Supervisor Holly Mitchell released a map of priority locations where Los Angeles County will build low-cost internet for households in the Second District. Supervisor Mitchell made the announcement in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Internal Services Department (ISD), which is Los Angeles County’s lead on digital equity, during a free laptop giveaway event at the Willowbrook Library. ISD handed out 700 laptops across Los Angeles, all of which are enabled with a full year of IT support. The Community Broadband Network (CBN) pilot will deliver free broadband services to low-income County residents. ISD will work with a pool of pre-qualified service providers to deploy and operate broadband networks in communities impacted by the digital divide. The pilot area in the Second District which includes neighborhoods along the 110 corridor south of the 10 freeway, including Willowbrook, Westmont, West Athens, Florence Firestone, and South Los Angeles. In September 2022, the LA County Board of Supervisors approved a total of $56 million to help connect families to fast and reliable internet. Construction for the Community Broadband Network will begin in early 2023. The pilot area covers areas where more than 20 percent of households lack home internet. The goal of the program is to provide internet at low- and no-cost that is fast and reliable, where multiple members of a household can be streaming at the same time. Service providers are also required to provide multi-lingual community engagement programs and advertising.

Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) introduced the Social Media Child Protection Act (H.R.821), which would make it unlawful for social media platforms to provide access to children under the age of 16. The rates of teen and adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide have risen at unprecedented levels since the emergence of social media. The Social Media Child Protection Act makes it unlawful for social media platforms to provide access to children under the age of 16. It also does the following:

• Makes it the social media platform's responsibility to verify age (using methods like ID verification);
• Requires social media platforms to establish and maintain reasonable procedures to protect the confidentiality, security, and integrity of personal information collected from users and perspective users;
• Gives the authority to the State to bring a civil action on behalf of its residents;
• Gives parents a private right of action on behalf of their children;
• Directs the FTC to prevent any social media platform from violating these regulations including implementing fines for violations. 

Lumen is taking a different path forward than the other big telephone companies. The company announced a major upgrade to its long-haul fiber routes that cross the country. The company’s main fiber strategy is to beef up the intercity network with plans to add six million miles of fiber to existing fiber routes by 2026. The existing Lumen long-haul fiber network came to the company in two acquisitions. The original network came when CenturyLink bought US West, which had earlier merged with Qwest, a major builder of long-haul networks. The network was strengthened when CenturyLink purchased Level 3 Communications. The original Quest fiber is getting dated in terms of capacity and performance. Much of this fiber was built thirty and forty years ago. Lumen will be using two low-loss types of fiber from Corning. This newer fiber is far clearer than older fiber and will increase the distance between repeater points while also allowing for using the fastest 400-gigabit electronics today and faster electronics later. Lumen is also pursuing a last-mile fiber expansion. Unlike the other telcos, Lumen hasn’t been talking much about the upcoming rural grant funding. This doesn’t mean the company might not pursue those opportunities since rural fiber expansion creates monopolies. But major residential expansion does not seem to be a key part of the Lumen plan, at least compared to plans for companies like Frontier, which says it plans to pass 12 million homes with fiber.