Internet/Broadband

House Communications and Technology Chairman Marsha Blackbur (R-TN) is open to using federal antitrust laws to fix the long-running debate over net neutrality. “It’s helpful to consider the complete spectrum of law shielding American consumers from anticompetitive behavior,” she said. “It’s clear that internet service providers are not the only potential roadblock standing between a consumer and his or her content of choice,” she said .

Comcast met with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's staff the week of Oct 30 in an attempt to prevent states from issuing network neutrality rules.

This election season, Comcast is once again devoting funds to an investment it considers necessary - influencing elections in Seattle (WA) and Fort Collins (CO).  In Seattle, Comcast and CenturyLink have donated $50,000 to a political action committee that supports a candidate opposed to publicly owned Internet infrastructure. In our analysis, we’ve run a range of possible scenarios and offered both a conservative Comcast loss estimate and figures based on higher loss of subscribership.

Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) led a bipartisan group of thirty-nine Sens in a letter urging the Federal Communications Commission to ensure its commitment to affordable and reliable broadband for consumers in hardest to reach communities across rural America. “A lack of resources to meet our [shared national broadband] goals is undermining investment and consumer access to affordable broadband across much of rural America. For this reason, we write to encourage the FCC to take the much-needed step of addressing the High-Cost Universal Service Fund budget shortfall,” the senators wrote.

[Commentary] Things have improved in the last 20-plus years: We’ve gone from 15 million people on the internet when I joined the Clinton Administration to 3.5 billion on the internet today worldwide and, in the U.S., we’re 80 to 85 percent connected. The numbers are moving in the right direction, but we won’t be done until there is no gap, until every person who wants access has access to the information and opportunities the internet provides. We’re still hammering away at the problem of the connectivity gap, but the face of the problem has changed as well.

US broadband providers invested approximately $76.0 billion in network infrastructure in 2016 down from approximately $77.9 billion in 2015 and $78.4 billion in 2014. From 1996 through 2016, the broadband industry has made capital investments totaling $1.6 trillion. The start of the decline, the first since the recession ended in 2009, coincided with Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 decision to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.

The digital age continues to spark creative developments in education. Wireless gadgets are now commonplace in the typical American classroom. But while technology is helping thousands of students reach new heights in their education, many others are falling behind. Dubbed "the homework gap" by researchers, students without the use of reliable internet access at home find it harder to complete and submit homework assignments, further expanding the inequality already seen in low-income communities.

The House Communications Subcommittee held a hearing checking in on the progress made in the deployment of FirstNet, the first nationwide, interoperable broadband public safety network. Chairman Blackburn kicked things off by highlighting the importance of FirstNet to help first responders and make communities safer, “A lot of work at this committee went into reviewing the recommendations from the 9/11 commission on how to better prepare our first responders in times of crisis.

Google Docs threw some users for a loop when the service suddenly locked them out of their documents for violating Google’s terms of service. The weird part? The documents were innocuous. The alerts were caused by a glitch, but they served as a stark reminder that not much is truly private in the cloud. A Google spokesman said that a “code push” caused a small percentage of Google Docs to be incorrectly flagged as abusive, which caused them to be automatically blocked.

The House Antitrust Subcommittee took a whack at the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality rules Nov 1, specifically the role of antitrust law in governing broadband access provider conduct. That came as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is expected to circulate an order rolling back Title II classification of ISPs as early as later in Nov. It also came at about the same time that the FCC Democrats went to Capitol Hill to push back on that Pai proposal.