Reporting

The Christmas Day explosion that rocked Nashville caused considerable disruption, as it damaged a critical piece of the broader area’s telecommunications infrastructure. One of the major lines of inquiry was whether there was significance in the location of the blast: on a downtown street in front of an AT&T transmission building. The explosion created significant damage to the facility, causing widespread repercussions to telecommunication systems in Nashville and beyond. Officials said the outages have affected 911 operations and flights at Nashville International Airport.

The Federal Communications Commission has run low on time to adopt an order trimming a liability shield for social media companies, leaving the fate of a request from President Donald Trump in doubt. On Dec 22, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai let slip a deadline for setting a vote on the proposal at the next monthly meeting of the agency, which is scheduled for Jan. 13 and is the last before he leaves the commission a week later. FCC proposals not adopted at meetings can be passed with a vote by commissioners behind closed doors.

Universal Service Administrative Corporation -- the not-for-profit, quasi-governmental corporation charged with funding internet access in needy and underserved communities -- is looking for some robotic process automation tools to ease the job of its verification team and reduce errors from rote, manual data entry. The RPA tools sought in a solicitation posted to beta.SAM.gov will be used in support of the High Cost program, which, “provides support for connectivi

President Donald Trump has vetoed funding for the US military because the massive defense spending bill did not include a provision to repeal Section 230 which grants Internet service providers, including online platforms, broad immunity from being held legally liable for content third-party users share and grants those same services legal immunity from the decisions they make around content moderation. The National Defense Authorization Act would have authorized $740 billion in defense spending for the upcoming government fisc

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) has asked the Federal Communications Commission to reject efforts by West Virginia legislators to block Frontier Communications’ successful bid for Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) funding. Frontier won $247 million to serve almost 79,000 locations in the state. It says that it will bring gigabit connectivity to many of those locations. The company is currently in bankruptcy, but expects to emerge in the first quarter of 2021.

Two bills approved by Congress awaiting President Donald Trump’s signature would limit the powers of Michael Pack, the president’s pick to lead the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America and four other international media organizations. The legislation includes changes limiting the powers of the USAGM and its chief executive, but in different ways. The two bills taken together could restrict Pack’s actions between now and January 20, when Democratic President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

The telecommunications ecosystem is broken, but there's a move underway by the Telecom Ecosystem Group to rectify, if not completely reset, some of those problems.

The Federal Communications Commission should define broadband as internet speeds of at least 100 Mbps in both directions, up from the current benchmark of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream, trade groups for rural broadband carriers and fiber carriers argue in a new regulatory filing. The current standard “does not reflect what American consumers need today, let alone tomorrow,” NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association and the Fiber Broadband Association told the FCC.

The $900 billion coronavirus package and $1.4 trillion government funding deal are full of technology and telecommunications priorities that will help Americans stay connected amid a darkening pandemic and keep issues from antitrust to artificial intelligence policy front-and-center heading into 2021. Both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice's antitrust division get a bump in funding.

Facebook and Google agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” if they ever faced an investigation into their pact to work together in online advertising, according to an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by 10 states against Google. Ten Republican attorneys general, led by Texas, are alleging that the two companies cut a deal in September 2018 in which Facebook agreed not to compete with Google’s online advertising tools in return for special treatment