Monday, April 15, 2024
Headlines Daily Digest
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Bridging the Gap: Can $90 Billion in Broadband Funding Close the Digital Divide?
AI makes the fight for net neutrality even more important
Samsung Electronics to Establish Leading-Edge Semiconductor Ecosystem in Central Texas
Digital Divide
Infrastructure
Net Neutrality
Devices
Journalism
Privacy
Platforms
Ownership
Company/Industry News
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To connect more Americans, Congress designated a slice of the $1.2 trillion 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Infrastructure Act), as well as a portion of the $350 billion 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) that passed to provide financial relief during the COVID pandemic, to fund projects that would cross this digital divide. All told, the bills provide around $90 billion in funding for connectivity spread across a plethora of initiatives. The question remains: Will this colossal sum be enough to bridge the digital divide? If it doesn't connect every American, how many will be left out of the modern digital world? Some of the $90 billion has already been spent, but the largest chunk is waiting to be assigned state-by-state, providing a once-in-a-lifetime pile of money dedicated to solving a difficult problem with many thorny issues and piecemeal solutions.
At Comcast, we remain committed to doing our part to help connect low-income households including:
- Partial Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) Credit – To help ease the transition, all ACP customers will receive a federally funded ACP credit of $14 on their Xfinity bills ($35 on Tribal lands) for the month of May as the government program winds down.
- Internet Essentials – We continue to offer Internet Essentials for $9.95/month. All current ACP customers are eligible to switch to Internet Essentials tiers during this transition.
- Internet Essentials+ – For customers looking for even faster speeds, Internet Essentials Plus offers double the speed – up to 100 Mbps – for $29.95/month.
- Xfinity Mobile Savings – For those looking to save money on their monthly bills, we’re also offering discounts to customers who bundle their Internet service with Xfinity Mobile. New Internet Essentials Plus customers can take advantage of a free line of Xfinity Mobile for one year. Additionally, current customers enrolled in ACP with Comcast who add Xfinity Mobile can get an additional free unlimited line for one year, potentially saving them hundreds of dollars per year.
- NOW WiFi Pass – For individuals and families on the go, Comcast has introduced NOW WiFi Pass, which connects them to our 23 million+ Xfinity WiFi hotspots nationwide. Now through June 30, customers can get online for $10/month with no additional equipment required, no long-term commitments, or any cancellation fees.
- Lift Zones – Individuals, whether they’re our customers or not, can access one of our more than 1,250 WiFi-connected Lift Zones across the country. Working with our extensive network of nonprofit partners, Lift Zones provide free Internet access in neighborhood locations like nonprofits, community centers, gyms, and parks and recreation facilities. Additionally, many locations have Digital Navigators – trusted and trained individuals who help them get online and learn digital skills.
- Internet Essentials Partnership Program – Our Internet Essentials Partnerships Program (IEPP) provides the opportunity for school districts and other organizations to fund and connect large numbers of students and families to broadband access at home. Since 2020, IEPP has collaborated with hundreds of entities across the country to help connect K-12 students.
- Partnerships and Project UP – We also continue to work with our network of thousands of nonprofit partners nationwide who are on the front lines of closing the digital divide. We’re investing in organizations that train thousands of trusted Digital Navigators who connect people to the Internet; and partners who advance economic mobility and open doors for the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, storytellers, and creators. This is all backed by Project UP, our $1B commitment to advance digital equity and help build a future of unlimited possibilities.
After spending some time going over my predictions about the future of broadband, I've come to a few conclusions:
- We should start soon to develop a strategy to bolster middle-mile fiber routes. We’ll be facing a crisis in 15-20 years where most middle-mile fiber will have to be replaced to accommodate faster lasers.
- Commercial companies are building some new middle-mile fiber, but not at a pace that’s needed.
- Regulators and policymakers should consider future demand before giving out money to build broadband infrastructure. That failure to consider future broadband needs has repeatedly resulted in the Federal Communications Commission and states providing grant funding for broadband infrastructure that can’t meet predictable future demand. Any broadband infrastructure funded by grants should have the capacity to handle the expected demand during its expected useful life.
- The expected future growth in demand means that every existing broadband network will have to be upgraded at some point in the next 25 years.
- We need to invest in strategies that relieve broadband traffic from having to go to and from the major Internet POPs. That might include strategies to increase the use of edge-computing, caching more data locally, and creating many more peering points closer to local providers.
In the course of the Federal Communications Commission's Office of Economics and Analytics’ (OEA) review of George Ford's Regulation and Investment in the U.S. Telecommunications Industry, staff determined that the underlying data relied upon by the author of this study has been revised by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) since the author’s analysis and the corrected data changes the results. Staff submitted a link to the original BEA data used by Dr. Ford, a link to the revised BEA data, and a comparison Dr. Ford’s two baseline model regressions using the different data sets.
On April 25, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will—for the seventh time in 20 years—address the issue of net neutrality. The lobbying—including a barrage of commercials by the cable association and Chamber of Commerce—has thus far rehashed the same old arguments that an open internet threatens the companies’ incentive to invest in broadband networks. At the heart of net neutrality is whether internet service providers (ISPs)—cable companies such as Comcast and Charter and telephone companies such as AT&T and Verizon – should have the responsibilities of a common carrier that for decades have applied to telephone service. Such responsibilities—often described by reference to Tile II of the Communications Act—include behaving in a “just and reasonable” manner, including providing non-discriminatory access to their networks. Now, two decades after the debate began, artificial intelligence (AI) has once again amplified the importance of non-discriminatory access as well as just and reasonable behavior on the last mile of the internet that connects consumers and businesses. According to ChatGPT 4, here are the specific benefits net neutrality brings to the implementation and development of AI:
- Increased Data Demand: “Without net neutrality, ISPs could throttle or prioritize traffic, affecting access to AI services and resources. This could hinder AI research and development, especially for smaller entities without the means to pay for better access.”
