Competition/Antitrust

Underline, the nation’s intelligent community infrastructure platform, is connecting American communities on a foundation of open access fiber. To support existing projects and drive continued US expansion, a fund managed by Ares Management’s Infrastructure Opportunities strategy joins Underline as a strategic investor—adding a scaled global investment manager to the existing investor group. Underline is the first digital infrastructure investment Ares will make through its Infrastructure Opportunities strategy—a leading infrastructure investor with approximately $4.3 billion in assets unde

A big piece of what the Federal Communications Commission does is to weigh competing claims to use spectrum. One of the latest fights, which is the continuation of a fight going on since 2018, is for the use of the 12 GHz spectrum. The big wrestling match is between Starlink’s desire to use the spectrum to communicate with its low-orbit satellites and cellular carriers and wireless internet service providers (WISPs) who want to use the spectrum for rural broadband. Starlink uses this spectrum to connect its ground-based terminals to satellites.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a lawsuit against Amazon alleging that the company stifled competition and caused increased prices across California through anticompetitive contracting practices in violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law and Cartwright Act. In order to avoid competing on prices with other online e-commerce sites, Amazon requires merchants to enter into agreements that severely penalize them if their products are offered for a lower price off-Amazon. In the lawsuit, Attorney General Bonta alleges that these agreements thwart the ability of other onli

Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization, launched the “Black Tech Agenda." The agenda sets an affirmative vision for how to create tech policy that centers on racial justice and ensures bias and discrimination are rooted out of the digital lives of Black people and everyone. The agenda has 6 pillars that outline real policy solutions for Congress to advance racial equity in Tech:

With US cable broadband subscriber growth remaining flat or going negative, operators are hard-pressed to find a remedy that will rekindle growth in a service category now considered central to the overall business.

Comcast Executive Vice President and Deputy Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said the biggest threat to the cable business is coming from fiber, not just from fixed wireless access (FWA). While there have been several factors attributed to the accelerated slowdown in cable broadband growth -- sluggish new home formation, minimal housing moves, and the transition to a new federally subsidized program for low-income families -- competition from both fixed wireless and, especially, fiber-based broadband providers have emerged as significant players.

Lumen Technologies completed one major business divestiture last month and are close to wrapping another. Company CFO and EVP Chris Stansbury said the pair of deals will help the company allocate resources to other products at a time when Lumen is starting to see big growth opportunities. “The company is going to get smaller before it gets bigger again,” Stansbury said.

Charter Communications Chief Financial Officer Jessica Fischer tacitly acknowledged the impact of fixed wireless access (FWA) competition on broadband subscriber growth. FWA technology was one of four factors that led to the cable operator’s first-ever broadband customer loss in Q2. Charter lost about 21,000 broadband customers in the second quarter, one of several cable operators that experienced declines in that segment after months of slow growth. Fischer said Q2 performance was impacted by four factors: sluggish new home growth, seasonality, fixed wireless competition, and fiber overbui

Competitive fiber network operator Cogent Communications reached a definitive agreement to buy T-Mobile’s wireline business.

The Federal Communications Commission is working to release new, better broadband coverage maps later in 2022. But in the interim, it released a fresh batch of data based on Form 477 submissions from operators. Fierce sifted through the data to find the states with the best and worst internet coverage, as measured by the percentage of the population without access to any ADSL, cable, or fiber providers offering speeds of at least 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps up. In Mississippi, nearly 21% of the overall population lacked access to fixed broadband providers.