Category Archives: Regulation – What is it Good For?

Kids and Social Media

There is legislation moving through Congress that will change the way that everybody uses the Internet. On June 29, the House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, H.R. 7757. This includes new rules from the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which requires online platforms to adopt default safeguards for minors, and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), which would expand federal privacy protections for minors. In early August, the Senate Commerce Committee passed the KOSA bill and sent it to the full Senate for a vote. Even if the Senate version passes, it is different than the House bill. Legal critics say there are some flaws with the House bill language that should be corrected during a reconciliation process.

There are a lot of good arguments for the legislation. Research has shown that access to social media has led to cyberbullying and other activities that are creating anxiety and depression in young people. There is also a lot of evidence that being online can lead to compulsive behavior like infinite scrolling and addictive notification loops. The law also wants to protect young people from exploitation.

Much of the rest of the world is coming to this same realization, and a lot of other countries have passed or are considering similar legislation. France enacted a law that bars children under 15 from creating new social media accounts and requires full compliance for existing accounts. The UK has announced legislation looking to block children under 16 from major social media platforms. Canadian legislators have proposed the Safe Social Media Act to restrict users under 16 and mandate strict age verification. Austria is working on a bill aimed at restricting social media access for children under 14 along with other digital literacy school reforms. Denmark announced plans to implement a national social media age floor for children under 15.

The reason I say this will change the Internet is that there is no way to implement this kind of regulation without requiring everybody on the Internet to verify their age. There are several downsides to an Internet that requires age verification. One is that this won’t just apply to social media. I have to think this is going to apply to newspapers, magazines, blogs, and a lot of other content.

The only way to verify age is to upload verifiable personal data. Some age verification processes ask for things like a copy of a government ID. Others use biometric scans that use an algorithm to guess a user’s age based on facial images or online behavior. The problem with creating age verification profiles is that they can be hacked, meaning unknown parties can use that data to pretend to be you. There are already known cases of such hacking. In 2024, the company AU10TIX was hacked. The company did age verification for various online platforms. The hackers got access to information including name, date of birth, nationality, identification number, and images of documents like drivers’ licenses. I can’t imagine that I will ever be willing to upload a picture of my driver’s license or social security number to any website.

Another issue is the lack of privacy, because this probably means that social media platforms will know the identity of everybody who visits them. The law will force them to know who you are to prove they are complying with the law.

The laws have other downsides that are a huge problem for online platforms. They will require online platforms to shield children from “dangerous” content. First, that makes each platform have to decide what is dangerous. Their attorneys are likely to advise them to block a huge amount of things that might be construed as dangerous. This probably will lead to a further dumbing down of web content. More dangerous is that governments can define what’s dangerous, which could mean being forced to block political and social information a government doesn’t like.

It seems inevitable that this is going to become a law since there were 76 sponsors of the legislation in the Senate. Any final legislation will be challenged in the Courts, which could take a while. But sometime in the next few years, this will become the law. While implementing this will be a challenge for social media companies, in the long run, this will significantly improve their ability to track people who use their site.

Senate Passes Bill for Broadband Mapping

Before the Senate paused for recess, it passed a bill introduced by Senator Deb Fisher of Nebraska that would require the FCC to undertake a major review of its broadband mapping system. The bill is labeled the Modernization, Accountability, and Planning (MAP) for Broadband Funding Act.

It’s not hard to understand why there are folks who lobbied Congress to ask the FCC to pay more attention to the maps. Anybody who has ever used the current BDC broadband mapping can describe problems and errors in the map. However, I can’t be the only one who thinks that making this request to the FCC now, as States are in the process of awarding BEAD grants to ISPs, is too little, too late. I’m highly skeptical that the maps can ever be made anywhere close to perfect.

There are two separate parts of the broadband mapping system that work together to create the maps – the fabric, which is created by Cost Quest, which is supposed to show the location of every location that might be a broadband customer. The second big component is broadband coverage data as reported by ISPs, which shows the locations they can serve and the broadband speeds they can provide.

