The Federal Communications Commission appointed Burt Cohen, Staff Attorney and Broadband Coordinator for the State of Connecticut, Office of Consumer Counsel, to serve as the State Consumer Advocate representative on the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service. This appointment fills the position recently vacated by the William “Bill” Vallee of the Connecticut State Office of Consumer Counsel. 

In the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R-GA) highlighted, "With 25 percent of rural residents without access to high-speed internet, bringing this access to all of Georgia is a fundamental component of our plan to strengthen rural Georgia." In a plan he called A New Day for Rural Georgia, Kemp committed to improving healthcare, education, and economic growth facilitated by access to broadband. Also in 2018, the Georgia state legislature enacted the Achieving Connectivity Everywhere (ACE) Act promoting broadband deployment in areas not currently served at a minimum broadband speed of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload (25/3). The Georgia Broadband Deployment Initiative (GBDI) was launched as a result. GBDI coordinates activities with five state agencies—Department of Community Affairs, Department of Transportation, Department of Economic Development, Georgia Technology Authority, and State Properties Commission—as well as a Stakeholder Advisory Council consisting of representation from private telecommunications and cable providers, local government, and electricity cooperatives. Additional legislation authorized electric membership cooperatives and telephone cooperatives to provide broadband services, and streamlined broadband deployment in the public right-of-way. The state also required communities to submit comprehensive plans, including broadband, to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs every five years 

Each year, the Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS) brings together Indigenous leaders, network operators, and policymakers to nurture a continent-wide community dedicated to enhancing the capacity of Indigenous communities to connect to affordable, sustainable internet on their terms. As part of this effort, each year since the first ICS in 2017, delegates have developed and endorsed a set of recommendations that, if adopted by governments and other stakeholders, will help advance connectivity in Indigenous communities in Canada and the US. The 2022 Indigenous Summit Calls to Action are as follows:

• Digital inequity is the product of colonialism. Therefore, we call on the governments of Canada and the United States to decolonize their respective telecommunications policy processes by creating an indigenous task force on telecommunications.

• Governments should require that projects that use government funds take a First Mile First approach, meaning the project must be designed and implemented with the community end user as the starting point, not the end point.

• We call on the governments of Canada and the United States to strengthen and enforce their existing regulatory mechanisms to hold companies accountable in the event they misuse government funds for telecommunications projects affecting Indigenous territories, or when they are deemed to be not acting in the best interest of the community as determined by local leadership

• We call on the Governments of Canada and the U.S. to acknowledge that Indigenous Peoples have myriad needs for the natural resource called electromagnetic spectrum (“spectrum”), including but not limited to climate change monitoring and modeling, food sovereignty and security, health and safety, especially pertaining to missing and murdered Indigenous people, mental health and wellness, emergency management, education, economic development, revenue, and other priorities.

• We need a multi-faceted workforce development effort to strengthen capacity within communities to achieve digital equity. To that end, we call upon Indigenous/Tribal colleges and community colleges to work with communities and relevant technical organizations to codesign and implement appropriate educational programming that develops the technical capacity of Indigenous people of all ages.

The jokes and memes about Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase as proof of a massive midlife crisis are at least partly on point. The internet, for one, is having its own midlife crisis. And as with any midlife crisis, the internet can spiral into the abyss, continuing its own self-destructive pathway, or we can seize the moment to build a better internet founded on the essential principle that the internet belongs to all of us. Twitter isn’t just a platform. It’s how some of us live, work, and survive. Many have long argued that Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms are public utilities—they provide an essential service to the public by enabling the flow of communication that supports communities, commerce, and access to critical information. The fact that one of the world’s wealthiest men can buy Twitter and screw it up has prompted an epiphany for many of its most loyal devotees: activists, journalists, politicians, and yes, trolls. We need to reshape the internet to support this public spirit—or at least refashion a small slice of it. But that requires grappling with questions that have vexed decades of internet policy thinkers; namely, who foots the bill and who sets the rules of engagement? The government needs to provide regulatory guidance to prevent the worst excesses of capitalist egress and abuse, serving as a steward for the public. “New Twitter” could be a global communication platform owned and operated by a coalition of public service–minded stakeholders. But to keep Twitter, well, Twitter, it needs to retain some core properties and features of the platform that people have valued. Namely, the platform needs to be free, it needs to have scale, and for better or worse, it needs to be a place for free expression. Twitter would need to have a long leash, much like well-supported public broadcast providers in democracies across the globe that have remained at arm’s length from government censorship.

[Nikki Usher is an associate professor in communication at the University of San Diego and a senior fellow at the Open Markets Institute.]