Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Headlines Daily Digest
Today: How Internet Access Can Preserve Native Cultures
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US's digital divide 'is going to kill people'
Monopoly ISPs Too Big to Make Good on Covid-19 Internet Offers
COVID-19 Response
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More Broadband/Internet
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Universal Service
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Wireless
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Health
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Security
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Emergency Communications
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Elections & Media
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Privacy
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Platforms
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Journalism
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Policymakers
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Life As We Know It Now
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Stories From Abroad
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COVID Response
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The COVID-19 crisis is exposing how the cracks in the US’s creaking digital infrastructure are potentially putting lives at risk, exclusive research shows. With most of the country on lockdown and millions relying on the internet for work, healthcare, education and shopping, research by M-Lab, an open source project which monitors global internet performance, showed that internet service slowed across the country after the lockdown. “This is going to kill people,” said Sascha Meinrath, a professor at Penn State University and co-founder of M-Lab. After looking at the internet connection speeds for individual IP addresses, M-Lab found that more than 50% of customers in 325 US counties stopped getting internet download speeds that met the government definition of broadband between the final two weeks of Feb and the final two weeks of March. The drop in connectivity is affecting both rural and urban areas with populations already underserved by the medical system or racked with poverty.
In Congress, the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) included $2 billion for schools and libraries to help keep people connected in a draft version of an economic stimulus bill responding to coronavirus, but it was scrubbed out of the final legislation. Instead, $200 million is being directed to telehealth initiatives and $125 million to distance learning. Benton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate Gigi Sohn said this was far from enough money to meet the broadband needs of people during the coronavirus outbreak. “Congress didn’t take it seriously,” said Sohn. “It’s a shame it’s taken a pandemic for people to realize if you don’t have internet access you’re cut off from participation in society.”
830 Groups Urge Congress to Halt Broadband, Electricity and Water Shutoffs in Next COVID-19 Relief Bill
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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.
On April 7, the Joint Center convened a panel of experts and key stakeholders for an online policy forum with Federal Communications Commissioner Geoffrey Starks to discuss the concept of a “connectivity stimulus” to ensure that people in all communities in the United States are connected and have access to online education and economic opportunities during and following the COVID-19 crisis. Areas discussed: 1) the need for a connectivity stimulus for COVID-19 relief, 2) the disproportionate impact COVID-19 has on Black communities, and 3) necessary priorities that address the digital divide. Commissioner Starks has called for a broadband stimulus focusing on reaching Americans on the wrong side of the digital divide (e.g., low-income families, K-12 children, rural Black communities).
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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.
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Altice USA said it is extending its free broadband service to students in its service territory until June 30, 2020. The company also has been partnering with school districts in the New York Tri-state area to offer its Student WiFi product at no cost for 60 days, a program that provides students who have school-issued devices the ability to use the Optimum WiFi Hotspot Network to access their school’s network and resources from home if they do not have dedicated Internet access. To date, Altice USA has partnered with more than 100 school districts and connected more than 240,000 student devices to its hotspot network as part of this effort.
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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.
Unequal access to high-speed internet could be the biggest obstacle to getting the American economy back on track
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As unemployment claims reach record highs, Americans' unequal access to high-speed internet could become a roadblock to recovery. Even before the age of coronavirus, there's evidence that the availability of high-speed internet directly affects employment. At least six studies spanning two decades show a cause-and-effect relationship: Where broadband is deployed, businesses adopt more efficient practices, introduce new services, and can reach new labor pools and customers. Data from tech companies in the US seems to bolster those conclusions — Microsoft's analysis found that counties across the US with the highest unemployment rate also had the lowest availability of broadband internet. It's difficult to predict when the US will recover from the coronavirus crisis or what that recovery will look like. But for underserved rural communities without high-speed internet, adapting to the increasingly-online market will be one of the biggest challenges.
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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.
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In August 2019, India’s government revoked Kashmir’s special autonomous status and locked down the region, which has a population of around 8 million. The lockdown was followed by the democratic world’s longest internet shutdown, which was partially lifted on Jan. 25 when authorities restored access to 2G internet. But the denial of high-speed internet still prevents people from using banking apps, paying their bills, and accessing services—even forcing some out of their homes. The Indian government will not restore the high-speed internet despite the pressing need for the population to stay informed about the coronavirus pandemic. On April 3, authorities ordered a continuation of the ban “in the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of India,” after a review of the situation in Kashmir, a territory whose sovereignty has been disputed with Pakistan for decades. Like the rest of India, Kashmir is now under a 21-day government-mandated lockdown to contain the coronavirus. Inadequate internet access has compounded the challenges for health care workers in the isolated region, who face the looming pandemic with a severely deficient health infrastructure. In depriving Kashmir of the internet now, the government is “being inhuman,” Saleem said. “The entire world is united in the fight against this disease, sharing experiences and information online, but we have been isolated thanks to the continued curbs on the internet.”
