Diversity

This crisis is exposing a hard truth about the state of the digital divide in urban America, rural America, and everything in between. Not everyone in this country is connected to modern communications. Not everyone in this country has access to broadband. And not everyone in this country has access to basic phone service. But here’s another truth: Everyone needs communications to have a fair shot at 21st century success. It was true before this crisis. But it’s even clearer now.

The Solicitor General of the United States, on behalf of the Federal Communications Commission, has asked the Supreme Court to review a US Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision overturning most of the FCC's media ownership deregulation decision, hammering the circuit for what the FCC suggested was serial obstruction of what it had concluded was in the public interest. The FCC said that it has been trying to grant the ownership deregulation for 17 years, thwarted by a series of decisions by a divided panel of the Third Circuit.

Broadband is seen as a vector of economic growth and social development. In the developing world, mobile technologies are widely adopted and mobile broadband is progressively rolled-out with high expectations on its impact on the countries’ development. We highlight what the determinants of mobile broadband use are in four Sub-Saharan countries. Using micro-level data coming from household surveys over 5 years, from 2013 to 2017, we show that SIM card ownership and being part of an online social community has a strong positive impact on mobile broadband use.

When the world celebrated the web’s 30th birthday a year ago, we were reminded of the incredible things it has enabled — and all that we stand to lose if we don’t fight for it. I asked everyone to join together and do what they can to make sure the next 30 years of the web is even greater than the last.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announces the appointment of members to serve on three working groups of the Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment (ACDDE). These working groups—Access to Capital, Digital Empowerment and Inclusion, and Diversity in the Tech Sector—will assist the ACDDE in carrying out its work. The current members of these working groups are identified in the Appendix to this Notice. As previously announced, Chairman Pai designated Anna M.

Until today, the latest broadcast station ownership data reported by the Federal Communications Commission was from 2015. While I am pleased that we finally have updated numbers to talk about, it is still an unacceptable lag of more than two years in our reporting on data from Oct 2017. To effectively address the lack of media ownership diversity, we cannot use stale data and must get better at assessing the extent of the problem in a timely manner.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Media Bureau released its fourth report on the ownership of broadcast stations. The data contained in the report provide a tabulation of station ownership based on information submitted by licensees on FCC Form 323 and Form 323-E in response to the 2017 biennial ownership report filing window, which closed in March 2018. This filing window was the first to collect information from non-commercial educational stations about the gender, ethnicity, and race of the licensee’s attributable interest holders.

Since day one as a Federal Communications Commissioner, I have been speaking up and speaking out to advance diversity in broadcast media. I am also focused more broadly on what we as public servants should be doing to achieve the mandate in the Communications Act of making communications available to all Americans. We must do better in fulfilling the FCC's obligation to promote ownership by women and people of color.

On Wednesday, January 15, the House Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a hearing on diversity in the media market. In announcing the hearing, Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr.