Author Archives: Doug Dawson, CCG Consulting

Are Spectrum Licenses Property?

There is an interesting lawsuit in the U.S Court of Appeals for the case of Ligado Networks, LLC v. United States.  Ligado Networks filed a suit that alleges that the U.S. government unlawfully took its licensed spectrum without due compensation in favor of use by the Department of Defense. The spectrum involved in the suit is L-band spectrum, which sits next to spectrum actively used by DoD for GPS.

The government is arguing in the case that it has the right to take back spectrum when it’s needed for defense purposes. The government is arguing that Ligado doesn’t have a relevant property interest in the spectrum.

For some background, Ligado was granted the spectrum in 2020 by the FCC to use for a satellite-based 5G cellular network. The DoD opposed that license award at the time, and after the FCC awarded the spectrum, the DoD effectively cancelled the Ligado use of the spectrum in opposition to what the FCC had recently ordered. Ligado declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2025, citing the loss of the spectrum that would have been the basis for its business.

Ligado is arguing that what the government is doing is a taking, and that the government could claim any spectrum without compensating the spectrum owner.

USTelecom wrote a brief in the case in support of Ligado Networks. USTelecom argues that its members spend billions of dollars to buy spectrum, and billions more to build networks that use the spectrum. They argue that the government’s actions in this case undermine the ability of carriers to rely on spectrum, which will dampen the willingness to spend a lot of money for spectrum that could be taken away at any time.

The suit should be of interest to WISPs since there is a possibility that the FCC could reclaim CMRS spectrum to meet the Congressional mandate to to find more spectrum for  cellular auctions. The WISP industry has been working hard to protect that spectrum, but this case has to make them nervous.

USTelecom further argues that the government could use the same logic to argue that it could take back rights-of-way or other uses of public lands. In case that sounds far-fetched, the Supreme Court of Georgia recently ruled that local governments can withdraw contracts that granted rights-of-way, by relying on an argument that no contract can last forever, with no end date. The Georgia rights-of-way will likely be renegotiated. But the principle is bad news for telcos, cable companies, electric companies, wireless companies, and the many businesses that rely on maintaining rights-of-way to support long-term infrastructure. The same logic can hold for public lands.

A judge ruled in November that the Ligado suit can continue to examine the issue of whether spectrum licenses are property. This is a suit worth keeping an eye on.

Digital Opportunity in Action

I recently attended a wonderful event sponsored by the Blue Ridge Broadband Alliance. The Alliance is headquartered in Asheville and is focused on improving broadband in the many rural counties in Western North Carolina. The Alliance is being led by Sara Nichols with help from two great sponsors – The Benton Institute and the Dogwood Health Trust’s Digital Opportunity Initiative.

The event I attended was a Digital Opportunity Pitch Party where four local groups made a pitch to the crowd and to a great panel of judges to vie for funding to support their digital opportunity efforts. The four organization that made pitches were AB Tech, OurJourney, Swift App School, and Through the Trees in 828. All four pitches highlighted great local efforts to assist people in the region with digital assistance. All four groups won an award that ranged from $1,000 to $4,000.

The overall winner was OurJourney. This is a non-profit organization whose founders were originally incarcerated in North Carolina, who now have a mission to support those who are returning from incarceration with their reentry journey.

OurJourney has created a reentry kit. The kit includes a booklet called What to Expect: Your First Days Free along with a package of information tailored for each County in North Carolina. The package advises those in reentry on a wide range of issues like finding a job and transitional housing. The package includes contact information for agencies, organizations, faith- based ministries, and businesses that provide services for those who are returning from prison. Also included is a handbook from the DMV on how to renew a driver’s license, a t-shirt, and a gift-card for two meals.

You might wonder what this has to do with digital equity. Each reentry kit includes a Samsung smartphone and three months of pre-paid service. OurJourney has also created  a phone app that provides a wide range of  assistance.

One important service from OurJourney is a tutorial on to use a cellphone, something that is going to be unfamiliar for anybody who has been incarcerated for a number of years. It’s easy for the average person to think that using a cellphone is natural and intuitive, but it involves a number of digital skill that we all learned over many years. For somebody who has never used the Internet or a smartphone, simple tasks like web searching, banking, or shopping can be overwhelming. OurJourney also has a help desk that offers one-on-one training and is available to answer questions.

