Daily Digest 6/26/2018 (Lifeline for Puerto Rico)

Two tribes and a group of companies that get telecom subsidies under the Federal Communications Commission's Lifeline program want the FCC to hold off on its plan to limit the types of companies that get more Lifeline money to support subscribers on tribal lands. In 2017, the FCC approved a plan that would eliminate extra funding on tribal lands for wireless resellers, and limit the areas eligible for a higher subsidy. The enhanced subsidy adds an extra $25 to the monthly $9.25 per-subscriber total that Lifeline companies receive. In a petition filed June 22, companies including Assist Wireless and Boomerang Wireless, along with the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and the Oceti Sakowin Tribal Utility Authority, asked the commission to pause implementation while they challenge the cuts in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that the company’s work to upgrade its network with FirstNet’s 700 MHz spectrum will position it to move to 5G network technology via a software upgrade. “To build out this FirstNet capability, this first responder network, we have to go climb every cell tower. Literally, we have to go touch every cell tower over the next couple of years,” explained Stephenson. "As we're touching those cell towers, every single one of them, we have a lot of spectrum in inventory. We will be lighting that spectrum up as we touch each cell tower." Added Stephenson: "We'll be equipping every single cell site for 5G such that, when 5G is ready to go, when it's ready for prime time, our turn-up of 5G is a software load, it’s a software upgrade.”

Gray Television has agreed to buy fellow television-station owner Raycom Media in a $3.65 billion deal that would create a company that reaches nearly a quarter of US TV households. Gray estimates it will be able to save $40 million in the first year after the deal closes by reducing station and corporate expenses. It also expects revenue to increase by $15 million, as Raycom’s contracts convert to Gray’s rates. If the Gray-Raycom deal is completed, the combined company would own 142 television stations in 92 US markets, reaching 24% of TV households and owning the third-largest number stations. Gray is buying Raycom for $3.65 billion in total proceeds, including $2.85 billion in cash, $650 million in preferred stock and 11.5 million shares of Gray stock, valued at $147.2 million June 22. Raycom is employee-owned. Gray’s shareholders would have 89% of the economic ownership of the company after the deal. The combined annual net revenue of both companies, averaged over a two-year basis, would have been about $2 billion. Gray has largely owned the leading stations in smaller and midsize markets across the US, while Raycom has focused more on operations in the South. To ease regulatory approval, Gray plans to sell television stations in all nine of the markets where both companies operate stations.

In 2015, Gibbon (MN) joined nine other cities and 17 townships in creating a cooperative that promised to bring broadband Internet access to 6,200 residents across both Renville and Sibley counties. RS Fiber Cooperative laid fiber optic cable through Gibbon in 2016. Each of the cities involved in the cooperative now has fiber optic cable, with speeds of up to 1 gigabyte; the second phase of the project – to bring broadband to the countryside – should begin in 2020. The cost to bring broadband to the cities involved in the project was about $15 million; Gibbon sold bonds to raise its share, which was $813,000. Dana Lietzau, the city manager, said civic leaders pitched broadband access as at least one way to encourage businesses to locate in Gibbon. 

Public Knowledge leads a group of public interest and racial justice allies in welcoming net neutrality advocates from across the United States to Washington (DC) for a “Day of Advocacy.” Volunteers plan to express how important net neutrality is to their lives, schools, and businesses and why Congress should support the Congressional Review Act resolution to reinstate the FCC’s strong net neutrality rules. More than 50 participants volunteered to share their stories in scheduled meetings with their representatives on Capitol Hill. Public Knowledge, Access Now, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Media Justice, Common Cause, Consumers Union, Demand Progress, Engine, Fight for the Future, Free Press Action Fund, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Native Public Media, and New America’s Open Technology Institute will help participants meet with their representatives.

The Federal Communications Commission has provided a significant budgetary boost for its Rural Health Care Program to address immediate and longterm funding shortages driven by growing demand for rural telemedicine services. The FCC increased the annual cap on program spending by nearly 43 percent, to $571 million, which will reverse across-the-board spending cuts for the current funding year imposed by the old cap. These “pro-rata” cuts had created uncertainty and turmoil in the program for patients, health care providers, and communications companies alike. The program’s previous $400 million cap was set in 1997 and was never indexed for inflation. The $171 million increase represents what the funding level would be today had the initial cap included an inflation adjustment. Looking ahead, the FCC will adjust the cap annually for inflation and allow funds unused from prior years to be carried forward. At the same time, the FCC continues its work on enacting reforms proposed last year to guard against program waste, fraud, and abuse.

