big technology companies, possibly through forced separation of online platforms. The House Antitrust Subcommittee is nearing completion of a report wrapping up its 15-month investigation of Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. The report follows the committee’s collection of more than one million documents from the companies and competitors, as well as a July hearing with CEOs of the four tech giants.

With its mountainous topography and sparsely populated areas, West Virginia understands this un-ideal reality as well as any state, so it created what some might call a Band-Aid solution: the Kids Connect Initiative, a unified education network with hundreds of Wi-Fi access points. The project started in early Aug, leaving little time for implementation before Sept 8, the first day of school in West Virginia. The concept was to allow any K-12 or college student the ability to use Wi-Fi from any access point within a network spread over the entire state.

The only competitor challenging the growth of Google and Facebook's digital advertising dominance of late is Amazon. A years-long effort by major media companies to take on "the duopoly" has mostly fizzled out -- although media companies and activists have been successful in putting regulatory pressure on Google and Facebook, and that seems to be playing out in their favor, if ever so slightly.

The Department of Labor explicitly named 5G wireless network building as a goal when recently designating the Wireless Infrastructure Association as an industry intermediary to help train wireless workers — something that the association has long clamored for amid plans to spend millions of dollars on the effort.

In early March, just days before cities across the US shut down due to the pandemic, Elon Musk shared the latest details about his plan to build a satellite broadband service called Starlink. Musk described how a constellation of Starlink satellites will “blink” when they enter low-Earth orbit.

A system Google set up to promote competition on Android has left some smaller search engines having trouble gaining traction, fueling rivals’ complaints about the tech giant’s compliance with a European Union antitrust decision ahead of potential US charges. Since March, Google has been showing people in Europe who set up new mobile devices running the company’s Android operating system what it calls a “choice screen,” a list of rival search engines that they can select as the device’s default.