Agenda

Earlier this year, the Commission reinstated the UHF discount, finding that the prior FCC’s decision last year to eliminate it absent a simultaneous review of the 39 percent national cap effectively tightened the cap without determining whether that was in the public interest. Because the national cap and the UHF discount are inextricably linked, any review of one component of the rule must include a review of the other. Under the proposal that I shared with my colleagues today, we would go about determining the future of the national cap, including the UHF discount, the right way.

[Commentary]  As the Federal Communications Commission gets ready to abandon a decade of progress on net neutrality, some in Congress are considering how new legislation could fill the gap and protect users from unfair ISP practices. Unfortunately, too many lawmakers seem to be embracing the idea that they should allow ISPs to create Internet “fast lanes” -- also known as “paid prioritization,” one of the harmful practices that violates net neutrality.

ZRF Partners founder Faisal Nisar and Schurz Communications CEO Todd Schurz submitted a joint proposal to Burlington (VT), offering $25 million for Burlington Telecom. The proposal also detailed a plan to grow Burlington Telecom and make Burlington a "hot bed for tech entrepreneurs and startups in New England." The joint proposal came about through Gary Evans, an adviser to Nisar and the retired CEO of Hiawatha Broadband Communications, which Schurz bought in Oct 2017. Evans connected Nisar and Schurz, Schurz said, and the two men spoke for "hours" about their vision.

Investment bankers have gotten used to being asked by worried retail-industry chief executives to pitch takeover ideas aimed at fending off Amazon. Now the fear has spread to media, health care and many other sectors, where CEOs dread the breathtaking competitive advancements made by not just Amazon but also Facebook, Google and Netflix. The result is an explosion of mergers and acquisitions. So far in Nov 2017, about $200 billion of deals have been announced in the US, according to Dealogic.

Apparently, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will reveal plans to his fellow commissioners on Nov 21 to fully dismantle the agency's Obama-era network neutrality regulations in a major victory for the telecom industry in the long-running policy debate. The FCC will vote on the proposal in December, some seven months after it laid the groundwork for scuttling the rules that require internet service providers like Comcast or AT&T to treat web traffic equally. Pai’s plan would jettison rules that prohibit ISPs from blocking or slowing web traffic or crea

Federal regulators are expected to unveil their plans for reversing Obama-era rules that require internet service providers to treat all web traffic equally, a move that could fundamentally reshape the internet economy and consumers’ online experience. The changes, expected to be adopted at the Federal Communications Commission meeting in mid-December, would open the door to a wide range of new opportunities for internet providers, such as forming alliances with content firms to serve up their webpages or video at higher speeds and quality than those without such deals.  Such “paid prioriti

Sens Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Mike Lee (R-UT) released their bipartisan proposal to renew a powerful surveillance authority for collecting foreign intelligence on US soil, but with a new brake on the government’s ability to access the data. The bill would require government agencies to obtain a warrant before reviewing communications to or from Americans harvested by the National Security Agency under the surveillance authority known informally as Section 702. The measure stands little chance of passage.

It’s no secret that America’s low-income and low-population communities trail urban areas when it comes to broadband access. Government and industry must ensure that gap doesn’t expand when 5G becomes operational, public- and private-sector officials said in a House Communications and Technology Subcommittee hearing Nov. 16. Today, most electronic devices connect to the internet, and some of those items, like connected vehicles, will be creating significant amounts of data that needs to be processed quickly.