This toolkit provides background context for the Homework Gap, addresses broader implications of household connectivity, suggests resources for scoping the problem, and details five strategies districts are currently using to address these challenges: 1) Partner with Community Organizations to Create “Homework Hotspots”, 2) Promote Low-Cost Broadband Offerings, 3) Deploy Mobile Hotspot Programs, 4) Install Wifi on School Buses and 5) Build Private LTE Networks. In addition, it outlines four steps school leaders can take to collaborate with local governments and their community to take a broader, more holistic approach to digital access and inclusion: 1) Assemble a Team and Develop a Shared Vision, 2) Assess Existing Community Resources, Gaps and Needs, 3) Engage Stakeholders and Partners and 4) Develop and Execute a Project Plan.

The secrets are hidden behind fortified walls in cities across the United States, inside towering windowless skyscrapers and fortress-like concrete structures that were built to withstand earthquakes and even nuclear attack. Thousands of people pass by the buildings each day and rarely give them a second glance, because their function is not publicly known. They are an integral part of one of the world’s largest telecommunications networks – and they are also linked to a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program. Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC. In each of these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across US territory. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it “has access to information that transits the nation,” but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling that police must get a warrant to access the vast trove of location information wireless carriers collect on their customers marks a breakthrough for privacy rights. But the majority in Carpenter v. United States sidestepped key issues about whether police can still access location data in real time or for short periods without a warrant. These gaps will likely give rise to a flurry of new legal challenges --- and are already sparking calls for Congress to step in to fix potential loopholes. Privacy advocates want lawmakers to regulate companies that sell real-time location data to law enforcement and to require that investigators get a warrant to access location data even for just a few days. “I think Carpenter will be seen as a landmark case for civil liberties protections in the digital age,” said Elizabeth Joh, a criminal law professor at UC Davis School of Law. “But, Carpenter opens up many questions … There is quite likely to be disagreement among judges about how broadly Carpenter’s rationale applies beyond the government’s collection of historical cellphone location data.”

In a test of antitrust law, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that American Express could use contracts to stop merchants from steering consumers to other cards. The decision has implications not only for what one brief called “an astronomical number of retail transactions” but also for other kinds of markets, notably ones on the internet, in which services link consumers and businesses. Such “two-sided platforms,” the Court said, require special and seemingly more forgiving antitrust scrutiny. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said the specialized nature of credit-card transactions justified what in other circumstances might have been anti-competitive conduct. Credit card networks create “two-sided platforms,” Justice Thomas wrote, and they “differ from traditional markets in important ways.” Since card companies deal with both merchants and consumers, he wrote, people challenging actions as anticompetitive must take account of the effect on both sets of market participants. Viewed that way, Justice Thomas wrote, American Express promoted competition by designing rewards programs to attract affluent customers. Justice Stephen G. Breyer read his dissent from the bench, a rare move indicating profound disagreement. He said the implications of the ruling were vast and could hurt competition in many realms. “I particularly fear the interpretive impact of the majority’s discussion of what it calls ‘two-sided platforms,’ in an era when that term might be thought to apply to many internet-related goods and services that are becoming ever more important,” Justice Breyer said.

Silicon Valley companies and law enforcement are starting to talk about how to ward off meddling by malicious actors including Russia on social media in the November midterms, an attempt at dialogue and information-sharing that was absent during the 2016 presidential elections. Facebook quietly convened a meeting in May 2018 with representatives from the biggest players in the technology industry along with Christopher Krebs, an under secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, as well as a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s newly formed “foreign influence” task force. Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Snap and the parent company of Yahoo and AOL, Verizon subsidiary Oath, attended. People who attended described a tense atmosphere in which the tech companies repeatedly pressed federal officials for information, only to be told — repeatedly — that no specific intelligence would be shared. The tech companies shared details about disinformation campaigns they were witnessing on their platforms, but neither the FBI nor the Department of Homeland Security was willing or able to share specific information about threats the tech companies should anticipate. One attendee of the meeting said the encounter led the tech companies to believe they would be on their own to counter election interference.

The Supreme Court sent back to a lower court a decision that Republicans in North Carolina had gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts to give their party an unfair advantage. The lower court will need to decide whether the plaintiffs had the proper legal standing to bring the case. The Supreme Court recently considered the question of partisan gerrymandering in cases from Wisconsin and Maryland. The court has never found a map so infected by politics that it violated the constitutional rights of voters. But the justices did not rule on the merits of the issue. The court said plaintiffs in Wisconsin did not have the proper legal standing and that the Maryland case was in too preliminary a stage.