Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) reintroduced the Online Privacy Act (OPA), comprehensive privacy legislation that creates user data rights, places limitations and obligations on the ability of companies to collect and use user data, and establishes a Digital Privacy Agency (DPA) to enforce privacy laws. The updated legislation includes several improved provisions and additional privacy protections, including a section that sets the OPA as the federal floor, allowing states to legislate only when state action would provide greater protection than what is in the OPA. The updated legislation also contains a new title that creates a privacy risk management framework and supports privacy education, research, and development. The Act protects individuals, encourages innovation, and restores trust in technology companies by:

• Creating User Rights – The bill grants every American the right to access, correct, or delete their data. It also creates new rights, such as the right to impermanence, which lets users decide how long companies can keep their data.
• Placing Clear Limits and Obligations on Companies – The bill minimizes the amount of data companies collect, process, disclose, and maintain, and bars companies from using data in discriminatory ways. Additionally, companies must receive consent from users in plain, simple language.
• Establishing a Digital Privacy Agency (DPA) – The bill establishes an independent agency led by a Director who is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for a six-year term. The DPA will enforce privacy protections and investigate abuses.
• Strengthening Enforcement – The bill empowers state attorneys general to enforce violations of the bill and allows individuals to appoint nonprofits to represent them in private class action lawsuits.
• Setting a Federal Floor – The bill establishes a federal floor of privacy protections for all Americans, allowing states to increase protections or respond to changes in technology and public policy.
• Supporting Privacy Research and Development – The bill directs the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to establish a privacy risk management framework and carry out research associated with mitigating privacy risk. Additionally, it directs NIST to make competitive awards to institutes of higher education or non-profit organizations to support research around privacy-preserving technologies.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted rules to deter arbitrage of the access charge system that is designed to compensate carriers for use of their networks by other carriers. The rules are aimed at ending harmful arbitrage practices that raise costs for long-distance carriers and their customers. The rules apply to access-stimulation traffic that terminates through Internet Protocol Enabled Service (IPES) Providers, and would establish a bright-line methodology for determining the relevant traffic ratios for both local exchange carriers (LECs) and IPES Providers, thereby avoiding any confusion about whether a LEC or IPES Provider should be considered to be engaged in Access Stimulation.

The Federal Communications Commission took a fresh look at spectrum management and established a set of high-level principles on how the FCC intends to manage spectrum going forward. The Policy Statement is part of the FCC’s effort to reorient its spectrum management framework to a holistic consideration of both transmitter and receiver components of wireless systems. The Policy Statement underscores the important role that improved receiver performance can play in promoting more efficient spectrum use and enabling valuable new services to be introduced that will benefit the American public. The Policy Statement adopted will help inform potential future FCC considerations and actions concerning harmful interference issues, the responsibilities of both transmitters and receivers to mitigate interference, and the further regulatory steps to ensure coexistence among services in increasingly congested spectrum bands.

Today, government officials have new strategic decisions to make just as momentous as the ones the intersection of policy and technology dumped in our Federal Communications Commission laps back in the early 1990’s. As we look out on a future in which more and more of our economic and civic activity involves online communications, we should not forget there is an urgent and critical task: eliminating the digital divide. Just as restricting home ownership in the 1930’s still causes negative reverberations for us today, so too, if restrictions on digital access and utilization, whatever their cause, were allowed to continue, it will weaken our economy and society for generations to come. This has been clear at least since 2010 when the National Broadband Plan found that “The cost of this digital exclusion is large and growing.” Congress put this understanding into law when, in the 2021 infrastructure bill, it wrote that “a broadband connection and digital literacy are increasingly critical to how individuals participate in the society, economy, and civic institutions of the United States; and access health care and essential services, obtain education, and build careers.” And it provided funds to build networks everywhere and to assure that all could afford the service. It is a great thing, and a necessary thing, to understand the divide and commit resources to address it. It is another, however, to effectively execute in solving the problem.

There are a variety of landline or wireless technologies that can deliver broadband. In most instances, wireless solutions have an advantage with respect to mobility and transferability (the ability to move broadband investment from one subscriber location to another). However, this advantage often disappears (and sometimes flips) when considering the increased operational expenses of wireless and the ongoing capital investment required. Licensed spectrum is not considered because it is a limited valuable commodity that should be reserved for mobility applications, and in fact, we should discourage the deployment of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funded networks using licensed spectrum for that reason. Much of the BEAD funding will be focused on rural areas. Rural wireless solutions that are practical for rural broadband are left only with mid-band (1-6 GHz range) or low-band (less than 1 GHz). The only spectrum available for use by most broadband providers in these bands are in an unlicensed band or lightly licensed band. As broadband demands continue to increase, it will become increasingly difficult for wireless providers (especially those relying on unlicensed spectrum) to meet the fixed broadband needs of their customers – largely due to the scarcity of spectrum that is suitable for rural broadband applications. Mid-band spectrum may be reasonably well-suited for use for long distances in rural areas, but there is not enough of it to provide future broadband speed demands.

The Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA) announced a statewide initiative called ACP4ME to increase awareness of and enrollment in the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a federal program to help lower-income households pay for high-speed internet. In Maine, 238,710 households are eligible for the ACP, yet only about 76,718 (32% of those eligible) have enrolled. Funding for the ACP is limited, so to receive the most benefit and signal the importance of the program, the Maine Connectivity Authority urges Mainers to enroll. MCA is working with EducationSuperHighway, a national non-profit working to close the broadband affordability gap, and has launched a pre-enrollment tool and ACP4ME resources to help Maine households prepare and succeed with enrollment: GetACP.org/Maine.

The internet is facing multiple crises. From algorithmically fueled misinformation on Facebook to communities abandoned by large internet service providers, the tension between digital monopolies’ profit interests and the public interest is glaringly evident. Consensus is growing that the internet we have is not the internet that we want or need. In recent years, a diverse array of thinkers has begun to coalesce around bold ideas for radically democratizing the internet—from the pipes that connect us to the internet to the platforms that distribute news and information. There are two main schools of criticism as it relates to the modern internet:

• The Dominant Paradigm: The Tinkerers and Tweakers. The dominant paradigm of internet criticism is premised on the proposition that while the profit interests of corporations and the public’s interests are not always aligned, they can be reconciled through enlightened, discerning public policy. Adherents of the dominant paradigm seek not to slay the digital giants, but to tame their worst impulses. What the dominant paradigm of tech criticism ultimately suggests is that we can reform the internet from within the coordinates of our current profit-driven internet system—that we can tinker and tweak our way out of the structural crises plaguing our information and communication systems. 
• The Democratizers: Building a New Internet in the Shell of the Old. This cohort of thinkers relates the manifold maladies that plague the contemporary Internet to its underlying political economy. In this view, there is a structural antagonism between the owners of the Internet and its users, between the profit interests of digital monopolists and the public’s interest in an open, empowering Internet. In other words: we can have an internet that works for Silicon Valley and telecom companies, or we can have an internet that works for the people. But we cannot have both. The failure of the digital goliaths to serve any semblance of democracy has inspired numerous attempts to create a more democratic, egalitarian internet.