Showing archive for: “Telecommunications & Regulated Industries”
The FCC’s Public Interest in Your Personnel Files
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licenses television stations. Does that make it Disney’s human resources department? The agency seems to think so, invoking a “public interest” mandate to investigate the company’s diversity policies—a mandate whose meaning seems to change with whoever holds power. Under the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, the FCC has initiated ... The FCC’s Public Interest in Your Personnel Files
Licensed to Wait: The High Cost of Spectrum Delay
America’s wireless future is on hold, pending another study. Federal agencies control much of the spectrum needed to build it—and the process for opening those frequencies rewards incumbents for taking their time. Sustaining U.S. leadership in wireless technology requires more spectrum—the radio frequencies that carry wireless signals—for fifth- and sixth-generation mobile networks (5G and 6G), ... Licensed to Wait: The High Cost of Spectrum Delay
BEAD’s Second Act: The Future Is Pending Approval
The road to rural access to AI-enabled services runs through the permit office. Chips, data centers, and electricity get the attention, but delivering AI to a farmer’s field, a rural clinic, or a factory floor takes a broadband network. Building it means navigating utility poles, road crossings, and public rights-of-way—each with a gatekeeper who can ... BEAD’s Second Act: The Future Is Pending Approval
Fiber Freeze: How Maple Grove Made a Cable Franchise the Price of Broadband
The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Build America Agenda rests on a simple premise: Stop making it so hard to build. Federal and state policymakers have spent years reducing permitting delays, resolving pole-attachment disputes, and easing access to public rights-of-way—the public corridors used for infrastructure such as roads, utility poles, and fiber lines. These obstacles slow ... Fiber Freeze: How Maple Grove Made a Cable Franchise the Price of Broadband
Pulling the 39% Thread: Why the FCC Must Fix More Than the Broadcast Cap
The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) 39% broadcast-ownership cap is a rule for a three-network world trying to govern a streaming one. Retiring it makes sense. Retiring it by itself does not. For four decades, the FCC has barred any company from owning television stations that collectively reach more than 39% of U.S. television households. The ... Pulling the 39% Thread: Why the FCC Must Fix More Than the Broadcast Cap
Lightning in a Bottleneck: How Regulatory Gridlock Is Choking America’s Energy Boom
America’s power grid has plenty of new customers and no shortage of new ideas. What it lacks is a regulatory system capable of connecting the two. Artificial intelligence data centers, advanced manufacturing, and cryptocurrency operations are driving electricity demand sharply higher. Yet the rules for connecting new power sources and major users remain slow, fragmented, ... Lightning in a Bottleneck: How Regulatory Gridlock Is Choking America’s Energy Boom
The Cost of Holding Up Broadband
America’s multibillion-dollar broadband push rests on an unglamorous piece of infrastructure: the utility pole. Fiber may carry the future, but first someone has to pay for the wood holding it up. Broadband providers rarely own the poles their networks use. Reaching a new community usually requires attaching equipment to poles owned by a utility or ... The Cost of Holding Up Broadband
The EU’s Bid to Nationalize Space
Europe’s latest space policy has a simple theory: To build a champion, you must first clear the field. The European Commission’s newly adopted proposal to reallocate the 2 GHz mobile-satellite-service (MSS) band—a slice of radio spectrum used for satellite communications—would reserve most of that spectrum for European operators. The same proposal would limit non-EU militaries ... The EU’s Bid to Nationalize Space
The Future of News and Its Frenemies
The local news business has spent the past two decades being “saved” by people who mostly seem to want it embalmed. Every new shift in how Americans consume information—websites, social feeds, newsletters, podcasts, short-form video, artificial-intelligence summaries—gets treated less like evidence of adaptation than proof that civilization will soon forget how school-board meetings work. That ... The Future of News and Its Frenemies
The FCC Wants Final Cut
The government does not need to burn books when it can threaten licenses. Why bother with an inquisitor’s bonfire when a regulator’s raised eyebrow can do the trick? That is the modern First Amendment problem. Censorship no longer arrives only as an outright ban. More often, it comes dressed as “oversight,” “public interest,” or “compliance”—all ... The FCC Wants Final Cut
The Lifeline Program’s Afterlife Problem
A subsidy program can survive many things. Paying benefits to the dead should not be one of them. That is the problem now facing the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Lifeline program, which was designed to ensure that low-income Americans can connect to the communications networks modern life depends on. As the program has expanded to ... The Lifeline Program’s Afterlife Problem
The Last Mile Is a Paper Trail: Why Broadband Gets Stuck
Everyone wants faster broadband—no one wants to wait for the permits. Modern communications infrastructure doesn’t stand still. Providers must keep investing in upgrades and expansion to meet consumer demand. Next-generation applications—artificial intelligence (AI), artificial reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR)—will require robust infrastructure to support them. That infrastructure depends on sustained investment from a wide ... The Last Mile Is a Paper Trail: Why Broadband Gets Stuck
