Reporting

As the tenure of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and his deregulatory Republican majority winds down, DC policy watchers are looking for action on some big issues yet to be resolved one way or the other.

In advance of the Supreme Court's Jan.

Amazon revealed the design o

Carolyn Roddy is now listed as acting chief of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration following previous acting Administrator Adam Candeub’s jump to the Justice Department.

The state of Connecticut is giving every student in grades K-12 a laptop and paying for their internet access. Recently, the state announced that it had achieved near-universal access for both device distribution and connectivity—a significant achievement in a state where 40 percent of households in some cities lack home access, according to census data. The program, known as the 

School districts and cities across the country are racing to bridge a digital divide that has existed for decades. At least 39 states have said they would use funds from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (Cares) Act to help school districts close the tech gap. The fixes can be fairly simple. School-district and municipal IT departments are using technology that has been around for years, such as solar-powered antennas to transmit Wi-Fi, or wireless broadband, closer to more peoples’ homes.

The scope of a hack engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer when some Trump administration officials acknowledged that other federal agencies — the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and parts of the Pentagon — had been compromised. Investigators were struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community, and nuclear laboratories were affected by the highly sophisticated attack.

In 2000, just two years after it was founded, Google reached a milestone that would lay the foundation for its dominance over the next 20 years: It became the world’s largest search engine, with an index of more than one billion web pages. The rest of the internet never caught up, and Google’s index just kept on getting bigger.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai swore in Nathan Simington as the commission's newest commissioner. Simington’s term is back-dated to July 1, 2019, when the previous term of former Commissioner Michael O’Rielly was scheduled to end. The swearing in ceremony took place virtually as the FCC continues to work remotely amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

A new report from the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society argues for more federal support of open-access, middle-mile (OAMM) networks, which “can help the nation meet its deployment and competition challenges.” By definition, an OAMM network will allow any Internet service provider (ISP) to connect to it, “on nondiscriminatory terms and conditions,” in order to provide last-mile solutions to homes and businesses.