Thursday, July 6, 2023
Headlines Daily Digest
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President Biden’s ‘Internet for All’ Initiative, Explained
Ruling Puts Social Media at Crossroads of Disinformation and Free Speech
Broadband Funding
State/Local Initiatives
Energy and Climate
Net Neutrality
Platforms/Social Media
Labor
Company/Industry News
Stories From Abroad
Broadband Funding
President Joe Biden announced that his administration would spend more than $42 billion to expand high-speed internet access across the US. The White House estimates the program will help over 8.5 million households and small businesses. It’s the latest effort from the federal government to boost broadband access, and the Biden administration says it can connect every family and small business in all 50 states, US territories, and Washington (DC) to the internet by 2030. The initiative’s funding comes from the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, established by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) that President Biden signed in November 2021. BEAD is a major part of the Biden administration’s “Internet for All” initiative. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, broadband access has only grown in importance, the Biden administration believes. “Even if it isn’t your number one issue, it should be your number two issue,” says Kevin Taglang, executive editor at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Moreover, broadband infrastructure is critical to extending health services to many rural areas, where hospital closures are prevalent, Taglang observes. But others note expanded internet access may not necessarily connect everyone to the internet. “Internet access is not really the major hindrance for people trying to get connected,” Will Rinehart, a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity, says. “The biggest impediment to getting everyone connected right now is that there’s a pretty significant trend of people who just don’t think it’s relevant," Rinehart said. Roslyn Layton, a broadband researcher who previously worked with the Federal Communications Commission as part of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team thinks one of the biggest problems with past initiatives was the failure to give end users choice in selecting services. “The best thing we’ve learned is giving vouchers directly to end users,” says Layton, likening it to school-choice vouchers. The valuable component of the smaller Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) that Congress also funded in 2021 is “the end user gets a voucher and the end user can decide which provider, which technology they want to use.”
As they begin a comprehensive effort to convince the country that “Bidenomics” is working, President Joe Biden and his allies are gleefully needling Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for celebrating Alabama’s receipt of federal funds to expand rural access to high-speed internet, money that came from a bill President Biden signed and Sen Tuberville, like most Republicans, voted against. It’s not an uncommon story these days; the administration is spreading a huge amount of federal funding around the country, and politicians love to claim credit when government dollars reach the ground. But it’s clear that President Biden is determined to convince voters in places Democrats have struggled in the past few elections — including rural areas — that his party can improve their lives. It’s something Democrats often talk about, but President Biden has a rare opportunity to actually show it. And if he can be even moderately successful, it could have a transformative effect, both substantively and politically. The funds Sen Tuberville is so happy to get come from the $42 billion the administration announced to expand broadband access to underserved areas, many of which are rural. The context here is that the administration is distributing a truly massive amount of domestic spending from four significant pieces of legislation President Biden signed in his first two years in office: the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the Chips and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. Put together, those four bills represent well over $3 trillion in new spending over a decade. If rural Americans see that they got broadband and their town got a new sewer system, they might be a bit more receptive to the case President Biden is making.
AT&T and Charter Communications are best positioned to benefit from the multi-billion-dollar Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program based on state-by-state allocations and the presence of each operator in those states, reckon analysts that have broken down the numbers. "The larger the presence an operator has in a state with a sizable allocation of BEAD funding, the greater the opportunity there is for it to see benefits from a build-out near its existing footprint and fill-in additional pockets across its DMAs [designated market areas] with edge-outs," the analysts at ISI Evercore surmised in a research note. "In that context, we highlight that AT&T and Charter over-index to states that received the lion's share of BEAD allocation." Broken down further, AT&T and Charter have 33% and 27%, respectively, of their residential broadband subscribers in the two top BEAD states – Texas and California – ISI Evercore pointed out. Comcast will also have a "meaningful opportunity for subsidized edge-outs," and could look to aggressively bid in parts of Texas, Michigan, Washington, Florida, and Illinois, where it already has a foothold. AT&T, Charter and Comcast have all signaled interest in participating in BEAD in some shape or form.
State/Local
Railroad industry group claims new Virginia law shifts permitting power from railroads to broadband providers
The Association of American Railroads (AAR) seeks to void a Virginia bill streamlining railroad crossing requests for broadband providers, claiming it shifts permitting power from the railroad owners to broadband providers. The law, which took effect on July 1, caps railroad crossing fees at $2,000 per crossing and requires broadband providers to reimburse railroad companies no more than $5,000 for expenses the railroads may incur. Also, railroads have 35 days to review a provider’s crossing request. In a lawsuit, AAR stated the new law “treats railroads unlike any other landowner, seizing from them and giving to broadband service providers a permanent easement to access and occupy railroad lands.” AAR went on to say the law doesn’t authorize a railroad to reject a proposed crossings installation for failing to comply with railroad safety requirements. Virginia’s statute also “provides no mechanism” for how to relocate permanent crossings in case a railroad needs to upgrade its network, such as adding sidings to serve more customers. State Senator Bill Stanley (R- Glade Hill), who introduced the bill, said he isn’t surprised by AAR’s litigation, given “the railroads engaged in bullying our Virginia broadband companies that were seeking a fair and equitable solution to this problem during the 2023 legislative session.” Sen Stanley claimed Virginia railroad companies “are now doing everything that they can” to prevent economic revitalization and fiber buildouts in the Southwest and Southside regions of the state.