I have a lot of sympathy for Cost Quest for ever getting an accurate fabric. If nothing else, this is a dynamic country with houses constantly being built, torn down, burned out, or abandoned. Cost Quest is forced to rely on local housing data that is often inaccurate – counties don’t really care if a property is abandoned or unused as long as somebody pays the taxes on the property. Cost Quest also seems to use satellite data to spot locations. But satellite data misses buildings (and entire roads) that are under heavy tree cover. And satellite can’t tell the difference between a house, a shed, or a burned-out abandoned building.

About the only thing that could improve the fabric is local feedback on inaccuracies. There is zero motivation for local governments to spend time and money on this if they think their areas already have good broadband or are going to be covered by broadband grants. Many local governments are fed up with the FCC map challenge after they spend big efforts trying to fix the maps during the BEAD map challenges, only to see huge numbers of their suggested changes rejected. I really can’t think of any constituency that is ever going to be motivated to try to fix the fabric in the future. It’s going to be laughable if the FCC makes map challenges easier now that nobody is likely to bother with the process.

The part of the map with the biggest problems is completely due to FCC rules. ISPs are supposed to define where they can provide service within ten days of a customer request. Many ISPs are conscientious about this while others either file ridiculously exaggerated coverage areas, or else don’t bother to update changes in their networks. But the biggest area of mapping problems comes from ISPs being able to declare marketing speed capabilities instead of something close to what they can actually deliver. Even somebody who has never looked at a broadband map can imagine ways that ISPs can abuse this rule. Some ISPs exaggerate speeds and consider the FCC maps to be a cheap source of advertisement. Others claim 100/20 Mbps or faster to stop federal and state grants being used to compete with them.

The most important change that is not in the legislation is giving the public access to the data underlying the broadband maps. It’s outrageous that there are expensive licenses required to see data that belongs to the American people. If the FCC mapping data was open and free, then I can imagine a lot of folks who would work to fix the map in their neighborhood out of altruism.

I am worried that any changes to the map are going to rebound and hurt ISPs that have already won BEAD awards. NTIA has shown an eagerness to remove locations from the map as a way to reduce the amount of BEAD grant funding, while not being equally open to adding locations to grants that were missed by the FCC maps. The only saving grace is that nothing will happen quickly. This may not be passed in the House, and if it is, the House could pass a different version that would require reconciliation. Even if enacted, this would instruct the FCC to take a fresh look at the maps, and that process could take several years. As I said at the start of the blog, this is too little too late. This would have been a wonderful bill in 2021, and now it just seems like a way for Congress to say it is doing something about broadband without actually doing anything.

The 2026 FCC Broadband Report

The FCC released its annual Section 706 report on August 14 that describes the U.S. broadband industry as of June 30, 2025. This report is created to fulfill a mandate that the FCC should update Congress once a year on the state of broadband. As seems to be the norm for these reports, they seem to take over a year to compile and publish.  The data supporting this report comes from the Broadband Data Collection (BDC) process where ISPs  and carriers report speed and location data to the FCC twice each year.

One of the findings of the report is that broadband coverage is growing. That’s not hard to believe. I’ve been following and reading reports of broadband projects all over the country, much of the rural builds supported by various state and federal grants and urban builds being funded by carriers and venture capital money. I’m a bit dubious of the statement that 96.9% of Americans have access to a terrestrial ISP that can deliver speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps. I’ve written many times about the exaggerations and inaccuracies in ISP reporting in the data collection process. I still think there are ISPs reporting exactly 100/20 Mbps speed capability to the FCC while delivering something slower.

