The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a package of fatally flawed plans that would fundamentally undercut Lifeline. May 15's FCC oversight hearing is an opportunity for Congress to hold the agency accountable for its disastrous proposals. 

Lifeline began during the Reagan administration to promote universal telephone service, and was expanded under President George W. Bush to support mobile phones. In 2016, Lifeline was modernized to include subsidies for broadband. Today, the program provides $9.25 a month for low-income households struggling to afford service. At the end of 2017, the FCC issued a series of bad proposals designed to shrink the program — a thousand tiny cuts that cumulatively would leave millions of Americans stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide.

One of the proposals would ban wireless resellers from participating in Lifeline. Resellers, who serve a whopping 70 percent of Lifeline recipients, buy capacity wholesale from major telecommunications companies like AT&T or Sprint and then resell it to customers — typically at lower prices than the big brands offer, and without burdensome conditions like racially discriminatory credit checks. As major wireless carriers have largely abandoned Lifeline, banning resellers threatens to disconnect millions who have few alternatives for affordable service. The FCC also proposed a “self-enforcing” budget cap for Lifeline, which would artificially cap a program that has only a 30 percent participation rate. The cap would also prioritize money for rural populations over urban ones, pitting disconnected communities against each other.

Virtually no one supports these changes – not Lifeline subscribers, not resellers, not even big industry players like Verizon and trade group USTelecom. The FCC must terminate the proceeding and abandon any future its plans to gut the program. The FCC should remember its core purpose: to connect people so that our country’s most vulnerable aren’t left behind.

[Dana Floberg is the policy manager at Free Press, Carmen Scurato is the senior policy counsel at Free Press, and Erin Shields is a national field organizer for internet rights for the Center for Media Justice.]

Access to rural broadband internet should become easier in 2019 with the passage of a Missouri law and the awarding of federal grants from the Federal Communication Commission. The budget that passed the MO legislature recently included $5 million toward the new Rural Broadband Development Fund, and the FCC has recently announced more than $25 million in federal grants from the Connect America Fund (CAF).

The American Public Power Association, American Water Works Association, Edison Electric Institute, National Rural Electric Cooperatives Association, and the Utilities Technology Council -- which together represent almost all of the nation's utilities, water, and wastewater facilities -- wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, warning him about the FCC moving too quickly to open up 6 GHz midband spectrum currently used by those utilities. The utilities say they need the spectrum for their mission-critical communications and that the FCC's proposal to open it up for unlicensed Wi-Fi use is an untested and unproven approach that the FCC is pursuing. The utilities' communications networks are "used for critical situational awareness, underpin safety functions, and enable crews to safely repair and restore services after storms," as well as "the greater deployment of distributed energy resources such as solar or battery storage, smart meters, and other technologies to enable grid modernization." "While our collective members fully understand and appreciate the need to make more efficient use of spectrum," they wrote, "We strongly encourage the Commission to weigh the advantages of expanding access to the 6 GHz band with the potential negative impact this could have on critical infrastructure networks."

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai issued the following statement regarding the President’s Executive Order to protect our nation’s communications networks and the security of the communications supply chain: “Protecting America’s communications networks is vital to our national, economic, and personal security. I therefore applaud the President for issuing this Executive Order to safeguard the communications supply chain. Given the threats presented by certain foreign companies’ equipment and services, this is a significant step toward securing America’s
networks. When it comes to our national security, we cannot afford to make risky choices and just hope for the best. We must have a clear-eyed view of the threats that we face and be prepared to do what is necessary to counter those threats. Today’s Executive Order does just that.” 

As calls mount to break up big tech companies or limit their power, their legal fate will hang on how judges and regulators define their markets. "The social networking category" is a way to define this market that most readily casts Facebook as a monopoly. But if you call it "messaging," then Apple, Snapchat, and the cellphone providers all look like hearty competitors. Similarly, in many countries, Google looks to have a monopoly in the search market. But if you define the market instead as "online information," the case is a lot murkier. In tech, market definitions are unusually fluid because hardware evolves quickly and software is infinitely malleable. Lawsuits and antitrust cases move slowly, and in the time they can be tried, the markets tend to have mutated.

The White House announced an unprecedented campaign asking Internet users to share if they had been censored on Facebook, Google and Twitter, tapping into President Trump’s long-running claim that tech giants are biased against conservatives. The effort, which the White House said on Twitter was directed at users “no matter your views,” seeks to collect names, contact information and other details from Americans. The survey asks whether they have encountered problems on Facebook, Instagram, Google-owned YouTube, Twitter or other social media sites — companies the president frequently takes aim at for alleged political censorship. The survey claims that “too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear ‘violations’ of user policies.” The White House also asked users for permission to send new email newsletters about “President Trump’s fight for free speech," so that the administration “can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.”

As expected, the Democratic leaders on the House Communications Subcommittee used the Federal Communications Commission oversight hearing to hammer FCC Chairman Ajit Pai over policies and actions with which they strongly disagree. In his opening statement, Chairman Mike Doyle (D-PA) said Chairman Pai had yet to explain to Congress or the American people what it was doing about mobile carriers sharing real-time geolocation data. He also slammed the inaccurate and deeply flawed broadband deployment data, old and faulty business broadband data, and warned the FCC not to act on a USTelecom forbearance petition using such data. He said the FCC should auction the C-band spectrum, rather than hand that money to "four foreign satellite companies," which he said would be irresponsible.

[much more at the link below]