- Bias and Fairness: “With AI startups and innovations emerging rapidly, the absence of net neutrality could stifle competition by allowing established companies or those with agreements with ISPs to dominate, potentially slowing down the rate of innovation in AI.”
- Access to Services: “Many AI-powered applications and services require constant internet connectivity to function optimally. Without net neutrality, ISPs could control access to these services, impacting everything from AI-driven healthcare diagnostics to personalized learning platforms.”
- Global Accessibility: “The development of AI is a global effort, requiring collaboration across borders. Net Neutrality facilitates this by ensuring that data can flow freely and without discrimination. This is crucial for sharing AI research, accessing computational resources, and deploying solutions worldwide.”
- Ethical Implications: “The ability to control what can be accessed or prioritized by ISPs could lead to ethical dilemmas, especially if certain AI-driven content is censored or throttled. This raises concerns about who controls access to AI technologies and for what purposes.”
[Tom Wheeler is a visiting fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. Wheeler is a businessman, author, and was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2013 to 2017.]
The US Department of Commerce and Samsung Electronics have signed a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms (PMT) to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen the resilience of the U.S. semiconductor supply chain, advance U.S. technology leadership, and fuel U.S. global competitiveness. Samsung—the only leading-edge semiconductor company that is a leader in both advanced memory and advanced logic technologies—is expected to invest more than $40 billion dollars in the region in the coming years, and the proposed investment would support the creation of over 20,000 jobs. The proposed investment would turn Samsung’s existing presence in Texas into a comprehensive ecosystem for the development and production of leading-edge chips in the United States, including two new leading-edge logic fabs, an R&D fab, and an advanced packaging facility in Taylor, as well as an expansion to their existing Austin facility. It also demonstrates Samsung’s ongoing commitment to the United States, where it has been manufacturing chips since 1996. By continuing to develop the technologies of the future in the United States, Samsung is taking steps that would work towards strengthening U.S. economic and national security and increasing the resilience of both the U.S. and global semiconductor supply chains. Because of investments like Samsung’s, the United States is projected to be on track to produce roughly 20% of the world’s leading-edge logic chips by 2030.
A pending bill in the California state legislature, the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), would create a “link tax” that would require Google to pay for simply connecting Californians to news articles. We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism. If passed, CJPA may result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers. By helping people find news stories, we help publishers of all sizes grow their audiences at no cost to them. CJPA would up-end that model. It would favor media conglomerates and hedge funds—who’ve been lobbying for this bill—and could use funds from CJPA to continue to buy up local California newspapers, strip them of journalists, and create more ghost papers that operate with a skeleton crew to produce only low-cost, and often low-quality, content. CJPA would also put small publishers at a disadvantage and limit consumers’ access to a diverse local media ecosystem. To prepare for possible CJPA implications, we are beginning a short-term test for a small percentage of California users. The testing process involves removing links to California news websites, potentially covered by CJPA, to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience. Until there’s clarity on California’s regulatory environment, we’re also pausing further investments in the California news ecosystem, including new partnerships through Google News Showcase, our product and licensing program for news organizations, and planned expansions of the Google News Initiative.
With the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) on the line, internet service providers (ISPs) want to ensure their low-income subscribers don’t lose internet access—and that nobody falls through the cracks. Identity verification company SheerID has launched a tool allowing telcos to verify that households are eligible for government assistance programs. With the ACP slated to run out of funding at the end of April, SheerID said its verification tool is a way for carriers to continue reduced rate pricing and promotions to families who need extra financial support. SheerID is in talks with a number of its customers “in terms of transitioning off the ACP program into using our product” for supporting families on government assistance. But as the product just came out, there aren’t any partnerships to announce so far. All told, determining eligibility for low-cost internet plans is going to get a lot less organized if ACP goes away. While the Federal Communications Commission has allowed some ISPs to verify ACP eligibility themselves, consumers applying for ACP have typically gone through the National Verifier, a centralized application system managed by the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC).
Using a 2003–2019 dataset on broadband adoption in Algeria, we explore its pattern and the market structure, institutional, and socio-economic factors that influenced its pace, which was considerably delayed due to political and social instability during the decade of the 1990s. We propose an integrative model selection approach that simultaneously searches for the best diffusion model among the Bass, Gompertz, and Logistic diffusion models, as well as relevant explanatory variables. The Logistic model chosen strongly aligns with Algeria's historical context compared to the Gompertz model selected by the standard sequential approach. Market concentration exhibits a U-shaped impact on adoption rates, while institutional quality, mobile technology, and higher education enrollment consistently have a positive impact. Introducing differentiated broadband access to stimulate competition and lower prices can promote adoption among sub-populations in Algeria who currently find it financially inaccessible. Additionally, broadband uptake can be further accelerated by enforcing transparent governance, supporting regulatory policies, and boosting digital literacy.
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), Grace Tepper (grace AT benton DOT org), and Zoe Walker (zwalker AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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