Mic

Many advocates are calling on the Federal Communications Commission to significantly expand its Lifeline program. More than 250 organizations called on the FCC to provide low-income households with unlimited talk and text plans. The groups have also asked the agency to create an emergency broadband benefit that would provide eligible households with $50 per month to cover the cost of high-speed internet connections, where they are available. Eric Null, US Policy Manager at Access Now, argues that the FCC should ensure the Lifeline program lives up to its name during this time.

When Amazon released its voice-controlled personal assistant in November 2014, an important question was raised about the hands-free speaker: if the Amazon Echo is voice-controlled, then is it always listening? Essentially, all voice-controlled assistants — Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's AI assistant, etc. — work the same way: The device activates once it detects the "wake word." For the Amazon Echo, the wake word is the assistant's name, Alexa. But in order to detect its name, the Echo has to be listening in at all times on some level.

You may have heard of the prison industrial complex, but there is also an entire industry that just manages prison phones — the Verizons and AT&Ts of American prisons. Recently, those companies gained major ground in the fight to keep them in check. After legal pressure from the prison telecommunications industry, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed a new set of caps on what those telecoms can charge vulnerable families to keep in touch with incarcerated loved ones over the phone. The former cap on phone calls was 11 cents per minute. If the new proposal passes, it'll be a sliding scale of 13 to 31 cents, based on the size of the facility.

For decades, the cost of keeping in touch with a relative in jail has been crippling. The Ella Baker Center published in September found that one in three families of inmates goes into debt just to cover the cost of calls and communications with that inmate. In 2000, some of those families filed a class-action lawsuit called Wright v. Corrections Corporation of America to put a cap on those costs, and in 2013, the FCC finally decided to cap prices for calls at federal and state facilities at 11 cents a minute. But what looked like a resounding victory was met with blowback from the prisons communications industry, who filed complaints and lawsuits alleging that the new caps would cut unfairly into their ability to stay profitable. In March, two of the big three prison telecoms, GTL and Securus, won a lawsuit that bought them some time before the changes take effect. The FCC's new decision is a compromise, and it gets the caps finally put in place after years of struggle.