Research

The 2020 Census is different from past surveys in two important ways.

What if, suddenly, decades of progress in weather prediction was reversed and monster storms that we currently see coming for days were no longer foreseeable? The toll on life, property and the economy would be enormous. Yet the government’s science agencies say such a loss in forecast accuracy could happen if the Federal Communications Commission and the US wireless industry get their way. Both the FCC and the wireless industry are racing to deploy 5G technology, which will deliver information at speeds 100 times faster than today’s mobile networks.

Pew Charitable Trusts, which has spent more than a year studying Americans’ access to broadband, will soon be launching an online explorer inventorying the data it’s collected — including information on gaps to coverage and the policies state governments are pursuing to fill them.  The explorer will be a searchable catalog of everything from current laws and policies, to information on funding and financing, and will likely launch sometime late this summer, said Kathryn de Wit, manager of the project. “What we know at this point is that different communities can be difficult to connect for

The Agency for Global Media is supposed to broadcast objective Spanish-language news programs into Cuba, but fails to meet basic standards of journalistic fairness and let an anchor describe Trump administration officials as the “dream team” for Cuba policy, according to an independent review. The review of Radio and Television Martí content, conducted by Spanish-speaking academics and former journalists, found the news organization routinely allows “almost any criticism of the Cuban government and its leaders” on the air.

Fewer than 10% of US physicians practice in rural communities, where 25% of Americans live. Yet, rural Americans may need more health care as they become increasingly older and sicker relative to their urban counterparts. Telemedicine has been proposed as a solution to improve access to care. Federal and state policymakers have enacted policies to expand telemedicine use among publicly and commercially insured beneficiaries. However, whether Americans with the poorest access to care have the necessary broadband Internet capability to fully benefit from telemedicine is unknown.

The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration will submit to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for clearance a proposal for voluntary collection of broadband availability data. In the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, Congress directed NTIA to update the national broadband availability map in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission and the states. Congress directed NTIA to acquire and display available third-party data sets to the extent it is able to negotiate its inclusion to augment data from the FCC, other federal

The European Commission compared the current situation with the one before its open internet regulation entered into force (on 30 April 2016) and concluded that the regulation’s principles are appropriate and effective in protecting end-users’ rights and promoting the internet as an engine for innovation. The report suggests that there is no need to amend the regulation at this stage, in order to continue with the regulatory stability and in view of continuing protecting end-users’ rights and promoting open access to the internet.

Microsoft has unseated Google at the top of the 2019 Corporate Accountability Index. Telefónica outpaced Vodafone among telecommunications companies. Yet despite progress, most companies still leave users in the dark about key policies and practices affecting privacy and freedom of expression. A majority of companies improved and clarified policies affecting users’ privacy—a trend that appears to be driven by new data protection regulations in the EU and elsewhere. But even the leading companies fell short in key areas.

This report presents a quantitative assessment of how the presentation of news has changed over the past 30 years and how it varies across platforms.

This paper analyses the incidence of broadband on regional productivity in Brazil, intending to find out if the economic impact is uniform across all territories of the country. The possibility of performing a regional approach to test the effect of broadband on productivity in an emerging country represents a novelty for the literature. Results suggest that the impact of broadband on productivity is positive although not uniform across regions. On the one hand, it seems to depend on connection quality and network effects.