The Vermont Community Broadband Board announced that the state will receive $229 million in federal funding from a White House initiative to expand high-speed broadband access. That figure is some $50 million more than state officials had anticipated — good news for the effort to wire up rural Vermont. In the lead-up to the announcement, officials worried that Vermont would get too small a piece of the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program pie. The federal government doled out the money based on an internet connectivity map generated by the Federal Communications Commission, which overstated the number of Vermont households with reliable broadband connection. That led the Vermont Community Broadband Board to launch a campaign urging residents to look up their home on the federal commission's website, which tracked high-speed connections house-by-house and had a mechanism for challenging the findings. On June 26, 2023, state officials learned that Vermonters had won almost 11,000 challenges, each worth $3,000 to $5,000 in additional aid. Still, success is not assured. In a March 2023 report, State Auditor Doug Hoffer and his team raised concerns about how the effort could be tripped up. For one: Vermont is relying on communications union districts, new entities with no experience handling large expenses, to turn hundreds of millions of once-in-a-lifetime federal dollars into a web of high-speed internet connectivity. Now it's a question of whether they can pull it off. For rural Vermonters bypassed by for-profit internet service providers, it's a matter of equity. A lack of broadband has left them without easy access to telemedicine, remote job opportunities and virtual schooling.
Some 8,200 homes, businesses and schools in unserved and underserved parts of Lumpkin County (GA) will, for the first time, be eligible for high-speed fiber internet. The $20.4 million project, to provide fiber broadband to Dahlonega and throughout the county, is expected to be completed in 2024. It is a result of a public–private partnership between the county and Kinetic. The county will use about $6.9 million in state grant money from the federal government. The money comes from the US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Development Opportunity Fund (RDOF), and the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program, part of the federal American Rescue Plan Act's (ARPA) COVID-19 stimulus package. Kinetic will invest $13.5 million and cover any cost overruns. The combined venture will enable Kinetic to lay more than 450 miles of optical fiber cable to bring high-speed internet to residences, businesses and schools. Kinetic’s Lumpkin County fiber project is part of a $2 billion multiyear capital investment strategy by Kinetic to dramatically expand gigabit fiber service across the company’s 18-state footprint.
The environmental impacts of broadband networks are not well understood. The infrastructure required to run these networks requires power, which in and of itself, releases carbon and other emissions into the atmosphere. Hence the power consumption of broadband networks matters. Further, with electrical power rates expected to rise significantly due to elevated wildfire risk and renewable energy costs, a balanced, clean, and stable power budget becomes even more critical. Many promising power-thrifty innovations – including smart agriculture, just-in-time energy management, or remote work, education, and healthcare – depend on Internet-based middle-mile networks to function, so these networks themselves must run as efficiently as possible to avoid erasing any gains they enable. Motivated by a desire to scale for the future while using its and its members’ resources as efficiently as possible, CENIC has achieved dramatic improvements in power, equipment, and service provision.
Ajit Pai recently wrote an article in the National Review where he talks about how his decision as head of the Federal Communications Commission to repeal net neutrality was the right one. He goes on to claim that repealing net neutrality was the driver behind the current boom in building fiber and upgrading other broadband technologies. He contrasts the progress of broadband in the US with Europe and says that the FCC’s action is the primary reason we are seeing a fiber boom in the US. With the possibility of seating a fifth Commissioner, he knows that the issue of reinstating net neutrality and Title II authority is going to be raised at the FCC. Killing net neutrality was his crowning achievement at the FCC, and he’s defending it as a way to lobby against bringing back net neutrality. The big broadband providers will be repeating the same rhetoric being told by Pai. But Pai is not telling the real story. Industry insiders and experts didn’t expect much change to come from repealing net neutrality. The CEOs of all of the big cable companies admitted that keeping or killing net neutrality would have almost no impact on their businesses. The real purpose of killing net neutrality was to kill Title II authority over broadband. The Ajit Pai FCC gave up all rights of the agency to regulate broadband. That was the number one agenda item for Ajit Pai, and he handed the big providers everything on their wish list. None of the fiber boom is due to killing regulation. All that killing regulation did was allow big providers to run roughshod over customers without consequences. The FCC can’t even pull broadband providers in to talk about their bad broadband behavior. Ajit Pai’s accomplishment was not killing net neutrality – it was handing the reins of the broadband business to the big providers by allowing the ultimate regulatory capture of having the FCC walk away from its regulatory responsibilities.
