Level of Government

Comcast is footing most of the bill for a $55 million broadband network buildout in Indiana for which the company also won funding from the state. The state of Indiana awarded Comcast several grants totaling about $9.4 million to cover some of the costs of the buildout in June. The remaining $45 million-plus will be covered by Comcast, the company spokesperson confirmed.  That’s around 83 percent of total project costs.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) today has approved and recommended for award applications from Delaware, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Puerto Rico allowing them to request access to more than $68 million to implement their Digital Equity Plans. This funding comes from the $1.44 billion State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program, one of three Digital Equity Act grant programs created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The awards received are:

Securing our nation's cyber infrastructure is imperative. That is why all Department of Commerce networks have taken the first step to implement Internet routing security. Routing security ensures that Internet traffic reaches its intended target. Misconfigurations or manipulations of routing information can lead to significant degradation and loss of service. The United States Government is tackling concerns about routing security through a whole-of-government approach. The Department of Commerce is playing a leading role in these efforts:

Chris Mitchell speaks with Andy Schwartzman, Senior Counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, about pressing legal issues affecting telecommunications policy in the U.S.

The largest-ever federal broadband expansion program—Broadband Equity, Access and Development or BEAD—was passed in November 2021 but is only now really starting to hit its stride. No one has been connected to broadband by BEAD, nor have any BEAD funds been awarded to any internet service provider (ISP) for expansion purposes. But they will come soon.

Charter CFO Jessica Fisher recently announced that Charter will spend substantially less on pursuing Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants than the company spent on Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) [funny wording for how a company wins federal money]. This is big news because a natural assumption in some state broadband offices is that Charter would likely be a big player in the BEAD grant process.

Donald Trump could have an easier time limiting press freedom in his second term in the White House after a campaign marked by virulent rhetoric towards journalists and calls for punishing television networks and prosecuting journalists and their sources, legal scholars and journalism advocacy groups warn.

Washington is getting ready to run a wild experiment, testing what happens when one of Silicon Valley’s signature “disruptors” meets the world’s biggest bureaucracy. Elon Musk showed up in person in the capita the day after Donald Trump named him to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency”—an initiative to slash government waste, fraud, and inefficiency, wherever the tech mogul might decide he finds it. Musk will co-lead the project with Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech investor and MAGA cheerleader who ran against Trump in the GOP primary. Trump unveiled the idea with his usual lavish prom

A legal battle over the Biden administration’s influence on social media companies looks set to spill into the next Trump administration—and no one knows quite how that will play out. A district judge allowed the case known as Missouri v. Biden to resume even as the Biden administration winds down. The Supreme Court vacated his previous ruling in the case in June, but the new one means the plaintiffs can now pursue additional discovery.

The Universal Service Fund (USF) has been stuck in legislative limbo as the government wrestles with how to improve the subsidy program. Experts think USF reform could see momentum in Trump’s second term, but how that will pan out is a trickier question to answer. The USF, which supports broadband access and affordability in rural and low-income communities, is made up of four [sic] smaller programs: Connect America Fund, Lifeline, E-Rate and Rural Health Care. One glaring problem with the current USF framework is the shrinking contribution base.