GeoLinks took home $84.6 million of the $234.9 million it won in the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction for broadband projects in Arizona and Nevada. While its top priority is ramping up those fiber and fixed wireless builds, company President Ryan Adams said it's also keeping its eyes peeled for expansion opportunities from the Southwest to the East Coast which could help it scale over the next decade. GeoLinks has slowly but surely slid swaths of southern California under its wing through strategic partnerships, like with the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), which helped connect schools and public libraries across rural California to reliable internet connections. Even though fiber is the golden goose for GeoLinks, fixed wireless via licensed and unlicensed spectrum alike are of interest. While Adams wasn’t ready just yet to reveal the next key markets that RDOF projects will launch in, he underscored that the company was working closely with the FCC to build roadmaps on what is to come to ensure that all milestones can be met in the future.

In November 2022, the Federal Communications Commission released our pre-production draft of its new broadband maps. For the first time ever, the maps reflect broadband availability at the physical location level. In fact, prior FCC maps only provided this information at the census-block level. That means these new maps provide the best picture available to date of where broadband is and is not available across the country, and the maps will only get better over time as the FCC gets input from stakeholders across the country. As I said last month, this is a beginning, not an endpoint for the new era of broadband maps. But just because we know they’re better doesn’t mean they’re perfect. And the long-term success of this effort depends on consumers and other stakeholders getting involved in the process. This isn’t just good policy, it’s the law. The Broadband DATA Act requires the FCC to use a challenge process to continually update the map to make it more accurately reflect the reality consumers face. The Act even instructs us to collect this availability information every 6 months, incorporating previous challenges along the way, meaning that with each iteration we’re getting closer and closer to a more accurate picture of where broadband is and where it is not. The FCC is committed to this continually evolving process both in the near term and for the long haul. So far, we have received thousands of challenges from consumers nationwide—and we know more are on the way. This feedback will help make the maps more accurate. And more accurate maps will help us all work together to close the digital divide. Here are the most important things to know about how to participate in improving the FCC’s maps.

There is a mountain of complaints to be made about the Federal Communications Commission's new National Broadband Map. In some parts of the country, there are a lot of missing rural locations, including entire subdivisions. Close analysis of the map shows what folks in the broadband world have always known, but were unable to prove, that the big cable companies and telcos don’t cover everybody. It is these unserved folks in the middle of cities that I call the hidden unserved locations. These little pockets came about for a variety of reasons. Some are costly to serve and the cable company decided not to reach them when the initial network was built. 

Google and Meta, known together in the ad industry as the "duopoly," are expected to bring in less than half of all US digital advertising this year for the first time since 2014. While they still tower over digital rivals, their momentum is starting to slow as competition moves in. Google and Meta will together capture 48.4% of all US digital ad revenue this year (28.8% for Google and 19.6% for Meta), down from 54.7% at their peak in 2017 (34.7% for Google and 20.0% for Meta). By far, the biggest threat to their collective ad dominance is Amazon, which has grown its ad business to over $30 billion dollars annually. By 2024, Amazon is expected to capture 12.7% of all US digital ad dollars, while Meta is expected to capture 17.9%. Aggressive lobbying against Big Tech's ad dominance, mostly by the digital news industry and smaller technology rivals, will make it harder for Google and Meta to expand their ad businesses through acquisitions.

A bevy of proposals to limit Big Tech firms' power gave up their last gasp as Congress released the text of its year-end spending bill. But the following major tech-related bills, including two that supporters were fiercely pushing for, failed to make it in:

• The Open App Markets Act would have forced Apple and Google to give app developers more rights in their app stores, including the ability to "side-load" apps directly onto phones, surpassing approval and a commission charge.
• The Kids Online Safety Act would have required platforms to guard kids from harmful content using new features and safeguards and to make privacy settings "on" by default for children.

Only a few pieces of notable legislation related to tech and telecommunications made it to the finish line:

• A provision to ban TikTok on government devices.
• A version of the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act, which raises the cost of merger filing fees for transactions of $5 billion or more, was included, though the boost in funds won't be allocated until 2024.
• The INFORM Act, aimed at deterring online sales of counterfeit and stolen goods and supported by companies like Amazon and Etsy.
• The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), passed a year ago, allocated $65 million for broadband internet deployment.

 The threat of new rules in the US, combined with an increasingly onerous regulatory environment in Europe, has companies re-thinking their policies around competitors, children's privacy, algorithmic transparency, and more.

Google Fiber Webpass uses wireless technology to provide high-speed internet to the apartments, condominiums, and offices we serve across the country. Wireless technology is a broad term that can mean many different things, like Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, IoT protocols, and military communications. Those are great, but the Google Fiber Webpass wireless method of internet deployment is different. We use millimeter wave — or wireless radio — technology for what’s known as “backhaul,” for how we deliver wireless internet to any given building. This method can really speed up how quickly we can get service to a multi-unit building. Simply put, while our fiber optic lines deliver fast speeds, they can be costly and time consuming to construct, or even simply infeasible to deploy especially in dense, urban areas, where many of these buildings are. With radio technology, all we have to do is bring our fiber optic connection to one of the buildings in the radio network that covers a given area. That makes it incredibly fast and easy to implement and still delivers remarkable speeds, which can be comparable to a fiber optic connection, so we can serve more units more quickly.