Universal Broadband

West Virginia’s largest cable companies have filed a lawsuit against Gov Jim Justice (D-WV) and Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, alleging that a new state law could ultimately cause internet service outages at customers’ homes and businesses. The state Cable Telecommunications Association is challenging new rules designed to make it easier for startup internet firms to secure access to utility poles. The cable companies don’t want competitors meddling with their equipment housed atop the poles. About 400,000 West Virginians have telephone and internet service through cable providers. “There could be significant damage to equipment and to customer relationships and outages and things of that sort when you have circumstances where there are no limitations at all on competitors moving other competitors’ equipment around,” said Mark Polen, spokesman for the cable group.

The companies say the new law allows the smaller internet companies to hire private contractors and rearrange existing equipment atop utility poles without permission. Federal rules already dictate how telecommunication companies share and access equipment on utility poles, according to the lawsuit. The new state law conflicts with longstanding federal law, the cable group alleges. The lawsuit characterizes the state law as “invalid” and “unconstitutional.”

FiveThirtyEight analyzed every county’s broadband usage using data from researchers at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University and found that Saguache (CO) was at the bottom.

Only 5.6 percent of adults were estimated to have broadband. But Saguache isn’t alone in lacking broadband. According to the Federal Communications Commission, 39 percent of rural Americans — 23 million people — don’t have access. In Pew surveys, those who live in rural areas were about twice as likely not to use the internet as urban or suburban Americans....Unforeseen serendipitous opportunities — summer jobs that become careers — are what motivate the county’s small internet providers to continue to pursue broadband as a public good. For now, no one in Saguache County is counting on a deus ex machina of funding from the federal government that turns universal broadband service from fantasy to reality. In real life, the practicalities wear.

Free Basics, Facebook’s free, limited internet service for developing markets, is neither serving local needs nor achieving its objective of bringing people online for the first time. That’s according to research by citizen media and activist group Global Voices which examined the Free Basics service in six different markets – Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan and Philippines – to see whether it was serving the intended audience. Free Basics is a Facebook-developed mobile app that gives users access to a small selection of data-light websites and services. The websites are stripped of photos and videos and can be browsed without paying for mobile data. The Global Voices report identifies a number of weaknesses in the service, including not adequately serving the linguistic needs of local populations; featuring a glut of third-party services from private companies in the US; harvesting huge amounts of metadata about users and violating the principles of net neutrality.

Louisville (KY) has garnered much praise for an award-winning data map that visualizes the modern day effects of redlining — a practice that dates back to the 1930s, and involves racial and socioeconomic discrimination in certain neighborhoods through the systematic denial of services or refusal to grant loans and insurance.

This map, dubbed Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class and Real Estate, takes historic data about redlining found in the national archives in Washington (DC) in 2013 and combines it with a timeline of historic events, data about current poverty levels, neighborhood boundaries and racial demographic info. With a host of tools including buttons and sliders, users can clearly see the correlation between the deliberate injustices of the past and the plight of struggling neighborhoods today. Jeana Dunlap, Louisville’s director of redevelopment strategies, said the value of this map is wide-reaching, and that it serves to foster awareness and spur discussion of many civic challenges, including digital equity, poverty, and access to basic needs such as full-service grocery stores and health-care services.

The Trump Administration’s plan for $1 trillion in infrastructure spending presents an opportunity not only to repair existing roads, bridges, and tunnels, but also to build out broadband internet coverage in rural areas. On July 24, the Center for Technology Innovation hosted a panel discussion at Brookings about how the administration, Congress, and the private sector can work together to address broadband needs of unserved (no access) and underserved (limited access) populations.

The event began with opening remarks from House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), focused on the congressional perspective on broadband infrastructure. To close the access gap, Chairman Blackburn seeks to eliminate regulatory barriers, increase investment in unserved areas, and redraft current Federal Communications Commission maps to more accurately reflect the percent of Americans that lack broadband access. The panelists largely focused on ways the government and private sector can work together to expand broadband internet access.

[Commentary] Although the fight for an open internet tends to have Silicon Valley tech bros at the forefront, it’s a racial justice issue; arbitrary powers for corporations tend not to help marginalized populations. It’s a rural justice issue, too.

