Reporting

The pandemic has highlighted the need for county and city governments to provide their workers and K-12 students with internet connections and related technology, especially laptops, experts said during a June 4 CompTIA webinar titled “Stretching the Limits: Broadband Capacity and Availability in a Crisis.” Albemarle County (VA) a largely rural area that is home to the University of Virginia, partnered with its public schools division to provide surplus laptops to social service workers who didn’t have them.

After years of hearing from its citizens and business owners that Internet access was one of Fort Morgan’s most pressing problems, the Colorado city of 11,000 decided to do something about it. Like dozens of other communities around Colorado, in 2009 residents approved a ballot measure to opt out of SB 152, the 2005 state law preventing municipalities from offering broadband.

Wireless internet service providers (WISPs) have long offered fixed wireless broadband services in rural areas where cable or wireline broadband is lacking. But now fixed wireless is seeing a bit of a revival in some urban markets thanks to Verizon’s 5G Home service and newcomer Starry’s fixed wireless 802.11-based service. But not everyone is convinced that these new attempts at delivering fixed wireless broadband will be a success.

A Q&A with Steve Lacoff, general manager of communications at Avalara (which provides cloud-based software tax compliance), on the Permanent Internet Tax Fairness Act.  

The government must urgently ensure that more than 1 million children have reliable internet access at home or risk irreparable harm to their education, a cross-party group of Members Parliament and former ministers has said.

The protests continuing around the country are historic displays of social action. For political operatives, the mass gatherings are also a unique opportunity to harvest data on potential voters. Advocacy and voter-registration groups are gathering a trove of data from protests by tracking the cellphones of participants and sending them messages about registering to vote or taking other actions. The tactics, which one user called “deeply spooky yet extremely helpful,” are the latest example of ways political groups are using cellphone data to target voters.

Even with the global economy reeling from a pandemic-induced recession and dozens of businesses filing for bankruptcy, tech’s largest companies — still wildly profitable and flush with billions of dollars from years of corporate dominance — are deliberately laying the groundwork for a future where they will be bigger and more powerful than ever.

Long before the coronavirus pandemic, the tech industry yearned to prove its indispensability to the world. Its executives liked to describe their companies as “utilities.” They came by their self-aggrandizement honestly: The founding fathers of Big Tech really did view their creations as essential, and essentially good. In recent years, however, our infatuation with these creations has begun to curdle.

Educators told the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pension (HELP) Committee on June 10 that access to technology is key to reopening schools in the new normal of COVID-19 and they could use some help in the form of government dollars. John King, former Education Secretary under President Barack Obama, said that before COVID-19, 79% of households had broadband versus only 66% of black households and 61% of Hispanic households.

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly said he's unsure whether his agency has the authority to carry out President Donald Trump's executive order targeting tech firms' legal protections. President Trump's order seeks to have the FCC craft regulations limiting the scope of legal immunity that online platforms have under federal law.