Reps Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Bob Latta (R-OH), along with Sens Roger Wicker (R-MS) and John Thune (R-SD) sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel seeking information about the agency’s response after the FCC Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that broadband providers have been fraudulently enrolling households in the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) program. The providers falsely claimed that certain customers’ households had children attending schools participating in the National School Lunch Program’s Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) in order to obtain EBB funds. The OIG found that in some CEP schools, the number of households enrolled in EBB based on students attending that school far exceeded the number of students actually attending the school. "The upcoming transition of the EBB to the [Affordable Connectivity program] provides further reason for concern," says the letter. "We are concerned that the FCC may proceed with rules for a permanent ACP that do not adequately protect American taxpayers or best serve eligible households." To "help Congress ensure that the FCC is appropriately administering and overseeing the EBB program," the lawmakers asked the FCC to respond to a series of questions by January 7, 2022.

Internet service providers (ISPs) are telling the Federal Communications Commission not to require ISPs to allow broadband subsidy recipients to apply those subsidies to grandfathered plans, arguing that it would be burdensome and confusing, though they also said they should be free to apply the subsidies to select grandfathered plans. The ISPs argue that requiring that the subsidy be applied to older plans being phased out could prove problematic in terms of billing and conflicts with the statute's language about plans that are "generally available." The FCC sought input on how to transition Congress' COVID-19-realated Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) subsidy program to the new, $14 billion, Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) subsidy in the infrastructure bill, including on how to interpret the Congressional mandate that the subsidy be applied to “any internet service offering” and whether that extended to “legacy or grandfathered" plans. Those grandfathered plans are ones no longer offered to new customers but maintained for legacy customers until the plans are phased out. Those could include plans inherited by a company when it bought another ISP.

There is no such thing as a 25/3 Mbps broadband connection, or a 100/20 Mbps broadband connection, or even a symmetrical gigabit broadband connection on fiber. For a long list of reasons, the broadband speeds that make it to customers vary widely by the day, the hour, and the minute. And yet, we’ve developed an entire regulatory system built around the concept that broadband connections can be neatly categorized by speed. What do regulators mean when they set a speed definition of 25/3 Mbps? Does that represent the slowest speed that can be achieved, the fastest speed that can be achieved, or the average speed? There is no consensus on that. When a telco says it can deliver a speed of 25/3 Mbps the company is implying that it is capable of that speed, but doesn’t guarantee it. The definition of speed ought to be based on technology and not on the fiction of meeting achieving an imaginary speed goal. If the Federal Communications Commission wants to allow federal grants to overbuild DSL, they should say so. If they want to protect cable companies from competition, they should say so. But a policy that favors or disfavors certain technologies will never fly in a country where lobbyists influence policy. Instead, we’re going to keep seeing definitions of speeds that give the big ISPs the ammunition they need to fight against competition.

[Doug Dawson is President of CCG Consulting.]

Results of a study and survey commissioned by the Door County Economic Development Corp. (DCEDC) on high-speed broadband internet service in the Wisconsin county confirmed what many have long thought — there isn't much broadband available, some areas have little or no internet access at all, and what there is often doesn't offer adequate service. The results provide a basis for developing a plan to make high-speed internet available across the Peninsula, DCEDC executive director Steve Jenkins said. "Those are the salient points that put some substance to what we suspected," Jenkins said. "It gives us the foundation to launch a countywide effort to bring broadband to as many places as we can as is economically feasible." The DCEDC formed a Broadband Study Committee that worked with broadband infrastructure engineering assessment consultants Finley Engineering and CCG Consulting on the study, which took six months to complete. The full report runs 215 pages, but a 26-page summary written in layman's terms is available on the DCEDC website.

The security and privacy landscape has continued to evolve since NTIA first asked about it in the 2015 Internet Use Survey. High-profile data breaches and debates about the role of technology in people’s lives have kept concerns about privacy and security in the forefront. The spread of emerging technologies such as smart home devices and always-on voice assistants, as well as business models predicated on the collection, use, and sale of personal information, means these concerns have taken on increased urgency. As NTIA will be exploring in listening sessions, these concerns are especially acute for those in marginalized or underserved communities. These communities can sometimes face higher risks of harm from the loss of privacy or misuse of data. In 2019, most Internet-using households in America expressed concerns regarding digital privacy, according to data from the NTIA Internet Use Survey. While fewer households had concerns about digital privacy and security and deterred online activities in 2015 vs. 2017, rates have held steady from 2017 to 2019. In 2019, 73 percent of Internet-using households in 2019 had significant concerns about online privacy and security risks, and 35 percent said such worries led them to hold back from some online activities.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made a stir when he recently said that the US should “get rid of all” federal subsidies. “Just delete them all,” Musk, the world’s richest man, demanded. Musk’s comments were met with particular skepticism in the tech policy world; SpaceX is known for its aggressive pursuit of federal subsidies for SpaceX’s satellite internet division from the FCC. Since 2012, SpaceX has received $5.6 million in federal and state subsidies and Tesla has received $2.5 million, according to data from Good Jobs First, a group that advocates against corporate subsidies. Overall, Musk’s companies had received $4.9 billion in government support as of 2015, according to the Los Angeles Times — much of which came in the form of subsidies. In 2020, Starlink won almost $900 million as part of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, an FCC program meant to bring high-speed internet service to homes and small businesses in rural areas. That award made SpaceX the fourth-highest awardee for those funds. SpaceX fought hard to be eligible for the rural opportunity fund, over objections from critics who said satellite companies were not well-suited to achieve that program’s goals. But the FCC, then under Trump-era Chair Ajit Pai, doled out the money to SpaceX anyway. Arlene Martinez, communications director at advocacy group Good Jobs First, said she was “cheered to hear Musk support ending his run of receiving huge, publicly funded federal subsidy packages.” “Surely he’d agree that he should stop extracting public money from local, regional and state governments too,” she added.