App Association: NTIA More Likely Than FCC to Produce Unbiased Broadband Report

ACT: The App Association, which represents more than 5,000 app developers and device makers, said the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) should be the one collecting and compiling data on broadband availability, not the Federal Communications Commission. "[T]he technology administration [NTIA] is more at home working across government agencies to put together an unbiased report," said ACT senior policy director Graham Dufault. NTIA was in charge of populating a broadband availability map as part of broadband stimulus funding allocated during the Obama Administration, but that funding ran out in 2015 and the FCC took over the job. House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has introduced legislation to return oversight of that data collection and mapping to NTIA.