What’s most impressive about OurJourney is that they know, after a few years of doing this, that what they are doing works. They are already seeing that people who get their assistance have a far lower recidivism rate than for others coming out of incarceration Prison officials and County officials strongly support and recommend the program to those coming out of incarceration.

The specific pitch that OurJourney made to the Blue Ridge Broadband Alliance was help to fund the creation of a program for women since they previously have only supported men. Women reentering society have different needs and concerns than men.

People often tell me that they don’t fully understand what digital opportunity training really does. OurJourney is one of many examples from around the country of local organizations and programs that are helping those who most need the help to navigate the digital world. They are doing it in the only way that really works by helping people one-on-one.

Where Were the ISPs?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how the BEAD grant program got off track. Even before the current giant swing in rules by NTIA, the program had a lot of problems. One of my observations about the BEAD grant program is that ISPs were not an integral part of developing the grant rules. ISPs were largely ignored from the start and were only brought into the BEAD process after the rules were largely set in concrete.

This is actually not that unusual in the world of grants, but BEAD was supposed to be different. The BEAD legislation required State Broadband Offices to reach out to stakeholders in “every corner of a state” to solicit feedback on what should be accomplished with the BEAD program.

The BEAD process wasn’t just about infrastructure and also included funding that might be used for distributing computers and devices and training people how to use them. It made sense for Broadband Offices to reach out to listen, particularly since many States had newly created Broadband Offices that had recently been created to handle the grants funded by the Capital Project Funds.

I sat through the outreach process in a number of States, and was disappointed when, in many States, there was no listening involved, just Broadband Offices talking about the BEAD timeline. But the real flaw of the outreach program to me was that ISPs were not considered as major stakeholders in this process. For the infrastructure portion of BEAD, ISPs are the only stakeholders that really matter, because they are the ones who will raise the needed matching funds, build, and operate the grant-funded networks.

A lot of the problems encountered in the BEAD process could have been avoided if NTIA and States had asked ISPs upfront what it would take for BEAD to be attractive to them. The first time I read through the legislation, I identified a number of requirements that ISPs were going to hate. In practice, many of the BEAD processes turned out to be even worse than I had feared. For example, the map challenge process, as devised by NTIA, was a total nightmare that had no chance of functioning as intended. States could have done a much better job, and many States already had created their own broadband maps of the areas that needed better broadband. Those efforts were ignored.

I had naively hoped that since BEAD was the first grant program to require public feedback, States would end up loosening the worst of the rules to make the program work. To me, the ideal grant program allows a Broadband Office to waive requirements that are a problem for specific ISPs. The State broadband grants in many states were flexible to make them work.

Unfortunately, any hope that BEAD could work well died when it became clear that States were not going to be given much latitude. From the outset, it quickly became clear that NTIA was not going to be an advisor to State broadband programs. Instead, NTIA dictated practically every aspect of the BEAD rules and process. NTIA left very little to State discretion.

When it’s over, I think the NTIA decision to take full charge of BEAD will ultimately prove to be the fatal flaw of the program. It didn’t have to happen this way. It was clear in the legislation that Congress intended States to develop unique plans for BEAD that worked for each of them. We know what a grant program looks like the federal governments hands over the reins to States. The Capital Projects Fund gave over $9 billion to States to award broadband infrastructure grants. Treasury created some basic rules but largely let States decide how to implement and operate the grant programs. States took a wide variety of approaches to choosing ISPs for the funding. In the end, CPF was a State-directed grant program with only light oversight provided by the federal government. If NTIA had adopted the same philosophy with BEAD, construction would have started for grant-funded projects a few years ago.

Any infrastructure grant program can only be successful if ISPs are willing to participate. State Broadband Offices understand this and were adept at making State grant programs work.

BEAD became so out of kilter that many States ended up with a large number of locations where no ISPs other than Satellite providers made bids. If States had run these programs from the start, they would have found a way to bring local ISPs into the mix. They would have been able to fund a lot of fiber, but would not have hesitated to fund other technologies when that made sense. And they would have accomplished all of the steps required by the legislation in a lot less than four years.

