More than 20 million US households are now receiving discounts on internet service as part of Federal Communications Commission's Affordable Connectivity Program. The program has continued to gain more than half a million new households a month since February 2023. Despite the program’s bipartisan popularity and its rapid uptake by consumers, the new enrollment figures still only represent about 40% of the estimated 50 million households in the United States that may be eligible for assistance through the ACP, according to research by the consumer advocacy group Common Sense Media. And the ACP’s future is uncertain: Once the program runs out of the $14 billion that Congress initially allocated for it, millions of low-income Americans could lose their monthly discounts. The more households that sign up, the faster the program will exhaust its funding. Policy analysts widely anticipate the ACP running out of money in 2024, setting up pressure on Congress to extend the program.

On July 24, 2023, the Federal Communications Commission authorized a new subsidy program, Enhanced A-CAM (Alternate Connect America Cost Model). This program will extend subsidies to small, regulated telephone companies at a cost of about $1.27 billion per year for ten years. The subsidy will be paid from the FCC’s Universal Service Fund (USF). According to Mike Conlow, this order will bring broadband to almost 583,000 unserved or underserved locations that are already covered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant footprint. This means that two US agencies both announced funding to cover the identical half-million locations within a month of each other. There is no way that the FCC didn’t do this deliberately. The FCC could have asked the NTIA to take these locations out of the BEAD process so that the $42.5 billion would have been allocated fairly. I speculate that the FCC did this to reclaim relevance in the discussion of who is helping America solve the rural broadband gap. The FCC has taken a lot of criticism in recent years for botching the RDOF funding process and handing out wasted billions to the big telcos in the CAF II subsidies. The FCC was also largely cut out of the biggest effort ever with BEAD grants to solve the rural broadband gap, and that had to sting. The FCC can now say to the folks living in the A-CAM areas that it provided the funding to bring better broadband instead of the NTIA.

In 2016, representatives from the northern region of Missouri met in Brookfield to talk about the issues they were facing.  Stakeholders of all kinds—economic developers, USDA employees, elected officials, county commissioners, and mayors—from every county north of I-70 complained bitterly about everything their communities were going without. As the meeting progressed, five topics were written on a board, five ways to find solutions to these communities’ needs. Broadband was listed as number one. The attendees never got to number two. Louis Riggs was at that meeting, advocating for his community. For 15 years, Riggs has been an educator, an attorney, and an active advocate for economic development in rural Missouri. “Broadband was something that permeated everything we did,” says Riggs.  And, Riggs says, eight of the ten worst-served counties in the state were in northeast Missouri. At the same meeting, Janie Dunning, from the USDA, stood up and said, “What the state really needs is a legislative champion—and it doesn’t have one.” “That really stuck with me,” says Riggs.

Ting Internet's (a division of Tucows) 2-gigabit fiber internet is now available in initial Colorado Springs (CO) neighborhoods. Customers in Colorado Springs will now be able to sign up for Ting's 2-gigabit fiber internet for $89 per month, providing both download and upload speeds of 2,000 megabits per second (Mbps). Ting will also offer 2-gigabit symmetrical internet to all Colorado Springs residents who qualify for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) at no cost to them. While currently only available in select markets, in time, Ting expects to roll out the 2-gigabit ACP offering to its markets across the country, making a tangible difference in bridging the digital divide by providing thousands of residents with access to fast, reliable internet at no cost. Ting's fiber internet is currently available in northeast neighborhoods and is steadily expanding across all of Colorado Springs, with full municipal access expected by the end of 2028.

X, the social media service formerly known as Twitter, slowed down access from its platform to rival sites such as Substack and Facebook, but has begun reversing an effort to restrict its users from quickly viewing news sites. The slowness, known in tech parlance as “throttling,” initially affected rival social networks including Facebook, Bluesky and Instagram, as well as the newsletter site Substack and news outlets including Reuters and The New York Times. The delay to load links from X was relatively minor — about 4.5 seconds — but still noticeable. Several of the services that were throttled have faced the ire of X’s owner, Elon Musk.