Policymakers

States throughout the country have created programs to expand broadband connectivity for their residents.

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Executive Director Adrianne B. Furniss named John Horrigan the new Benton Senior Fellow. Horrigan has been a regular contributor to Benton’s Digital beat blog in recent years. He is a national expert on technology adoption, digital inclusion, and evaluating the outcomes and impacts of programs designed to promote communications technology adoption and use. He served at the Federal Communications Commission as a member of the leadership team for the development of the National Broadband Plan.

President Joe Biden has faced constant pressure to fill out the Federal Communications Commission since he took office earlier this year. Pressure ramped up significantly last week when dozens of advocacy groups pushed the president to “urgently” address the deadlocked agency. In the immediate months following the 2021 inauguration, advocacy groups pressured Biden for a nominee but also recognized that the incoming administration was dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and the aftermath of Trump’s administration. Now, they say, it’s time for Biden to act.

President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate Xochitl Torres Small for Under Secretary of Rural Development, Department of Agriculture. The granddaughter of migrant farmworkers, Xochitl Torres Small grew up in the borderlands of New Mexico. In 2018, Torres Small became the first woman and first person of color to represent New Mexico’s second congressional district, the largest district that isn’t its own state.

With the rise of China, the US economic and technology environment has fundamentally and inexorably changed.

The Senate confirmed Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, elevating one of the tech industry’s most prominent antitrust critics to the government’s top Silicon Valley watchdog. The vote was 69-28 in a Senate split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, signaling the growing bipartisan interest in reining in large tech companies’ power. It came just days after House lawmakers from both parties unveiled bills that could force Silicon Valley companies to change their business practices and in the most severe cases, break up the companies.

The Federal Communications Commission will re-charter the Task Force for Reviewing Connectivity and Technology Needs of Precision Agriculture in the United States, a federal advisory committee, which provides advice and recommendations to the FCC on accelerating the deployment of broadband Internet access service on unserved agriculture land to promote precision agriculture.

Sens John Thune (R-SD), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Brian Schatz (D-HI), and Mark Warner (D-VA) reintroduced the Filter Bubble Transparency Act (S.2024). The bill would require large-scale internet platforms that collect data from more than 1 million users and gross more than $50 million per year to provide greater transparency to consumers, and allow users to view content that has not been curated as a result of a secret algorithm. 

Sen Roger Wicker (R-MS) introduced the Promoting Rights and Online Speech Protections to Ensure Every Consumer is Heard (PRO-SPEECH) Act (S.2301). This bill would establish baseline protections to prohibit Big Tech from engaging in unfair, deceptive, or anti-competitive practices that limit or control consumers’ speech. The PRO-SPEECH Act aims to:

If Congress passes comprehensive privacy legislation, it will need to delegate a federal agency to enforce the law and conduct rulemaking. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has used its general consumer protection authority to bring enforcement actions against companies violating user privacy, and has therefore been considered the de facto privacy agency. However, three bills have challenged this assumption and would create a new agency to enforce privacy law rather than relying on the FTC. This report compares the new agencies in three legislative proposals to one another and to the FTC.