Creative Destruction

The Nobel Prize for economics this year went to three economists who together developed an economic concept known as creative destruction. Creative destruction describes the economic impact that occurs when new technologies displace old ones.

Joel Mokyr is an economic historian. He identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress. His work pointed out that economic growth requires that a society must value the accumulation of useful knowledge, have the capability to transform ideas into tangible production, and have the cultural willingness to embrace change. He highlighted periods in history that were full of innovations, like ancient China, the Islamic world, and ancient Greece and Rome. But these societies never saw sustained economic growth. He contrasted this with the Enlightenment era, starting in 1750, when Western Europe began to institutionalize curiosity and reward experimentation. As an example, Britain’s Industrial Revolution celebrated innovation as a virtue rather than a threat.

Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt shared the prize for developing a dynamic mathematical economic model that can quantify the impact of new technologies, products, and business models emerging to replace old ones. In the Aghion-Howitt model, firms invest in research and development in the hope of discovering better technologies. Innovators hope to be rewarded for breakthroughs with a temporary monopoly as their breakthrough renders existing technologies obsolete.

The dynamic economy created by creative destruction forces companies to constantly reinvent themselves or exit the market if they can’t keep up. The team argues that this is not a flaw and that continual renewal is the engine of economic progress. Creative destruction is not destruction for its own sake but is a way to constantly replace inferior technologies with better ones. Their theory explains why individual industries can be experiencing high turbulence while the overall sector continues to grow steadily.

Their models also warn against policies that shield incumbents from competition or attempt to “pick winners.” Governments that try to protect existing firms misunderstand the nature of growth. The process of creative destruction requires openness and freedom for new market entrants to challenge incumbents. Government policy must embrace entrepreneurship and allow for failure.

It’s interesting to look at the telecom industry from the perspective of creative destruction. From a pure technology standpoint, we’ve constantly embraced new technologies. Since 2000, when broadband emerged as in industry there has been a non-stop stream of new and faster broadband technologies that have displaced slower ones. It’s hard to think of a broadband technology that wasn’t given a chance to sink or swim on its merits in the market.

We’ve also seen a lot of companies reinvent themselves. AT&T went from a traditional telco to become a dominant cellular carrier, and is back investing again in wired fiber networks. The last twenty years have seen dozens of vendors thrive and then disappear as others made a better product.

However, at the same time, we’ve had a regulatory and legislative environment that has favored incumbents over new firms. Much of the regulation in our industry for the last thirty years has been intended to shield the giant telcos and cable companies from competition. For example, the large ISPs have been successful for years in demonizing municipal broadband as a way to preempt new competition. The big cell companies gobbled up all available spectrum to keep competitors out of the market.

But competition still finds a way to win against incumbents. Witness the recent success of FWA wireless and satellite technology. We’re starting to see historic incumbents that are stumbling and even failing, like the steady downhill trajectory of CenturyLink.

WiFi is the Problem

TechSee advertises itself as the world’s leading visual agentic AI platform. The company conducted a nationwide survey of  3,790 people that asked about real-world experiences and expectations around home WiFi performance. I think every ISP I know could have predicted the gist of the responses, but I think ISPs might be surprised at the percentage of people who are unhappy with WiFi.

The following are some of the most interesting responses to the survey:

  • WiFi problems are rampant. 68% of households had a problem with WiFi in the past year. 18% of customers experience problems daily.
  • Coverage issues within homes are a problem. 76% of respondents have problems with connectivity in some parts of their house.
  • Getting help is a challenge. Over half of homes try to fix problems themselves and 62% of them are able to make performance better. Two-thirds of homes have contacted their ISP about connectivity issues in the last year. 39% of those had a technician visit the home, and 20% of the technician visits did not fix the issue.
  • Customers expect their ISP to be proactive. Three-fourths of respondents want the ISP to test WiFi coverage in every room as part of the installation. 56% are willing to spend extra for more equipment if they can see that it solves coverage gaps.
  • Over half of homes have more than six devices connected to WiFi at any given time. The more devices connected, the higher the reported WiFi coverage problems.
  • Nearly half of homes have a router that is over three years old, with only 29% upgrading in the last two years.
  • Many ISPs market whole-home WiFi solutions. Surprisingly, customers of these packages have more problems than average.