Another major finding is that the digital divide is rapidly shrinking in rural America. The report says that the number of rural locations without access to 100/20 Mbps shrank by 23% from 2024 to 2025. It adds that 100/20 Mbps satellite broadband is available to almost everybody. I take exception to this claim. This is really another way of reporting on broadband coverage. Looking at the digital divide means looking at who is buying broadband, not who has the opportunity to buy. The big question that the FCC constantly ducks is affordability. There was a recent hearing in the Pennsylvania House where witnesses told the legislators that the OBBB and affordability could mean a loss of 233,000 broadband customers in Pennsylvania in 2027 due to affordability issues.

Another big claim is that there is widely available 5G. The report claims that 95% of Americans are covered with 5G that can deliver speeds of 35/3 Mbps. It says that the number of households without 5G access decreased by 30% over a two-year period. To be fair to the FCC, it is only reporting what the carriers report to it, but these claims are hard to accept. Anybody who has spent time studying the cellular coverage maps will quickly see a lot of exaggerated coverage outside of cities. Another issue with looking at June 30, 2025 data is that there were a lot of locations in the FCC database where the only fast provider was EchoStar, which shut down the cellular business earlier this year.

The other major claim is that Americans have more competitive options than ever before. The report says that 77% of households have access to at least three ISPs that can deliver speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps when including satellite in that measurement. The problem with this is that Starlink is not able or willing to serve many folks in urban areas, so while this claim is probably true based on reporting, it’s not true in the real world. A more realistic statistic is that 43.4% of households have access to three or more ISPs that can deliver 100/10 Mbps. That would mean broadband from a fiber ISP, a cable company, a FWA provider, or a WISP. While I’m positive the number is a bit inflated, a lot of people in cities have access to three ISPs out of that list.

There were other topics reported to Congress in the report. For example, the report says that cellular data speeds are increasing. The report talks about the phase-out of copper technology. The FCC touted successes in the marketplace due to its spectrum policies.

There was an interesting change in the report. The FCC dropped the long-term goal that the country should be striving to reach a future speed of at least 1 gig upload and 500 Mbps download. That goal was adopted by the FCC under Chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel. ISPs other than fiber providers hated that goal, although cable companies are on an upgrade path to largely meet that goal. But that goal was anathema to the satellite, cellular, and fixed wireless ISPs.

Updating the FCC Definition of Broadband

There has been a lot of talk about how AI is putting stress on broadband networks, and many analysts are claiming that we need faster broadband speeds to accommodate growing AI traffic. I was particularly struck by a comment from NTCA – the Rural Broadband Association in a filing at the FCC earlier this year in the FCC docket looking at USF reform. NTCA wrote, “The burgeoning growth of [artificial intelligence] demands modern networks with upload speeds much closer to symmetrical to support the applications and devices that it supports.” The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) told the FCC in 2025 that the 20 Mbps upstream standard is far too low and should be increased to 100 Mbps.

The FCC definition of broadband of 100/25 Mbps was adopted in March 2024. However, Commissioner Rosenworcel had been pushing for the increase to 100/20 Mbps for several years before that. It had been clear to everybody but the Ajit Pai FCC that the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband was obsolete when the FCC’s mapping in 2022 showed that 90% of homes already had access to 100 Mbps download speed.

All of this leads me to ask if the 100/20 Mbps definition is already obsolete. Recent data from OpenVault says that 43% of U.S. households now subscribe to speeds faster than 500 Mbps download and 70% of homes subscribe to speeds of 200 Mbps or faster. It’s hard to look at these statistics and think that 100/20 Mbps should be the standard.

Unfortunately, the definition of broadband has political and financial overtones. A higher definition of broadband would declare that certain technologies are not really acceptable broadband. If we buy the arguments from NTCA and NRECA, then satellite broadband and FWA cellular would no longer be considered broadband. A huge percentage of cable company networks still have upload speeds far below 100 Mbps, even though there are numerous technology fixes for them to upgrade to faster, and even symmetrical speeds.

In a perfect world, the definition of broadband would be increased regularly to reflect that reality of the marketplace. But that’s not going to happen with this FCC, and in fact, in 2025, Commission Carr asked if the 100/20 Mbps definition is too high.

