Reporting

The storming of the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump is expected to turbocharge Congressional efforts to regulate big tech—and many lawmakers are expected to focus on scaling back the liability shield that protects internet companies.

Tim Berners-Lee believes the online world has gone astray. Too much power and too much personal data, he says, reside with the tech giants like Google and Facebook — “silos” is the generic term he favors, instead of referring to the companies by name. Fueled by vast troves of data, he says, they have become surveillance platforms and gatekeepers of innovation. Regulators have voiced similar complaints. The big tech companies are facing tougher privacy rules in Europe and some American states, led by California. Google and Facebook have been hit with antitrust suits.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s promise to deliver nationwide “turbocharged” broadband by 2025 will be missed because of a catalogue of government failures, parliament’s spending watchdog has concluded. The public accounts committee criticised the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) for failing to make any “meaningful progress” in delivering policies or legal changes to achieve a rapid rollout of gigabit broadband. As a result, thousands of homes and businesses, particularly in rural areas, could be left with slow broadband for many years, MPs warned.

For the bulk of his tenure, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has avoided wading into the relentless controversies that defined President Trump's presidency.

The Capitol began processing a massive shift in the balance of power as Democrats prepare to take unified control of Congress. That means these key Democrats are primed to take the gavels on the committees overseeing technology and telecommunications issues, ranging from data privacy to 5G to antitrust:

Georgia's election results handing Senate control to Democratic lawmakers mean the incoming Biden administration can fill key seats at the agencies that regulate tech.

• Net Neutrality: A Democratic Federal Communications Commission will likely first move to reclassify broadband as a service under Title II of the Communications Act. That will allow it to restore rules requiring Internet service providers to treat all internet traffic equally, and take other actions to regulate broadband providers’ business practices amid the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Many of 2020’s new phones, laptops, TVs, routers, and more will come with support for Wi-Fi 6E, a new upgrade to Wi-Fi that’s essentially like expanding your wireless connection from a two-lane road to an eight-lane highway. It’s the biggest upgrade to Wi-Fi in 20 years, and connections should be faster and a lot more reliable because of it. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry-wide group that oversees Wi-Fi, is now starting to certify the first wave of products with support for Wi-Fi 6E.

Frontier Communications has agreed to expand its fiber-to-the-premises network and improve its poor service quality as part of a bankruptcy settlement in California. Frontier committed to deploy fiber to 350,000 homes and businesses within six years on a schedule that would require the first 100,000 by the end of 2022, 250,000 by the end of 2024, and the full 350,000 by year-end 2026. The settlement, filed in late December, is pending approval by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

Here are the top reforms and nominations that could stand a chance in the new Congress assuming — as now seems likely — Democrats control both chambers and the White House.