Kaleigh Rogers

Rep Will Hurd (R-TX) — the only Republican to hold a district that falls along the southern border — is not in favor of a border wall. Instead, he’s partial to the idea of a “digital” wall: a border-wide system of technology such as cameras, sensors, and drones communicating through a fiber optic network to keep the border secure.

The Democratic Reps staying mum on network neutrality have all taken campaign contributions from major telecommunication companies, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Democratic Reps have until Dec 10 to get 218 signatures for the Congressional Review Act that would overturn Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's Restoring Internet Freedom order. This would require every Democratic Rep and a few Republican Reps.

Freedom House, a US-based pro-democracy think tank, releases an annual report that analyzes the amount of internet freedom in countries around the world, and assigns a score to each country. While America still has a high level of internet freedom, the loss of net neutrality protections, privacy laws, and the merging of major telecom companies caused its rating to drop in 2018. “It is depressing but not unexpected,” said Josh Tabish, the Ford/MDF Technology Exchange Fellow at Fight for the Future.

The Senate agriculture committee is considering Farm Bill proposals that would make it harder for rural communities to get funding for internet and favors Big Telecom. Big Telecom lobbyists have urged the committee to block funding for any community where more than 10 percent of the population has internet access, and any area that has received funding through the Federal Communication Commission’s Universal Service Fund, even if people in those area still have poor access.

Few candidates, from local mayoral races all the way up to the Senate, provide lip service to the fact that millions of Americans still lack access to broadband, and even fewer flesh out a robust policy to address it. At a time when politics is more divisive than ever, basic issues such as access to the internet are being overshadowed by the massive ideological clashes happening across the country.

The Federal Communication Commission wants more than $200 to release e-mails related to Chairman Ajit Pai’s novelty, oversized coffee mug under the Freedom of Information Act.  The mug gained mild notoriety after Chairman Pai was photographed with the drinking vessel. But when Taylor Amarel, a frequent FOIA-filer who secured the release of Chairman Pai’s calendar earlier in 2018, requested all of Chairman Pai’s executive assistant’s e-mails that included terms such as "reeses", "mug", or "Reese's,” the FCC pushed back.

A Q&A with FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn.

Commission Mignon Clyburn won’t call the Federal Communication Commission broken. But she believes it is “out of focus.” “The agency appears to be just looking through a lens that is industry-centered,” Commissioner Clyburn said. “When you are monofocal—not at least bifocal in looking at [both] the consumer needs and industry needs—then you can get it wrong. I think that pendulum is tilted too far in the other way.”\

More than 24 million Americans, or about 8 percent of the country, who don’t have access to high-speed internet, according to the Federal Communications Commission—and that’s a conservative estimate. Most of them live in rural and tribal areas, though the problem affects urban communities, too. In every single state, a portion of the population doesn’t have access to broadband. The reasons these communities have been left behind are as diverse as the areas themselves.

A bill introduced in Wyoming that set aside money to invest in municipal-owned internet was revamped before it passed to favor Big Telecom.

The Federal Communications Commission is about to hold an auction used to dole out grants to companies to build internet in rural America. But now, a bunch of items are off the block: Companies and co-ops, big or small, will no longer be able to apply for money to build internet infrastructure in many of these regions, because Big Telecom says there’s already internet there.