What is the right definition of broadband?. The easiest starting point for looking at download speeds is to look at the historical evolution of the definition of broadband from 4/1 Mbps, to 25/3 Mbps, to 100/20 Mbps. I’ve shown the following chart before that just trends forward that historic growth trend. If the definition of download speed continues on the same growth curve as from 1996 to 2022 (when the definition should have been 100 Mbps), the following definition of broadband is projected.This suggests the minimum definition of download broadband for 2027 would be 250 Mbps. That doesn’t seem at all out of line considering the OpenVault numbers that say that 70% of U.S. homes already subscribe to speeds faster than 200 Mbps.

Setting a definition for upload speeds is harder. The traditional definition of upload was low because there wasn’t really any use for it in most homes. But that has all changed in the last decade, particularly after the pandemic. People need upload bandwidth for a lot of uses. Most of us now work in the cloud all day. Video calls are the norm – I haven’t been on a voice conference call in ages. People game online and create content. We connect to portals for education that need significant and steady upload bandwidth.

The recent OpenVault report for the end of the second quarter of 2026 says that the average U.S. home uploaded 58 gigabytes of data per month, with upload usage growing at a rate of 20% per year. I always have to remind myself that the average means there are a lot of homes that upload a lot more than 58 gigabytes per month. That usage is two-and-a-half times the upload usage at the end of the pandemic and is way higher than usage a decade ago. I don’t know if the definition of upload should be 100 Mbps, as NRECA suggests, but I know it should be significantly higher than 20 Mbps, particularly if the AI folks are right.

In that same filing in the USF docket, NTCA also reminded the FCC that it is required to meet Section 254 of the Communications Act, which requires rural areas to have “reasonable comparability” to broadband service in urban areas. There are few urban and suburban areas where people can’t buy gigabit and faster download speeds, with an increasing percentage of homes that can buy gigabit upload. To be realistic, any definition of broadband that is set is strictly relevant only to rural areas, because urban speeds already far exceed any speed definition the FCC could ever consider.

Are Digital Equity Grants Back

There seems to be an increasing chance that the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program is back in play. In a status report filed by the Department of Commerce in the lawsuit where NDIA filed to reinstate the grant program, the government said it is targeting a December 2026 opening date for applications for the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program. Like everything associated with BEAD and the Digital Equity Grant programs, nothing is final until this is put in place. We’ve seen NTIA slow-roll the grant process at every turn.

As a reminder, the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program will be administered and the grants awarded directly by NTIA. The budget for this grant program is $1.25 billion, which was set by legislation to be $250 million per year for the years 2022 through 2026. 5% of the total funding is reserved for Native Entities, and 1% is set aside for territories. The original IIJA legislation had also included $1.44 billion to go to the State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program. The stated goal of this grant program is to promote the achievement of digital equity, support digital inclusion activities, and build capacity for efforts by States relating to the adoption of broadband.

NTIA had launched the Competitive Grant Program in 2024, with $750 million in grants. There were roughly 700 applicants to the program, and near the end of 2024 NTIA announced a number of award winners. This included a $7.7 million grant to Land of Sky Regional Council for my region of western North Carolina. The administration canceled both programs in May 2024. They said the grants were illegal since they included race as one of the categories to consider when using the grant funding.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance sued the administration over the cancellation, and there were negotiations between the two sides and the Court that led to this reinstatement of the Competitive Grant Program. The reconstituted grants will remove all reference to race as part of the use of the grants.

Assuming that NTIA meets the December date to open the grant window, it seems almost certain that every application to the grants will have to be refiled. But hopefully, the full $1.25 billion of funding would be open for applicants.

NTIA said it is currently preparing a new Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the coming rounds of grants. This is the document that defines the application process for the grants. If the experience of the big changes made to the BEAD grant program is any indication, there could be big changes. NTIA completely rewrote the BEAD grant program with the Benefit of the Bargain rules, and it won’t shock anybody if the rules for the Competitive Grant Program change as well.