Two months after President Biden took office, his top digital adviser emailed officials at Facebook urging them to do more to limit the spread of “vaccine hesitancy” on the social media platform. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials held “weekly sync” meetings with Facebook, once emailing the company 16 “misinformation” posts. And in the summer of 2021, the surgeon general’s top aide repeatedly urged Google, Facebook and Twitter to do more to combat disinformation. The examples are among dozens of interactions described in a 155-page ruling by a federal judge in Louisiana who imposed temporary limits on how members of Biden’s administration can engage with social media companies. The case is a flashpoint in the broader effort by conservatives to document what they contend is a liberal conspiracy by Democrats and tech company executives to silence their views. It taps into fury on the right about how social media companies have treated stories about the origins of Covid, the 2020 election and Hunter Biden. The final outcome could shape the future of First Amendment law in a rapidly changing media environment and alter how far the government can go in trying to prevent the spread of potentially dangerous information, particularly in an election or during emergencies like a pandemic.
Big Tech’s enforcement of various official truths that turned out to be false has undermined trust in both the leading tech companies and society overall. In addition to their own content moderators, four other organizational entities have been used to determine misinformation, disinformation, and so-called malinformation. All four have serious shortcomings:
- Government: Politicians have always engaged in mis-, dis-, and malinformation (sometimes they pretty much have to), but insisting that governments are a non-debatable source of truth is textbook Orwell.
- Mainstream Media: Given that US media trust is at an all-time low, how can these organizations possibly serve as accepted arbiters of truth? By working so closely with this national security and media nexus, Meta, Alphabet, and Twitter aligned themselves much more with official authorities and power than free speech and societal trust.
- The Scientific Community: The problem was the censoring and demonizing of any critics, even though questioning, learning, and change have always been the essence of science. Similarly, the constantly repeated mantras of “the science is settled,” “follow the science,” and even “the science” are simply wrong. Should we listen to “the science”? Certainly. Should we always follow it? Certainly not. Is there a single major field of science that is “settled”? Changing views are especially important in medicine, whose history has often been about correcting the terrible misunderstandings and malpractices of the past.
- Self-Appointed Guardians: The names are hard to keep straight: The Digital Trust Project; Project Origin: Securing Trust in Media; the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership; the Disinformation Governance Board (disbanded); the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), and many other groups and organizations all say they want to improve digital trust. But they are mostly a mix of traditional institutions and media convinced that new media is the problem. They also tend to be reflections of partisan groupthink.
Aside from the incumbent operators, there are plenty of smaller broadband players striving to make a name for themselves. But how can broadband providers use branding to stand out from the rest of the crowd? Three providers have shared their reasons behind their branding decisions:
- Bluepeak: A fiber operator that’s ramping up rollouts in the central US., Bluepeak rebranded from Vast Broadband to its current name. The name Bluepeak “has both literal and figurative meaning to us.” Specifically, it represents “the big skies, open land and majestic mountains that define the areas we serve.”
- Firefly Fiber Broadband: A wholly owned subsidiary of Central Virginia Electric Cooperative (CVEC), Firefly Fiber Broadband this spring hit 20,000 broadband subscribers across rural central Virginia, with plans to make service available to another 50,000 underserved locations in the state. The rep explained a few parallels between fireflies and the service the provider offers. Fireflies are a mainstay in rural Virginia, Firefly’s home footprint. Also, fireflies are not expensive to acquire and Firefly “waives its connections fees during initial buildout, making it available to anyone.”
- IQ Fiber: IQ Fiber is a Florida-based startup that recently scored $150 million to fuel its expansion in the Jacksonville area. According to Kim Smithers, IQ Fiber’s chief marketing officer, the operator’s brand name “was born out of our desire to create a residential fiber-to-the-home company that offered residents a better, smarter choice.”
Announcements of GoNetspeed fiber market launches have been coming at a rapid pace. GoNetspeed President and CEO Richard Clark said the company has been able to do this thanks to its reliance primarily on private funding. “By privately funding our infrastructure, we are able to build at a faster pace with access to additional resources. Therefore, we are able to build quicker and more efficiently than competitors,” said Clark. When asked how GoNetspeed decides where to build, Clark said, “When we decide to bring our 100 percent fiber internet to a new community, we look at the needs of the community. Oftentimes we see that communities lack options and lack access to service, so for many communities we strive to be a new option and a new solution to help bridge the digital divide.” Usually when GoNetspeed enters a market, it isn’t the first provider in the area. The company differentiates itself by offering fiber internet with symmetrical speeds. While most of GoNetspeed’s infrastructure is free of government funding, it has done a few partnerships with communities in which the communities contributed government funding that they had received. As far as tapping into new sources of government funding in the future, Clark said GoNetspeed is open to partnering with communities that would like to discuss this as an option, and those interested in welcoming an additional service provider.
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 David L. Clay II (dclay AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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