The House voted overwhelmingly to approve a bill on that would ban TikTok from operating in the US or force a sale, with lawmakers largely shrugging off a last-minute lobbying push by the Chinese-controlled service and setting the stage for a final showdown in the Senate, where lawmakers have been cooler on the legislation. The measure passed the House 352 to 65, with one member voting present, showing broad bipartisan support for cracking down on TikTok over national-security concerns. The popular short-video app has faced scrutiny over the way its algorithm works to select content for users, both on sensitive issues like teen depression as well as on contentious global debates like the Israel-Hamas war. US officials say TikTok’s ownership potentially gives Beijing a way to both collect data on Americans and influence public opinion, driving years of efforts to crack down on the app and culminating in the new legislation. 

Official bill summary: This bill prohibits distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok). However, the prohibition does not apply to a covered application that executes a qualified divestiture as determined by the President. Under the bill, a foreign adversary controlled application is directly or indirectly operated by (1) ByteDance, Ltd. or TikTok (including their subsidiaries or successors); or (2) a social media company that is controlled by a foreign adversary and has been determined by the President to present a significant threat to national security. The prohibition does not apply to an application that is primarily used to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews. The bill authorizes the Department of Justice to investigate violations of the bill and enforce the bill's provisions. Entities that violate the bill are subject to civil penalties based on the number of users. The bill requires a covered application to provide a user with all available account data (including posts, photos, and videos) at the user's request before the prohibition takes effect. The bill gives the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia exclusive jurisdiction over any challenge to the bill. Further, a challenge to the bill must be brought within 165 days after the bill's enactment date. A challenge to any action, finding, or determination under the bill must be brought with 90 days of the action, finding, or determination.

There is a tendency to think of high-cost areas—places where it’s expensive to build fiber—as only being in remote places with tough terrain. We’re going to see a lot of other cases of high cost locations that I think are going to surprise State Broadband Grant offices. There are many reasons that drive up the cost of building a landline network. Some places are high-cost by definition. I know of a small town in Arizona that is fifty miles away from the nearest other people. Building fiber to this town means building middle-mile backhaul, which in this case is through tough terrain and faces the extra burden of aging poles. The condition of poles can be a huge cost driver anywhere. I’ve worked with several rural communities where more than 90 percent of poles need major work to add fiber. The issue that is going to blindside a lot of grant offices is housing density, measured by the number of residences per mile of road. Another major issue to consider is the degree to which inflation and BEAD grant rules are driving up the cost of construction. BEAD rules can easily add up to 30% to the cost of building a rural network due to factors like prevailing wages, letters of credit, and environmental studies. Finally, I think broadband offices are relying too heavily on using fixed wireless as the solution for high cost areas. There are places where fixed wireless is a good solution, but plenty of others where it is not. 

Like all states and territories, Vermont has been hard at work developing plans for the NTIA's Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant program; and the companion Digital Equity program. Vermont is scheduled to receive nearly $229 million for BEAD, to close its broadband deployment gaps, and over half a million to implement its Digital Equity Plan, designed to help everyone gain access. Unlike every other state and territory, however, Vermont has been working toward solving its broadband access problem in a unique way over the last decade: by establishing ten Communications Union Districts (CUDs), or groups of towns that form municipal entities to build out communications infrastructure. Currently, Vermont has broadband construction underway for six of its ten CUDs, and the state is taking registrations for a new broadband installer apprenticeship program to get ahead of workforce issues as BEAD dollars start to roll out. In this podcast, we discuss the remaining digital divide in Vermont, including what digital equity officer Britaney Watson says are still the "three major barriers" to broadband adoption in the state. 

Consolidated Communications’ latest public-private broadband partnership news is a bit different from some of the other public-private partnerships we’ve seen since federal legislators began making funding available for broadband buildouts during the COVID pandemic. The deal, pending completion of a challenge process, involves the town of Francestown, New Hampshire and funding from the state’s Broadband Matching Grant Initiative (BMGI). That program provides matching funds for projects that otherwise would be too costly for the network operator to undertake. The BMGI program was funded through the federal Capital Projects Fund, which was established in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). New Hampshire is using $26 million, representing 21 percent of its CPF allocation, for the BMGI program. Consolidated expects to provide approximately 39 percent of the funding to support the fiber buildout in Francestown. In addition to creating the CPF, the American Rescue Plan Act provided funding to individual towns and counties that could be used for a range of infrastructure projects, including broadband. Some towns and counties have used that money to cover some of the costs of broadband deployments.

Fiber network deployments have reached a milestone as they now pass more than 50% of US households, according to recent data from the Fiber Broadband Association and RVA Market Research and Consulting. Almost 69 million of those locations are "unique" fiber homes, meaning that about 9 million are passed by more than one fiber provider. The share of broadband technology is also evolving. While hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) remains the primary way of delivering broadband, fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) and fixed wireless access (FWA) will continue to make their presence felt in the coming years. Research companyy Omdia expects cable's share of that mix to drop over the next four years, hitting about 55% by 2028, while fiber's share is expected to rise to 30% by that time. For the cable industry, fiber and FWA are not solely about competition. Many operators are also using FTTP extensively in greenfields and subsidized rural buildouts. They are deploying it on a targeted basis via a new generation of nodes that can support multiple access technologies, including HFC and wireless. Additionally, CableLabs has put fiber-to-the-premises on the front burner via a pair of new working groups. A recent survey from Omdia shows that more than one-third of cable operators have already deployed passive optical networking (PON) in some form. That number will "undoubtedly keep rising" thanks to initiatives such as the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, according to Heavy Reading analyst Alan Breznick

The European Parliament approved the Artificial Intelligence Act that ensures safety and compliance with fundamental rights, while boosting innovation. The law aims to protect fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability from high-risk AI, while boosting innovation and establishing Europe as a leader in the field. The regulation establishes obligations for AI based on its potential risks and level of impact. The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens’ rights, including biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behaviour or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden. The regulation is still subject to a final lawyer-linguist check and is expected to be finally adopted before the end of the legislature (through the so-called corrigendum procedure). The law also needs to be formally endorsed by the European Council.