830 utility-justice, environmental, faith, digital-rights and civil-rights groups sent a letter to Congress calling for the next congressional COVID-19 relief package to include a moratorium on broadband, electricity and water shutoff. The letter also calls for stimulus funds to address the systemic issues that lead to shutoffs. These issues include racial and economic inequities that can be addressed with improved affordable broadband programs including Lifeline; distributed solar energy; and percentage-of-income water-affordability initiatives. The letter calls for a nationwide moratorium on all utility disconnections. The letter also advocates for reconnections for lost services and forgiveness of late fees and bill payments for economically distressed people. 

Many national Internet service providers (ISPs) have introduced free and discounted plans to keep people connected during the crisis (though there are still holdouts). The charity of these companies is commendable, but their plans still leave many people disconnected, forcing them to choose between staying safe at home and accessing essential services. Eligibility oversights leave out households in need, and overwhelmed call centers make signing up for programs difficult. In many cases, families are falling through the cracks simply because the national ISPs are too big and too monopolistic to catch them. These are the diseconomies of scale that make monopoly ISPs less able to fulfil their vital role of connecting Americans, both in normal times and during a national emergency. To account for these failures, advocates, including the National Digital Inclusion Alliance and Public Knowledge, are pressing the federal government to establish some sort of free broadband program nationwide.

Infrastructure workers were essential long before COVID-19, but their economic importance has come into greater focus during the crisis and is beginning to shape the response, too. Just as our infrastructure systems require generational investment, so too do our infrastructure workers. Beyond protecting essential workers right now, there are enormous concerns over who will fill these jobs in the months and years to come. Policymakers have traditionally viewed infrastructure jobs in terms of construction projects. Shovel-ready jobs, for instance, were a big part of 2009’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. While constructing roads, bridges, and other facilities can potentially support thousands of direct and indirect jobs in the coming months, the reality is there are millions of jobs that operate our infrastructure. Only 15% of infrastructure jobs are involved in construction—the other 85%, or 14.5 million workers, repair and maintain our existing infrastructure systems.

As we wrap our heads around the new normal of sheltering in place and trying to care for those in our communities that are truly devastated by COVID-19, the technologies that connect us – from the internet to wireless to GPS – are now the first line of contact and defense for nearly everything we do. Information and communications technologies have created a remarkable ability to connect, inform, work remotely and innovate. While these capabilities benefit the world in a wide range of ways, their benefits are not distributed equally. For those with little or no access to the internet, working at home (or schooling at home) is much harder or impossible. Building the connected world that we all rely on requires vision, tenacity, humility and unwavering optimism.

[Vinton Cerf, Marconi Society chair, is noted for technical contributions and leadership in creating and evolving the internet.]

As the internet becomes our economic, educational and social window to the world, six innovators that built this critical technology give their thoughts on our post-pandemic future.  These visionaries are part of the Marconi Society, a foundation that inspires and connects those creating new technology for a digitally inclusive world. We'll provide summaries of their perspectives all week.

The Illinois Office of Broadband filed a petition for reconsideration of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) order, asking the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider its decision to forego federal-state partnership on broadband deployment, asserting a partnership would help coordinate state and federal broadband investment to maximize efficiency and minimize duplication. Illinois also asked the FCC to reconsider its decision to continue to treat broadband offering 25/3 Mbps service as a viable minimum, and make 50/5 Mbps the threshold for support in the RDOF auction.

According to the DC Circuit’s logic, the Federal Communications Commission’s jurisdiction over broadband Internet access services now resides in some sort of regulatory purgatory. This created a ripple effect across a wide variety of legal action items the FCC sought to resolve in its Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIFO), including the question of who is eligible to take advantage of the pole attachment regime contained in Section 224 of the Communications Act. If, as the court believes, access to pole attachments is crucial to broadband deployment and, ultimately, increased competition, what path should the FCC take on remand? 

Conspicuously absent from the Majority’s pole attachment discussion is any recognition of the important fact that that prior to the 2015 Open Internet Rules carriers that provided broadband-only services were foreclosed from taking advantage of the statutory regime under Section 224. The correct legal question on remand is not whether the RIFO deprived broadband-only carriers of inalienable “statutory rights” as the court suggests, but rather whether these carriers had valid reliance interests that were harmed by the Commission’s 2018 choice to reverse the 2015 Open Internet Order? According to the court’s own opinion, the answer to that question in this particular case is a resounding “No.”

All eyes are on Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai on whether he’s about to unveil a potential order to approve a long-pending application from Virginia-based satellite company Ligado Networks, which wants to light up 5G operations in some airwaves it currently holds. Lawmakers have nudged him for months to make a call on this industry request, but the Pentagon and other parts of the Trump administration have cried foul and said Ligado’s plans would disrupt their own critical operations in nearby airwaves — charges Ligado disputes. The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration sent another round of objections to the FCC on April 10, including signatures of concern from the departments of Energy, Homeland Security, Transportation and, perhaps most interestingly, Justice.

Google and Apple’s plan to team up to create new contact tracing technology to combat the coronavirus is already raising eyebrows among key policymakers in Washington. “Tech companies’ new feature to contact trace coronavirus cases has positive potential, but we must ensure privacy concerns are considered,” said House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ). “I’ll be following this closely to ensure consumer privacy is protected.” Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, broadly touched on the issue in his newly released proposal to “safely reopen America.” In outlining his plan, Biden calls for a “contact tracing strategy that protects privacy.”

President Donald Trump's reelection campaign is suing a Wisconsin TV station for running an anti-Trump commercial that pieces together audio clips of the president talking about the coronavirus outbreak in a way they argue is misleading and false. The ad by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA features a series of soundbites in which Trump downplayed the threat posed by the virus, while a chart that is splashed across the screen gradually begins to shoot upward as cases of the virus skyrocketed across the US. The lawsuit, filed by the Trump campaign in Wisconsin state court, alleges the ad splices together the clips in a way that makes it appear as though the president said the virus was a “hoax.” Trump's campaign argues that the president did not call the virus itself a “hoax," but was instead referring to Democrats who have politicized his handling of it. The lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial.

The threat of legal action could prompt TV stations to avoid running advertisements that are critical of President Trump in the midst of a contentious presidential campaign.