What does all of this mean for ISPs? About one-third of customers are willing to pay extra for better WiFi performance, but if they pay extra, they expect coverage where they need it. The survey result that should concern ISPs is that nearly half of the people surveyed would switch ISPs to get better WiFi coverage and performance.

There is obviously a big gap between what ISPs promise for WiFi and what they deliver. Every ISP I know tells me that WiFi is their bane and the source of a majority of their customer complaints and unhappiness. Yet a lot of ISPs don’t have a truly premium WiFi service.

I’ve done a lot of customer surveys over the years, and I’m not sure that many ISPs fully grasp that many customers believe that WiFi is the direct signal from the ISP. Many customers use the term WiFi to refer to their broadband. This means they blame every WiFi quirk and weakness on the ISP.

I know a few ISPs that do this right. It’s not cheap to do it right, which means technician time with customers, but here is how the ISPs that do this well handle WiFi:

  • They do the full house sweep at installation and recommend a solution to improve WiFi. That might mean a better location for the primary WiFi router or installing WiFi extenders. They don’t leave an installation until WiFi is maximized. It means being honest about the parts of the home with the strongest and weakest coverage.
  • These ISPs help customers install new devices on the WiFi network if requested. This can be done remotely and lets them make sure the device is working right, and let a customer know if any problems are due to a device and not the WiFi network.
  • Some ISPs monitor WiFi usage and will contact a customer if performance degrades.
  • ISPs that charge a premium monthly WiFi fee are willing to visit customers to rebalance the network if the need arises.

Taking these steps can justify charging a significant monthly fee for premium or concierge service. Too many ISPs charge extra for nothing more than a one-time installation of WiFi extenders. Customers don’t view this as a premium service if WiFi still doesn’t work well.

This seems like an obvious service to offer if 68% of customers have WiFi problems. It’s particularly important if half of your customers are willing to change ISPs due to poor WiFi performance.

NDIA Sues Over Digital Equity Act

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) is suing the Trump administration for cancelling the funding for the Digital Equity Act. The Digital Equity Act was created by the same IIJA legislation that created the BEAD grants. The Digital Equity Act included programs to help States expand digital literacy and address barriers to accessing the internet.

The lawsuit alleges that President Trump violated the separation of powers by killing a program that had explicitly been approved and funded by Congress. The lawsuit claims that shutting down the federal program “far exceeds the constitutional authority of the Executive Branch.” NDIA is asking the court for a declaratory judgment that would reinstitute the program. NDIA was one of the many organizations that had been awarded funding from the first round of grants from the program in late 2024.

There were huge delays in deploying the funding from the Digital Equity Act, which must be laid at the feet of NTIA. The State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program was established to give money to States to distribute through grants. The stated goal of this grant program was to promote the achievement of digital equity, support digital inclusion activities, and build capacity for efforts by States relating to the adoption of broadband. The Act allocated $1.44 billion to the States for this program, with awards to be made each year from 2022 through 2026. The NTIA was extremely slow in getting this program running and in 2024 announced $840 million in funding to States to cover grants that were intended to cover the funding from 2022 through 2024.

The other major grant program was the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program, which was administered directly by NTIA. The budget for this grant program from IIJA was $1.25 billion, with $250 million per year to be awarded from 2022 until 2026. Congress liked the program so much that they added an additional $250 million in 2024. NTIA was also slow in launching this program and finally announced the first Notice of Funding Opportunity for grants in 2024.

If NTIA had followed the requirements and timeline specified by Congress, over half of the funding would have been spent by 2024. Instead, because of the inexplicable delays, the White House killed all of the grants announced in 2024, and none of this funding has ever been used.

This is not the first lawsuit that asks that the federal government fulfill funding for programs approved by Congress but killed by the current administration. For example, twenty States filed a lawsuit in June asking the courts to reinstate a wide range of grant programs. The NDIA suit is unique in that it’s the first suit that directly names President Trump as one of the defendants.