There has been no word out of NTIA about releasing the State Digital Equity Capacity Grant funding to States. It would seem logical that as long as the same changes are made to remove reference to race, these grants could be released. But there has been nothing logical about the entire pile of funding that came from the IIJA.

There is still a big question about whether the funding for both programs is included in the 2027 federal budget? As is typical with Congress, budget bills are being punted down the road, and there is no telling when there will be an actual budget for Commerce. The Administration recommended killing this funding for 2027, and we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of the budget process. It’s conceivable that the grants will be killed through the backdoor of the budget process, which would undo anything Commerce is agreeing to now.

At least half of this mess is due to the slowness of NTIA since 2020. The funding for these grants was supposed to start flowing in 2022, and the first grant applications were submitted in September 2024. Half of this money should have already been awarded and in use before the programs were canceled in 2025. I’ve never heard any good story why NTIA took so long to launch a fairly straightforward grant program.

Retiring AT&T Copper in California

Regulatory fights between state and federal regulators sometimes get messy, and it’s been a while since we’ve seen anything as messy as AT&T’s attempt to retire and walk away from copper facilities in California.

AT&T asked the California Public Service Commission (CPUC) for the ability to start retiring copper telephone networks in March 2023. It wasn’t an unusual request since AT&T is in the process of retiring copper in every other state where it owns last-mile copper networks. The CPUC finally ruled on that petition in June 2024 and unanimously rejected AT&T’s request. The state said that AT&T couldn’t retire copper unless the company had a functional equivalent product available for every customer who loses a copper connection.

That’s something AT&T can’t promise. The only two possible replacements for copper are fiber or FWA broadband delivered using cellular spectrum. AT&T has an alternative for customers in most urban and suburban markets. The company has built a lot of fiber and announced in May 2026 that it was planning to invest $19 billion more on fiber construction in the state. Most urban customers should also be able to use FWA cellular broadband if they lose copper, with the caveat that too many customers on FWA in a neighborhood could overwhelm the cellular network.

AT&T’s big problem comes in rural areas, where there are large areas where AT&T doesn’t have enough cellular coverage to reach homes with cellular broadband. It’s not unusual in most rural counties for a cellular carrier to serve only half of the area in a county, or less. There have been reports all around the country about customers who have been stranded after losing copper with no affordable voice option. AT&T has argued at the FCC that they can walk away from copper as long as customers can buy voice from somebody else. It feels extreme to have to replace an AT&T telephone line, that range from $25 to $63 per month with Starlink satellite broadband priced at $130 per month.

In May of this year, AT&T tried again. The company sued California and asked the federal courts to allow it to ignore the CPUC ruling. At the same time, AT&T asked the FCC to allow the company to walk away from carrier of last resort obligations (COLR) in California. The COLR request is a slightly different question than asking to be able to tear down copper. COLR are rules that require AT&T to still connect copper to new customers, even if that means building new copper facilities.

AT&T also filed a separate petition with the FCC asking for permission to discontinue 60% of its wire centers in California, or about 360 wire centers. AT&T argued that these wire centers were not compliant with the FCC’s rules requiring AT&T to support Phone-Advanced, which is a digital home phone service that runs on AT&T’s cellular network and broadband internet instead of traditional copper landline wires. Phone-Advanced lets customers keep their home number and connect up to six devices—including standard phones, fax machines, and medical monitors.

This is where it starts to become a messy jurisdictional battle. As was expected, the CPUC and California Attorney General Rob Bonta quickly challenged and asked the courts to dismiss AT&T’s federal lawsuit, while also asking the FCC to override rulings from the CPUC. In June, the FCC approved AT&T’s petition to close 360 wire centers and to cut copper to roughly 184,000 residential and 15,000 business locations across the state, but it seems like that should be ineffective while the State is saying the opposite and the issues are in court.

