CCG Consulting

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration recently issued a directive encouraging states to get internet service providers (ISPs) to remove locations from Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment grant applications that can’t be served by broadband.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for administrative agencies like the Federal Communications Commission to undertake substantial new initiatives, since doing so inevitably results in multi-year court cases that are increasingly ruling against the agency. We saw this in 2024 in the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which has been widely interpreted to mean an end to the Chevron deference.

We just spent a few years agonizing over the Federal Communications Committee broadband maps. The reasons we’ve cared is easy to understand. The FCC maps were first used to allocate Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment funding to states. States that spent a lot of time to clean up the maps seem to have gotten a better share of the BEAD funding. We’ll soon be at the end of the BEAD map challenges, and that makes me wonder if anybody will ever care about the FCC maps after this. I’m positive that when BEAD is over, the FCC and everybody else will lose interest in the broadband maps.

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee recently approved 17 bipartisan bills, and a few of them impact the broadband industry. Since these have bipartisan support, it seems like they will have a decent chance of becoming law. The first is S.98 – Rural Broadband Protection Act, sponsored by Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV).

In a 2024 end-of-year memo, Gary Bolton of the Fiber Broadband Association said that FBA had partnered with the consulting firm Cartesian to look at the pros and cons of Starlink in the U.S. FBA says that report shows that Starlink currently has 1.4 million customers in the U.S., and with the current satellite constellation has the capacity to serve 1.7 million customers. The implied conclusion of the report is that Starlink can’t serve everybody in rural America.

The term technology neutral has been around for a number of years related to federal grants. The term is used among the folks who create grant programs as a way to not dictate technology choices—any technology that can meet the requirements of a given grant program should be considered. The term is taking on significant new meaning in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant process. The BEAD legislation said that the program was supposed to be technology neutral.

In comments made to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the recent docket looking at customer service practices, the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) filed comments that said that big internet service providers (ISPs) don’t focus on customer service because they don’t have to. The CPUC said that only 26 percent of California residents have a choice between two fast ISPs.

The Eliminating Barriers to Rural Internet Development Grant Eligibility (E-BRIDGE) Act, was signed into law in early January as part of the ‘larger Thomas R. Carper Water Resources Development Act of 2024 (S. 4367). This bill authorizes the Economic Development Administration (EDA), which is part of the Department of Commerce, to award economic development grants to public-private partnerships or related consortiums to implement broadband infrastructure projects.

A recent article published by the Russian Foreign Affairs Council (RFAC) claimed that some of organizations that engage in Internet governance have a clear U.S. bias.The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) responded, saying the claims are false. This all sounds like worldwide politics in action, but it raises a good question—who owns the Internet? There is no easy answer to that question.

AT&T announced that it will withdraw its 5G home Internet product in New York rather than comply with the law that requires it to offer broadband rates as low as $15. The law went into effect recently when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal for the New York law approved by the New York legislature in 2018.