What's on the agenda for policymakers.
Agenda
States will be the battlegrounds for 2020 tech policy fights
The tech industry's most consequential policy fights in 2020 will play out in the states, not Washington (DC). Momentum on a range of tech issues, from governing online privacy to regulating the gig economy, has stalled in DC as impeachment and election campaigns consume attention. State leaders and legislators are stepping in to fill the void. For example, California and Vermont are facing litigation over their attempts to impose their own net neutrality regulations after the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Obama-era open-internet rules. New York Gov.
A hearing on deception and manipulation online: Deepfakes and Cheap Fakes; Dark Patterns; and Social Media Bots
Witnesses
Monika Bickert
Vice President of Global Policy Management
Facebook
Joan Donovan, Ph.D.
Research Director of the Technology and Social Change Project
Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy
Harvard Kennedy School
The Federal Communications Commission seeks comment on adding a goal of broadband adoption to the Lifeline program, making additional program integrity improvements to the program, and establishing privacy training requirements for entities accessing Lifeline subscribers’ personal information.
Reply comments are due on or before February 25, 2020.
The Federal Communications Commission seeks comment on adding a goal of broadband adoption to the Lifeline program, making additional program integrity improvements to the program, and establishing privacy training requirements for entities accessing Lifeline subscribers’ personal information.
Comments are due on or before January 27, 2020 and reply comments are due on or before February 25, 2020.
New Lifeline Rules Effective January 27, 2020; Comment Period Set
The Federal Communications Commission published its new rule for its Lifeline program making January 27, 2020 the date the changes will go into effect. The changes include:
California is rewriting the rules of the internet. Businesses are scrambling to keep up
A sweeping new law that aims to rewrite the rules of the internet in California is set to go into effect on Jan. 1. Most businesses with a website and customers in California — which is to say most large businesses in the nation — must follow the new rules, which are supposed to make online life more transparent and less creepy for users. The only problem: Nobody’s sure how the new rules work.
Policymakers have long struggled to close a digital divide that leaves millions without access to broadband internet service. In recent years, another digital divide has emerged that involves the unevenness of cyber capacity-building and retention between regions. For the United States to remain the most dynamic and innovative tech powerhouse in the world, it is imperative for all its regions, and not merely a few rarefied clusters such as Silicon Valley, to foster and sustain research and development of cyber technologies for a 21st-century knowledge economy.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the items below are tentatively on the agenda for the Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Thursday, April 23, 2020:
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the items below are tentatively on the agenda for the March Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Tuesday, March 31, 2020: