Federal

Pledges to tackle data surveillance practices, harm to children's mental health, and tech giants' power over wide swaths of the economy haven't yet translated into passing new laws, and the clock is running out. High-profile bills that would heap new regulations on the tech industry have advanced, but they've yet to cross the finish line into law. On antitrust, the House of Representatives passed a bill in September 2022 that will raise filing fees for large mergers, using the proceeds to fund antitrust enforcement efforts.

The Federal Communications Commission has been without a Democratic majority for the entirety of President Biden’s 21-month tenure, hamstringing efforts to restore open internet protections and close the digital divide. Breaking the deadlock at the Federal Communications Commission hinges on confirming Gigi Sohn [Senior Fellow and Public Advocate at the Benton Institue for Broadband & Society], a longtime public interest advocate and former Democratic FCC official who was first nominated by the White House nearly a year ago.

Dish Wireless wants to conduct tests using the 12 GHz band to evaluate coexistence in the band – it’s just waiting for the FCC to say yea or nay.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that Ohio received its first planning grants for deploying high-speed Internet networks and developing digital skills training programs under the Biden-Harris Administration’s Internet for All initiative.

The Biden-Harris Action Plan for Accelerating Infrastructure Projects describes federal actions to address these challenges accelerate the planning, design and construction of infrastructure projects across all sectors, including transportation, broadband, resiliency, and others. Organized by the themes of On Time, On Task and On Budget, the actions support more efficient processes, collaboration, sharing of best practices, targeted support to new recipients of federal funding, and focused efforts to root out the causes of delays and overruns.

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau, in conjunction with the Office of Economics and Analytics, has authorized Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (Auction 904) support for 1,865 winning bids. This is the 14th round of funding authorization for the RDOF program. All information, including the winning bids found in Attachments A and B, can be found here.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has awarded 23 grants as part of the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP). These new grants, totaling more than $601.6 million, bring the total of the program to $1.35 billion awarded to 94 Tribal entities.

President Biden signed an Executive Order on Enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activities (E.O.) directing the steps that the United States will take to implement the US commitments under the European Union-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (EU-US DPF) introduced by President Biden and European Commission President von der Leyen in March of 2022. Transatlantic data flows are critical to enabling the $7.1 trillion EU-US economic relationship. The Executive Order bolsters an already rigorous array of privacy and civil liberties safeguards for U.S.

The Biden administration introduced sweeping new limits on the sale of semiconductor technology to China, a step aimed at crippling Beijing’s access to critical technologies that are needed for everything from supercomputing to guiding weapons. The moves are the clearest sign yet that a dangerous standoff between the world’s two major superpowers is increasingly playing out in the technological sphere, with the US trying to establish a stranglehold on advanced computing and semiconductor technology that is essential to China’s military and economic ambitions. The package of restrictions, wh

Vermont stakeholders have collaborated on an application for $114 million in funding through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) middle mile grant program. If awarded, the funding would represent over 10% of the approximately $1 billion allotted to the NTIA program, which has proven to be a highly competitive one. The Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB) spearheaded the application. The request would cover some of the costs of the proposed 1,663-mile fiber network.