There was a lot of speculation when the Digital Equity Act was killed that it was part of an effort by DOGE to kill any federal program related to diversity and equity (DEI). While the title of the program includes the word equity, digital equity has never had any goal of addressing issues related to age, sex, or gender. Digital equity has been used in the context that the U.S. economy will be improved if more people know how to take advantage of computers and broadband. The only slight nod to any social goal in the Act was that 5% of the funding was carved out for Tribes.

The future of the funding is now in the hands of the courts. It is also seeming more likely that there will be similar suits if NTIA decides not to award the non-deployment funds from the BEAD program to States. That funding was intended for States to tackle non-infrastructure programs related to broadband.

Broadband Shorts October 2025

These are a few topics I found interesting, but which don’t support a full blog.

NTIA BEAD Work to Continue During the Shutdown. We found out that the BEAD and other programs at NTIA were not subject to the government shutdown. NTIA is continuing work on BEAD, the Middle Mile program, the Tribal Broadband Connectivity program, the Broadband Infrastructure Program, and the Connecting Minority Communities program. Overall, NTIA was able to keep 463 of its 600 employees, largely because their work isn’t tied to annual appropriations.

My irony meter instantly went into full swing because NTIA is able to use the same funds allocated to BEAD to keep the federal side of the BEAD program open while the agency is actively working to claw back as much of that same funding as possible from State broadband grants and non-deployment funds.

Rights-of-way Not Permanent? The Georgia Supreme Court rules that local governments can withdraw contracts that granted rights-of-way, by relying on an argument that no contract can last forever, with no end date. This is bad news for telcos, cable companies, electric companies, wireless companies, and the many businesses that rely on maintaining rights-of-way to support long-term infrastructure. This might not mean much beyond the specific case that drew this ruling, but it opens up the possibility of local governments requiring periodic payments to maintain rights-of-way – something that infrastructure owners will be compelled to pay once infrastructure is using the rights-of-way.

Verizon to Buy Starry. Verizon purchased the fixed wireless company Starry, which is an interesting addition to the company’s expansion of wireless broadband. Starry has developed a unique wireless technology that it uses to bring broadband to large MDUs. Starry currently has over 100,000 customers in Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, New York/New Jersey, and Washington, D.C./Virginia.

Starry uses millimeter wave spectrum to reach customers. This fits in well with Verizon’s portfolio of millimeter wave spectrum that it had hoped to use for 5G. That use quickly died when it showed that the spectrum fizzled at street level when connecting to cellphones. Remember all of the Verizon commercials with a cellphone showing gigabit speeds?

FCC to Fast-Track Satellite Expansion. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced a push to fast-track satellite applications for expansions or changes to constellations. The process currently requires years of study by the FCC to consider any request from a satellite company. Carr described his planned changes as moving from a ‘Default to No’ process to a ‘Default to Yes’ framework”. He ways this will make the assumption that satellite technologies are in the public interest and should be treated in the same way that the FCC treats other technologies. This might be viewed as a pro-Starlink change, but there are dozens of companies asking for permission to launch satellites.

SpaceX has Chinese Investors. During a lawsuit, it was discovered that SpaceX has Chinese investors, a fact that has never been made public. This instantly raised a lot of questions since SpaceX is becoming increasingly important as a U.S. military contractor.

The extent of the Chinese investments, and the type of Chinese investor, was not disclosed, but it seems certain that this is going to be investigated. SpaceX has always kept its full ownership private, and that will likely have to change if it to wants to keep the role of defense contractor.

Who Will Still Need Broadband After BEAD?

A question I’ve been asked lately is what comes after BEAD. While BEAD will build good broadband networks in a lot of rural communities, it’s becoming clear that BEAD is not going to solve a lot of the rural broadband gap. I’ve identified categories of locations that will still need better broadband after BEAD.

BEAD Satellite Awards. I start with the premise that rural communities are not going to be happy when somebody officially tells them that the federal government is giving money to Starlink or Kuiper to solve their rural broadband gap. It’s likely that NTIA and the FCC will declare that satellite is good broadband so that they can declare that the rural broadband gap has been solved.

