On the Friday before a long weekend, I want to clear the decks on stories I wanted you to hear. Let’s look at some legislative moves.
The Biden-Harris Administration has announced nearly $700 million in grants and loans to connect rural residents, farmers, and business owners in 22 states and the Marshall Islands to reliable, affordable, high-speed internet through the ReConnect Program. This program is designed to fund the nation’s most difficult high-speed internet projects, which are the most rural, remote, and unserved communities. This investment is part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to rebuild the economy from the bottom up and middle out by rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected requests from US broadband providers to eliminate a requirement that they list all of their monthly fees. The FCC is implementing broadband-label rules, which require ISPs to display labels to consumers at the point of sale and include information such as the monthly price, additional fees, introductory rates, data caps, charges for data overages, and performance metrics. The FCC order yesterday said that providers must itemize the fees they add to base monthly prices, including fees related to government programs they choose to ‘pass through’ to consumers, such as fees related to universal service or regulatory fees.
A proposed cybersecurity law in the U.K. could require software providers to obtain government approval before patching flaws in their software. The law attempts to weaken services that provide end-to-end encryption or deter companies from adding such encryption to their products. The ramifications could have incredible consequences for the cybersecurity industry, and the proposed law could put the U.K. in the same league as China, which requires companies to disclose vulnerabilities to the government within two days after they are discovered.
Why do we care?
No patches, please. We’re British was a perfect title for that article, so credit Runtime News. UK listeners, you’ll want to speak up.
On the US front, it’s pretty clear that a legacy of the pandemic is an understanding of the importance of broadband and the internet as critical infrastructure. That’s good… in that it’s being recognized as vital. It’s terrible because it’s table stakes, simultaneously moving it lower in the value chain as its importance rises. It’s a commodity where it’s expected and not a differentiator. The inability to deliver here is instant disqualification.