State of Telecommunications Policy in the US Today

The Trump FCC has announced that it's taking formal steps to weaken or eliminate the rules as part of the agency’s broad, frontal assault on consumer protections. On October 30, the The Trump FCC under Brendan Carr voted in favor of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to eliminate or weaken the rules; especially requirements that ISPs transparently detail itemized fees buried in their advertised prices.

Legal analysts are questioning the recent assertion by the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) that the agency can legally withhold federal broadband deployment funds from states that have laws enforcing net neutrality or that have enacted affordable broadband legislation. Last week in speaking before the conservative Hudson Institute, NTIA administrator Arielle Roth offered remarks that have legal observers scratching their heads in bewilderment.

Superior, Wisconsin’s community-owned open access fiber network has gone live in its first two deployment neighborhoods, as the city works toward providing affordable next-generation fiber access to the city’s long under-served community of 26,000. The city’s open access network means that multiple broadband providers can compete over the same shared infrastructure and so far two independent ISPs are offering retail service to residents.

A recently published study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York details how to more accurately measure the elusive nature of affordable broadband costs at the community level. It also pinpoints multiple contributing factors such as the state of local infrastructure and how lower performing broadband access technologies can force low-income households to choose between cellular service or home Internet service.

California lawmakers approved new legislation letting renters opt out of bulk-billing arrangements that force them to pay for Internet service from a specific provider. Lawmakers say they didn’t ban the practice for fear of undermining some of the more beneficial aspects of bulk billing, which can make deployments more financially tenable for smaller providers.

The Trump FCC has voted to kill two different programs that helped bring free Wi-Fi to school kids in underserved poor and rural U.S. communities. It’s the latest casualty of an administration that has been taking a brutal hatchet to FCC consumer protection and affordability initiatives, many of which were developed over decades – with popular bipartisan support.