What's on the agenda for policymakers.
Agenda
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) maintains exclusive or shared regulatory responsibility for a wide range of issues including privacy, cyber-security, media broadband deployment, and network neutrality. Some of these issues, like network neutrality, have generated millions of comments to the FCC and are currently among the most controversial topics in public policy.
Join Public Knowledge for a conversation about privacy legislation in 2018 and the launch of "Principles for Privacy Legislation," a new white paper from Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld.
Our panel, representing a range of viewpoints, includes:
Justin Brookman, Director of Consumer Privacy and Technology Policy, Consumers Union
Eric Null, Policy Counsel, Open Technology Institute
Three Wilson Center analysts examine the push and pull between state and society in the expression of cultural values in contemporary technologies, and what this tension implies for the international system:
1. Valerie Anishchenkova: The importance of video games in modern global culture cannot be underestimated, especially in their increasing impact on personal and collective identities. What do Russian war-themed video games reveal about contemporary Russian nationalism? Who are friends and who are foes? Drawn directly from today’s geopolitical conflicts.
Trump infrastructure plan not likely to impact rural broadband
[Commentary] While the public still has no more than a leaked plan and vague State of the Union statements of aspirations, it appears the Trump administration's proposed approach to broadband infrastructure will end up delivering little of the abundant bandwidth the country’s rural areas need to thrive in the digital age. The original source of the rural broadband problem is how the administration apparently proposes to divide total investment. The leaked plan creates various buckets, with each getting a set allocation of the federal dollars.
Communities of color often face challenges connecting to and maintaining affordable broadband and voice service. The federal Lifeline program has been around since the mid-1980s. While it started as a low-income program to help households afford voice service, it has been expanded to include wireless voice and broadband Internet support.
Chairman Blackburn Sides With President Trump on Broadband
House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) isn’t joining fellow rural state lawmakers in pushing for dedicated funding for broadband in the infrastructure package. She wants to focus on bills to streamline permitting and clear away regulations impeding new networks, and attach them to the infrastructure legislation. “I want to see how much bipartisan support we can end up building for simplifying this process,” she said.
Senate receives notice of FCC net neutrality repeal
Apparently, the Senate has now received official notice of the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality repeal. That procedural development is important because it could be the first step to triggering a 60-day clock for Congress to undo the FCC’s decision. (That is, 60 legislative days.) The Senate’s 47 Democrats and two independents plus Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) have said they would support such a maneuver, using the Congressional Review Act. That’s 50 votes, still one vote short of the number needed for approval in the Senate.
Did Some Consensus Break Out at a House Broadband Hearing?
On Tuesday, January 30, the House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology convened a hearing on broadband deployment in the US entitled Closing the Digital Divide: Broadband Infrastructure Solutions. The aim of the hearing was to discuss twenty-five resolutions and bills that address federal permitting, siting, and permissions to access rights-of-way, which some stakeholders identify as barriers to investment and broadband infrastructure deployment. True to recent form in DC, there were contentious moments at the start of the event.
FCC Announces Tentative Agenda For February 2018 Open Meeting
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the following items are tentatively on the agenda for the February Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Thursday, February 22, 2018.
Innovation Month at the FCC
Feb 2 is Groundhog Day. Fittingly, I’m announcing an agenda for the Federal Communications Commission’s February meeting that revisits some familiar themes from the past year: modernizing outdated rules, closing the digital divide, and most significantly, promoting innovation.