While cable broadband operators are okay with most of the Treasury Department's framework for handing out billions of dollars in broadband deployment and adoption funds via the American Rescue Plan, prioritizing government owned or operated networks remains a point of contention. When the Treasury sought public input on the framework, NCTA-The Internet and Television Association said there could be limited circumstances to allow them--where there is insufficient business case for any private capital to build out--but a blanket priority for government nets should be off the table. NCTA suggested that the Treasury should instead encourage public-private partnerships, especially when there are private companies ready and willing to enter such partnerships and deliver the requisite services. If the money does go to government nets, NCTA said the Treasury should ensure that a government net:

• Does not exercise regulatory, legislative, or other governmental functions, and does not receive favored treatment for use of the public rights of way and/or access to utility poles;
• Complies in full with all of the legal requirements applicable to private sector providers of broadband service;
• Establishes safeguards to prevent the cross-subsidization of such ventures through the use of taxpayer funds or obtaining credit in reliance on the government entity’s taxing authority; and
• Is prohibited from bundling broadband with other municipal services.

AT&T executives hailed growing momentum in its fiber business after posting strong net additions in Q2 and predicted the pace of subscriber growth will pick up in the back half of the year as large swaths of new coverage come online. The operator added 246,000 consumer fiber customers in the quarter, more than offsetting non-fiber broadband and DSL losses to achieve 28,000 total consumer broadband net additions. The latter figure compared to a net loss of 102,000 in the year-ago period. CFO Pascal Desroches said 80 percent of net additions were customers that were new to AT&T. Jeff McElfresh, CEO of AT&T’s Communications division, said it expects to reach 3 million new locations with fiber in 2021 and tipped this new build to spur accelerated net additions in Q3 and Q4. Consolidated revenue of $44 billion was up 7.6% year on year, with net income of $1.87 billion up from $1.56 billion.

The Simultaneous Multiple Round Ascending (SMRA) Auction has become a defacto standard auction mechanism for the award of radio spectrum for commercial mobile services around the world. The winning bid price in such SMRA spectrum auctions is of interest, as it determines the valuation of the scarce resource by the mobile operators, and also indicates the revenue accrued to the governments as auction proceeds. This report uses a cross-country panel dataset to examine the determinants of spectrum prices of all the SMRA auctions held in 25 countries from 1994 to 2019. Our findings indicate that reserve prices, fixed by the auctioneer as the starting price of auctions, and the competition in the auction are the two variables that significantly affect the winning bid prices in SMRA auctions. The effect of reserve prices is more pronounced in regional auctions held in countries such as the US and India. Additionally, the larger the amount of spectrum put on auction, lesser is the winning bid price, indicating the traditional supply-demand relationship. Based on these findings, we provide policy prescriptions on fixing appropriate reserve prices, providing a clear visibility of spectrum availability, and increasing competition in mobile services for the effective use of scarce radio spectrum.

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse. The company’s divisions focused on products for communities, creators, commerce, and virtual reality would increasingly work to realize this vision. The metaverse is having a moment; coined in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel, the term refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. Zuckerberg referred to it as an "embodied internet," operated by many players in a decentralized way. The timing of the CEO's metaverse vision for Facebook comes as a package of bills making its way through Congress could potentially force the company to spin out Instagram and WhatsApp, and limit Facebook’s ability to make future acquisitions — or offer services connected to its hardware products. Yet even if tech regulation stalls in the United States, a thriving metaverse would raise questions both familiar and strange about how the virtual space is governed, how its contents would be moderated, and what its existence would do to our shared sense of reality. Zuckerberg's conversation with The Verge outlines his vision for an embodied internet, the challenges of governing it, and gender imbalance in virtual reality today.