There are also natural limitations on the capabilities of satellite broadband. It can be difficult to deliver a satellite signal through heavy tree canopy. The signal can be blocked for customers living in the shadow of hills or mountains. There are a lot of questions about the maximum number of customers that can be served simultaneously in a given geography. But the real ongoing question will be if people and local politicians will accept satellite broadband when neighboring counties have fiber in rural places. There is also a big question of affordability.

I predict there will be a growing outcry from people from areas that got satellite from BEAD who will not accept satellite as the permanent solution.

Defaults. There will continue to be defaults for existing broadband grant programs. This year saw significant RDOF defaults from Charter and CenturyLink. There will be defaults on networks funded by ARPA grants, where funding ends at the end of 2026.

I expect BEAD defaults. When NTIA took the approach of forcing ISPs to accept less funding, many of those ISPs will realize in the future that they don’t have enough money to build the promised network.

Crappy Mapping. The biggest group of locations missed by BEAD will be due to poor FCC maps. The BEAD map challenge was a total joke. It was fairly easy for ISPs to get BEAD-eligible locations removed from the map, including many that should have stayed on. The map challenge made it practically impossible to add locations to the BEAD map where the FCC maps were in error. There are two major flaws in the FCC maps that will surface as people complain about still not having adequate broadband.

There are still numerous examples of locations that are not identified on the FCC maps. I recently talked to a cooperative in Appalachia that said there were neighboring areas where the FCC fabric missed 30% of the eligible locations. This is understandable because CostQuest relies on two primary sources of data on housing: local records and satellite images. There are many counties that still have poor records. Satellite images don’t do well in areas with total tree cover that hides roads and houses from the satellite imagery.

The bigger mapping issue is ISPs that have claimed speeds of 100/20 Mbps or faster in the FCC maps but can’t deliver that speed. FCC rules allow ISPs to report marketing speeds rather than an approximation of actual speeds, so such ISPs are probably not violating any FCC rules. But while fully knowing that marketing speeds are likely exaggerated, in the grant process, we pretend that the speeds reported in the FCC maps are gospel. When the RDOF subsidy program was announced, which was to provide a subsidy to locations where speeds were less than 25/3 Mbps, the large rural telcos flooded the FCC mapping process with claims that upgraded the claimed speeds of huge numbers of locations to exactly 25/3 Mbps broadband. The FCC rejected a lot of these claims that were made on the eve of the RDOF reverse auction. When BEAD rules dictated that grants could only be made to locations where broadband speeds were less than 100/20 Mbps, many rural ISPs scrambled to claim that they could deliver exactly 100/20 Mbps.

ISPs also often overstate coverage areas in the FCC maps. An ISP is only supposed to claim locations it can connect to within ten days after a request. There are many examples of WISPs in the FCC maps that draw perfect coverage circles around a tower that ignore topography and foliage. There are many other ISPs that claim service areas that are aspirational rather than real.

The bottom line is that we will still be a long way from being able to declare the job done after the BEAD awards. To be fair, BEAD, ReConnect, ARPA, and other grants have made some huge dents in the rural broadband gap. But the day will come when the millions of people who have been left behind will make themselves heard.

Forcing Connectivity

In August, FEMA changed its disaster policy, and everybody who receives federal aid from the agency must now have an email address and must register and deal with disaster-related issues through a FEMA portal. WIRED reported having seen an internal document from FEMA that said the change is “an important step to prepare for the transition to digital payment methods and enhance communication with survivors throughout the application process.” The change is the result of an executive order in March that tasks the entire federal government with going digital and discontinuing the writing of checks for payments.

This is the first time I can recall any government agency that is only willing to correspond with constituents digitally. A huge number of local, state, and federal government systems have gone online, but I can’t recall any government processes that didn’t allow people to do things in person or using a telephone.

FEMA told WIRED that about 80% of people who need aid already do the process online. For folks who are unable to do this online, FEMA has always sent people into disaster areas to meet with and talk to people. In my area after Hurricane Helene, FEMA set up tents at public sites that were advertised on the radio. In the worst hit places, FEMA staff went door-to-door. Apparently, such local efforts are not going to happen in the future.

This is a really big deal because there are plenty of people who are illiterate and can’t deal with an online system. There are more people with no digital literacy skills, particularly a lot of the elderly, who will not be able to figure out an online portal. There are still people in every community who don’t have home broadband, don’t have a computer or laptop, or don’t own a smartphone. These people are going to be unable to interact with the government if all communications are by email and a portal.