More Broadband/Internet
Illinois Office of Broadband Seeks Reconsideration of Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Order
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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.
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A 400-mile fiber network built to provide broadband Internet access to 14 mountain communities across northwest Colorado officially went online the week of April 6. The Northwest Colorado Council of Governments has spearheaded the work, dubbed Project Thor. The loop starts in Denver and runs west, using Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) fiber along Interstate 70 and a combination of fiber services going north through Meeker, Craig, Steamboat Springs and Grand County. The network is designed to provide redundancy for communities that experience regular outages, the council said in a statement. It also fills a need for high-quality, affordable broadband lacking in many rural areas, government officials said. Project Thor, named after the hammer-wielding Norse god, received a $1 million grant from the state Department of Local Affairs for infrastructure and a $270,000 grant to lease the cable from CDOT for the first three years. Local governments provided matching funds. Work started on the project in 2014.
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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.”
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Speedier 5G wireless technology is rekindling a long-running debate over the best way to reach America’s internet dead zones: by wire or by wave. Cellphone carriers including Verizon and T-Mobile say new wireless technologies will let them serve more home-broadband subscribers without sending a technician to wire up a customer’s house. The companies have promised to build profitable services where other wireless broadband companies, like Clearwire, have failed to build a viable business, but they have yet to detail how many wireless homes they serve.
But the argument over which technology is better suited to the task is more than a debate about engineering. It has gained a political tinge, too. The Trump administration has touted its federal policies designed to spur 5G network investments as an answer to the digital divide that has kept millions of American households disconnected from high-quality internet service. Fiber advocates say a hard wire to the home will last the longest without requiring a costly replacement in a few years. A cellphone tower that could serve some disconnected homes today might become congested tomorrow.
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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.
Why is Microsoft Advocating for Gigabit Fixed Wireless? Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Comments Reveal Interest
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Could Microsoft be planning gigabit fixed wireless deployments – perhaps through service provider partners participating in the company’s Airband rural broadband program? Comments filed by the company about Federal Communications Commission plans for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction reveal some interest. Earlier in 2019, the FCC asked for comments on a variety of issues related to the RDOF auction, including a proposal to prevent providers intending to deploy fixed wireless from bidding in the gigabit tier if the providers did not previously report offering gigabit broadband as of Dec 31, 2018. Microsoft was one of several entities that filed comments with the FCC arguing against the proposed restriction. In its comments, the company said this restriction is not in keeping with the FCC’s stated goal of being technologically neutral in the RDOF auction. Microsoft then referenced comments from other opponents of the proposed gigabit fixed wireless restriction.
A Microsoft executive recently suggested that TV white spaces technology might be able to support speeds of 100 Mbps downstream in the future. But this is potentially the first time the company is talking about gigabit fixed wireless speeds, which could require the use of spectrum in higher-frequency millimeter wave spectrum bands and which also would likely need fiber to be brought closer to the end user to backhaul traffic from the fixed wireless access point.
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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.”
Reps Shakowsky, King Introduce Legislation to Assist Seniors with Health Care Access and Communications with Loved Ones During COVID-19 Crisis
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Reps Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Peter King (R-NY) introduced the Advancing Connectivity during the Coronavirus to Ensure Support for Seniors (ACCESS) Act. In March, Sens Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Robert P. Casey, Jr. (D-PA) introduced the bill in the Senate (S. 3517). Specifically, the ACCESS Act would:
- Authorize an emergency supplemental appropriation of $50 million for the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Telehealth Resource Center to assist nursing facilities receiving funding through Medicare or Medicaid in expanding their use of telehealth services;
- Require the Secretary of HHS to share recommendations on additional ways to improve access to telehealth services in nursing facilities and temporarily designated nursing facilities during the pandemic; and
- Establish a grant program authorizing HHS to award nursing facilities grants to nursing facilities to enable residents to participate in “virtual visits” with loved ones while the health risk of in-person visits remains high during the pandemic.
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.
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On April 7, 2020, Henry Geller passed away. Born in Springfield (MA) in 1924, he was raised in Detroit (MI). During a long career in communications policy, he worked at the Federal Communications Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and Duke University’s Washington Center for Public Policy Research. His life's work had a profound effect on US telecommunications; his impact on so many advocates and policymakers is impossible to measure.
"It is hard to overstate the influence that Henry had over two generations of media and telecommunications policy," said Benton Senior Counselor Andrew Jay Schwartzman. "But to focus on the policy work is perhaps to overlook what may have been his greatest accomplishment, which was as the wise and gentle teacher and mentor of two generations of communications lawyers who looked to him as a model of how to do the right thing, the right way."
Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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