The big service providers pushing the deregulation spree are the same companies that have so far refused to bring broadband to less-dense areas. They are holding under-served communities hostage by proposing a deal: roll back rights to private, open media, and we’ll give you cheaper internet. Trump’s Republican party is taking the bait. Up in the mountains west of me, a decade and a half ago, the commercial internet service providers weren’t bringing high-speed connectivity to residents, so a group of neighbors banded together and created their own internet cooperative. Big providers love making their jobs sound so complicated that nobody else could do it, but these people set up their own wireless network, and they still maintain it. Of course, their service remains pretty rudimentary; the same can’t be said of Longmont (CO), city 20 minutes from where I live in the opposite direction. There, the city-owned NextLight fiber network provides some of the fastest connectivity in the country for a reasonable price. In Longmont, all the surveillance and anti-neutrality stuff simply isn’t relevant.

Whatever happens in Washington, we can start building an internet that respects our rights on the local level. What would be the best route for creating community broadband in your community?

[Nathan Schneider teaches media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder]

The Trump administration is weighing whether to support online sales taxes that could give state governments greater flexibility in their budgets. Testifying before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee July 25, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the White House “is looking very closely at this issue” and that it intends to “come out with a position shortly.”

Sec Mnuchin said that the policy could be an important way for states to fund infrastructure — an issue that President donald Trump has touted as a key part of his agenda with a $1 trillion spending plan. Some analysts have questioned the feasibility of that plan because it would cut federal investments in infrastructure by tens of billions of dollars. But allowing states to require companies to collect and remit taxes on online sales could help make up some of the shortfall.

Louisville (KY) has garnered much praise for an award-winning data map that visualizes the modern day effects of redlining — a practice that dates back to the 1930s, and involves racial and socioeconomic discrimination in certain neighborhoods through the systematic denial of services or refusal to grant loans and insurance. This map, dubbed Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class and Real Estate, takes historic data about redlining found in the national archives in Washington (DC) in 2013, and combines it with a timeline of historic events, data about current poverty levels, neighborhood boundaries and racial demographic info. With a host of tools including buttons and sliders, users can clearly see the correlation between the deliberate injustices of the past and the plight of struggling neighborhoods today. For Louisville CIO Grace Simrall, the map is proving an asset in the city’s ongoing work to improve digital equity. City officials have also looked at the map as lens through which to examine digital inclusion, the effort to provide all residents with equal access to technology, as well as the related skills to benefit.

A nonprofit group is challenging President Donald Trump over his infrastructure council, claiming that the panel has been operating in secrecy and that its co-chairs have potential conflicts of interest. In a lawsuit filed July 25 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Food & Water Watch claims that the administration violated federal public access requirements in establishing and running the new panel. In addition to President Trump, the lawsuit also lists the Transportation and Commerce departments as defendants. President Trump announced in January that he was putting billionaire real estate developers Richard LeFrak and Steven Roth in charge of the council, which is helping oversee his proposed $1 trillion rebuilding push and vetting transportation projects. But Trump only recently issued an executive order to formally establish the group. In its complaint, the nonprofit group alleges that the White House violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires advisory panels to publicly disclose meetings and members and requires membership to be fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented.

Legislation that would give telecommunication companies tax breaks for expanding high-speed internet access doesn’t include proper oversight controls to ensure firms invest in areas where it’s most needed, public interest groups say. The pushback reflects a potentially divisive fight on an issue — expanding internet access to underserved areas — that generally has bipartisan support. The Gigabit Opportunity Act, sponsored by Sen Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), would provide state governors the flexibility to choose low-income areas to be designated as GO zones, investments for which telecoms could claim write-offs. Eligibility would also require states and municipalities to adopt model codes to “streamline” local regulations. Those codes are being written by the FCC’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee.

Some local entities are wary of pre-emption of their powers to set rates for pole attachments and other permitting procedures. The congressional proposals don’t address the real problem — lack of will by providers to invest in low-density areas where its hard to turn a profit, said Martha Duggan, senior director of regulatory affairs for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. “The irony is that we are the unserved communities, we want that connectivity,” Duggan said at the BDAC meeting. “I can tell you stories of municipalities that have offered zero-cost rates for pole attachments if the providers will come out and build in our areas. None have taken us up on that so far.”