The essential point at the Nevada Broadband Workshop in Reno was this: Communities that want broadband should produce a plan that’s as comprehensive as possible. Hosted by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) BroadbandUSA program, the workshop guided attendees through various aspects of broadband planning for smaller communities. Even if the cost for a project seems exorbitant, a plan can still be made. “If you don’t have a million dollars, don’t let that mean you don’t get started on the issue for your rural communities,” said Laura Spining Dodson, acting associate administrator at NTIA. As event speakers suggested, numerous planning options exist for communities. The trick is determining the relevance and risk of all options for a given community. Without such in-depth knowledge, a local area might unintentionally sabotage its potential for providing fast Internet service.

The Federal Communications Commission has mostly defeated net neutrality supporters in court even though judges expressed skepticism about FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's justification for repealing net neutrality rules.

One of the three judges who decided the case wrote that the FCC's justification for reclassifying broadband "is unhinged from the realities of modern broadband service." But all three judges who ruled on the case agreed that they had to leave the net neutrality repeal in place based on US law and a Supreme Court precedent. Today, consumers use broadband almost exclusively to access third-party content. "In a nutshell, a speedy pathway to content is what consumers value. It is what broadband providers advertise and compete over," Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote. While auxiliary services like DNS and caching are still part of the broadband bundle, "their salience has waned significantly since Brand X was decided" in part because DNS is readily available for free from other sources, and "caching has been fundamentally stymied by the explosion of Internet encryption," Judge Millett wrote. "For these accessories [DNS and caching] to singlehandedly drive the Commission's classification decision is to confuse the leash for the dog," she wrote. In 2019, she continued, "hanging the legal status of Internet broadband services on DNS and caching blinks technological reality." 

Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins agreed with Millett's assessment. "As Judge Millett's concurring opinion persuasively explains, we are bound by the Supreme Court's decision in [Brand X], even though critical aspects of broadband Internet technology and marketing underpinning the Court's decision have drastically changed since 2005," he wrote. "But revisiting Brand X is a task for the [Supreme] Court—in its wisdom—not us."

I’d like to outline a few areas of our Universal Service Fund policy that I am currently focused on and address certain matters in need of attention.

• Eliminating Duplicative Funding Among the USF Programs. Specifically, the use of E-Rate funding to overbuild high-cost program investments and to pay for fiber buildout to schools and libraries even where a fiber connection already exists.
• Stretching New Broadband Buildout Funding as Far as Possible. Stretching scarce USF dollars as far as possible means to me being inclusive of different technologies and treating them agnostically.
• Better Administration of the USF. As many of you know, I have long been critical of the Universal Service Administrative Company's (USAC) performance and transparency, having referred to that entity as a “black hole." We should take great pains to ensure that USAC’s role in our mapping effort is purely ministerial and avoid USAC’s inappropriate assumption of an adjudicatory role in any challenge process we adopt.

Findings from a July 2019 Pew research study:

Majorities say that social media companies have too much control over the news on their sites, and that the role social media companies play in delivering the news on their sites results in a worse mix of news for users. At the same time, social media is now a part of the news diet of an increasingly large share of the US population. Almost all Americans – about nine-in-ten (88%) – recognize that social media companies have at least some control over the mix of news people see. And most Americans feel this is a problem: About six-in-ten (62%) say social media companies have too much control over the mix of news that people see on their sites, roughly four times as many as say that they don’t have enough control (15%). Just 21% say that social media companies have the right amount of control over the news people see. While most Americans are pessimistic about the control social media companies have over the news people see, Republicans tend to be more negative than Democrats. Three-quarters of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say social media companies have too much control over the mix of news that people see, compared with about half (53%) of Democrats and Democratic leaners. More Republicans (66%) than Democrats (49%) also say that these efforts result in a worse mix of news for users.

Facebook is far and away the social media site Americans use most commonly for news. About half (52%) of all US adults get news there. The next most popular social media site for news is YouTube (28% of adults get news there), followed by Twitter (17%) and Instagram (14%). A number of other social media platforms (including LinkedIn, Reddit and Snapchat) have smaller news audiences.