The FEMA online process will be a huge barrier for folks with no digital skills or broadband connectivity. The process starts by registering with FEMA through a portal. The portal will then ask people to verify who they are, which means taking and sending pictures of documents. The portal will be the only source of communication for the entire assistance process. My experience with government portals suggests it won’t be as easy to use as advertised, even for people with good digital skills.

This is particularly troublesome for an agency with the mission of helping areas struck by emergencies. My region of Appalachia was decimated by Hurricane Helene. Cities and towns mostly got power and cell coverage within a few weeks, and a few more weeks to get home broadband. But a few towns were so devastated that outages were much longer. A few towns were wiped off the map. There was a handful of rural areas that were without power for months. There are still some remote roads that have still not been opened a year later. Immediately after the hurricane, nobody here was able to connect with FEMA online.

I’m sure that this is only the start, and it’s not hard to envision that all interactions with the federal government will move online. The IRS has already stopped paying refunds by check. The agency encourages people to get a bank account, but will send money on a prepaid debit card or a digital wallet. I shudder thinking of the government helping somebody who lost a home by mailing a debit card.

What is probably the most disturbing about this is that these new requirements come on the heels of NTIA cutting $3.5 billion in digital equity grant funding that was aimed at helping people improve digital skills and learn how to get online.

A New Security Risk

A new security risk has recently been brought to my attention. I was on a Teams call that included an attorney who would not let the call continue while an AI notetaker was present. His comment was that the notetaker is listening to everything that is said, transmitting everything verbatim to a data center somewhere in the cloud. He said he was aghast that people would hold meetings about sensitive topics and then give everything that was said to unknown parties outside of the call. He used the analogy that having an AI notetaker is the equivalent of inviting a reporter into a meeting.

It didn’t take much research to realize he is right. An AI notetaker records everything that is said in a meeting so that AI servers somewhere in the cloud can make a transcript or summary of the meeting. Every word said in a meeting, from the brilliant to the mundane, is sent to a data center out of the control of the people on the call.

There is no way to know what the folks who control the recording will do. At a minimum, it’s almost certain they are using the data to further train AI models, which are voracious for more data. A record of the meeting could be sold to others. It’s possible, and even likely, that somebody really good at AI prompts can figure out what is discussed at a corporate meeting.

Of course, the AI notetaker companies can all swear that they don’t use the data for purposes other than making a summary of the meeting. But I have to ask, does anybody have the slightest idea of the identity of the people who own and work at these businesses, and do you trust them? Nobody would let an unknown stranger into a work meeting, but that’s exactly what companies are doing with AI notetakers. But suddenly, companies have begun willingly sharing conversations with the cloud that they might not even want to share with everybody else inside their company. It’s hard to see this as anything but a self-inflicted data breach.

Before writing this blog, I asked a few people about this. One friend who is an AI expert said that it would be too tempting for anybody in this kind of business to monetize the data they are gathering by selling it to others to train AI models. He said that most AI companies are struggling to be profitable, and that secondary revenue streams have to be tempting (just as it is tempting for ISPs to sell user data). He thought that it’s too expensive for companies to routinely sift through the data for tidbits of corporate espionage, but that it would be possible for anybody willing to spend the processing time, or who is interested in a specific business or a specific person. He also said he would be worried that AI companies could be using the data to gather a voice print of meeting participants, something that they might otherwise have a hard time finding for most people.

I don’t have any knowledge that the companies in this line of business are doing anything nefarious with the data gathered, and perhaps they are not. But letting key information out of a closed circle of people on a call is practically the definition of a security risk. There is no way to know if this might harm a business.

There are a few companies that sell notetakers that say that they keep all data on a user’s computer and don’t share it in the cloud. The AI engine that summarizes a call is still going to be in the cloud, so unless that can be proven somehow, that still feels like a risk. Tech companies have been lying to the public about how they use the data they gather since AOL and early web companies figured out how to monetize user data.

This is one of the oddest blogs I’ve ever written because it makes me wonder if I’m being paranoid. But that feeling is probably a sign that this is a real concern.