Level of Government

The Newsom Administration, local officials, and Arcadian Infracom announced the groundbreaking of a crucial segment of California’s Middle-Mile Broadband Network. The Capitol Route groundbreaking in Natomas celebrates California’s work in building the nation’s largest open-access, Middle-Mile Broadband Network. The groundbreaking is a milestone in a 256-mile route of new open-access broadband fiber spanning from San Jose in Silicon Valley through the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Carson City, Nevada.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules to move forward with targeted investments in the deployment of advanced, 5G mobile wireless broadband services in rural communities.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules to enable initial drone operations in the 5 GHz spectrum band for wireless communications necessary to safely control the flights of uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS). The use of UAS in the United States is growing quickly: during this decade, UAS operations are expected to triple in terms of the number of devices and see the market expand into in the tens of billions of dollars.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) approved Mississippi and South Dakota’s Initial Proposals for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. This approval enables Mississippi and South Dakota to request access to funding and begin implementation of the BEAD program—a major step towards closing the digital divide and meeting the President’s goal of connecting everyone in America with affordable, reliable, high-speed Internet service. This action allows states to request:  

The state of Kentucky was allotted $1.1 billion to get every home hooked up to high-speed internet.

The town of McKee (KY), population 800, was ahead of the curve. The federal government is currently implementing the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, with the goal of connecting every home to high-speed internet by 2030. In McKee, the nonprofit Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative already did that—a decade ago. PRTC has about 55 employees and is based in Jackson County, where McKee is the county seat. PRTC borrowed $45 million from the federal government—in part from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a Great Recession-era stimulus bill.

The Biden-Harris Administration is announcing two new actions that will help build more projects, more quickly.

The California State Assembly passed a bill on August 28 that would enact the nation’s strictest regulations on artificial intelligence companies, pushing the fierce fight over how to regulate AI toward Gov.

At Dymally High School in South Los Angeles, test scores are slightly up, fights are down and teachers can better focus on instruction—and Principal Darvina Bradley credits her campus cellphone ban. This scene is one California lawmakers are hoping to replicate with their approval of statewide school cellphone restrictions. The Phone-Free Schools Act, a bipartisan bill introduced by Assemblyman Josh Hoover (R-Folsom), sailed through the Legislature and requires all public schools to devise a policy by July 1, 2026, to limit or prohibit smartphones during the school day.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Privacy Commissioner of Canada Philippe Dufresne to strengthen information sharing and enforcement cooperation between the two regulators.