When senators return to Washington next week, one of the most pressing issues they’ll face is passing the National Defense Authorization Act, which has been pushed back much further than usual. Lawmakers have filed nearly 700 amendments to the annual defense bill, including several related to tech and telecom. Politico has compiled a list of major Democrat, Republican, and bipartisan amendments in these areas. Two of the Senate’s tech-related amendments had already been approved in the House version. One calls for an annual State Department report on surveillance sales to repressive governments, and another would establish the National Digital Reserve Corps, through which private-sector tech workers could work on short-term federal assignments.

Bluebird Networks is bringing internet exchanges to its midwest roots, adding capability to its smaller market footprint and helping to avoid more congested larger markets. The company said it is now operating internet exchanges in two of its data centers. The exchanges are in Bettendorf, Iowa, and in Springfield, Missouri. Both exchanges have about 30 internet providers signed on to exchange traffic, and 10 more providers are in the process of connecting to the Bettendorf exchange. Bluebird Networks was created in 2011 when Missouri Network Alliance, a statewide network that had been owned and operated by a group of smaller rural telcos in the state since 1999, merged with Bluebird Media, operator of a middle mile network serving parts of Missouri and three neighboring states. In 2019, investment company Macquarie Infrastructure Partners bought Bluebird Networks.

Passage of the Infrastructure legislation on November 5 was truly historic—surely the biggest boost ever to bringing high-speed broadband to every American household. While we get about the job of building broadband, we need to take up other communications issues that have been of even longer gestation and which have just as much, maybe more, urgency for our country. High on my list is media reform. I have written before in this space about the need for comprehensive action to provide us with the news and information that citizens in a self-governing society must have if they are to redeem the promise of democracy. I have suggested action on four fronts:

1. Anti-trust. The giants who control both traditional media and online media wield more power and influence than any business should be permitted to deploy in a democratic society.
2. Public interest oversight. Industry is not going to fix itself. We must restore and expand public interest oversight for telecom and traditional media, and develop such obligations for online media too.
3. Public media. Public and community media have long been our news and information jewel, but are under-funded and lack the resources to do the job we need for them to do. We need to be talking about a truly significant boost to the public media budget.
4. Media literacy. We need a major online K-12 program in our schools to teach our kids and grandkids how to make productive use of their online experiences, as well as teacher training and adjustments to our school curricula to make this education available to everyone.

[Michael Copps served as a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission from May 2001 to December 2011 and was the FCC's Acting Chairman from January to June 2009.]

Technology and innovation have long been known to be key drivers of growth allowing companies and countries to better compete. The recent US infrastructure bill aims to foster such growth by providing for investments in digital infrastructure. However, these investments are nearly exclusively focused on better and more accessible broadband. Complementary to broadband, open technologies—those for which the underlying intellectual property, whether it is source code or hardware design, is publicly available—are playing an increasingly important role in the modern economy and companies’ and countries’ ability to innovate. The European Commission, the governing body of the European Union, commissioned a report to measure the importance of open source software (OSS) and open source hardware (OSH) for competitiveness, innovation, and technological independence in the European Union. The "Impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on Technological Independence, Competitiveness, and Innovation in the EU Economy" report, released in early September 2021, contains a wealth of information useful for understanding the importance of the open technologies that underlie the modern economy. Many of these insights can be applied to the United States, although differences between the US and EU environments limit the applicability of some of the report’s findings. Therefore, it is important to take a deeper look at the recommendations of the EU report to see how they might be applied in the US.

[Frank Nagle is an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School]