It’s getting hard to understand who has the final say about retiring copper in California, and it’s starting to feel probable that there might be conflicting rulings between the CPUC and the FCC. This doesn’t seem like something that is going to easily resolve, which could mean that copper will stay alive in California longer than anywhere else.

Who Should Regulate Space?

Earlier this year, two ranking members of the House Science Committee sent a letter to the FCC that reminded the agency that it didn’t have any clear authority from Congress to regulate space safety, space traffic management, or other non-communication space issues. This letter was sent when it became clear that the FCC was considering sweeping changes to the regulation of satellite constellations.

Those same two members, Republican Brian Babin and Democrat Zoe Lofgren, sent another letter in July, asking the FCC to delay a vote on new satellite regulations. The FCC Commissioners went ahead and approved the new satellite rules in its July meeting.

The FCC has been addressing space issues for years. I’ve read the applications that SpaceX filed when it originally asked the FCC for the authority to launch its current satellite constellation. Those filings are full of specifications and descriptions of how Starlink can direct satellites to avoid collisions, and how the company will deorbit satellites when they are no longer needed. The new FCC regulations cover these same issues.

The letter from Congress raises an interesting question. If the FCC doesn’t regulate these issues, then what federal agency does? The answer to that question is unclear, and it looks like various agencies have some role in regulating satellites:

  • The Department of Commerce has developed the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) that issues satellite collision warnings.
  • The Department of Defense and Space Command also tracks space objects.
  • The FAA coordinates with airplanes to avoid areas near rocket launches.
  • The FCC is clearly in charge of the spectrum issues used to communicate between satellites and Earth.

Congress hasn’t specifically given any agency the authority to regulate orbital debris mitigation and deorbiting rules. This is a relatively new issue due to the large number of satellites in orbit, and the much larger number of planned satellites coming over the next decade. When the FCC took on this role with early communication satellites, it didn’t have any Congressional mandate to do so, because Congress hadn’t given that specific authority to anybody. But nobody was very concerned about this issue a decade ago, when there were 4,200 objects in orbit, including only 1,400 operational satellites.

It appears that the FCC has taken on this role in the regulatory vacuum. The House Science Committee had sent letters to the FCC making the same points to Chairman Ajit Pai in 2020 and Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in 2022. That means that Congress has had years to debate the issue and decide who should regulate space safety. There have been discussions in Congress about assigning this role to the Department of Commerce, but no votes have been taken to do so.

Clearly somebody needs to regulate space safety. Scientists and space experts have been warning about the disaster that would ensue if there are major collisions of satellites that result in a cloud of debris. The satellite industry is growing to be a significant piece of the economy, and a major collision event could quickly cripple communications satellites for years.

I have to wonder if the FCC is the right place in the government to be tackling these issues today. Does the agency have enough space experts on staff to fully evaluate if satellite companies are taking the right precautions? Does any federal agency? There will be a lot of finger-pointing if a collision disaster happens, but it seems like the only place to point the finger would be Congress.

Slaughter and the FCC

Today’s blog muses a bit on the impact of the Supreme Court ruling in Trump vs Slaughter. The case arose when President Trump fired Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, the two Democratic Commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, soon after he took office. The Congressional legislation that established the FTC said that Commissioners serve seven-year terms, and that a president can only fire a Commissioner “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”. Slaughter sued, and won in District Court, and that ruling was upheld by a split decision at the Court of Appeals. However, when the split decision was appealed to the Supreme Court, the Court ruled that a president has the authority to fire regulators in independent agencies.

As soon as this was announced, there was press speculation that the President might also fire Commissioner Anna Gomez, the sole Democratic Commissioner at the FCC. It’s unlikely that the administration would currently fire Gomez. Firing Gomez would mean that the FCC wouldn’t have a quorum, which requires three Commissioners be present before the FCC can vote on any actions. The FCC currently only has three Commissioners – Chairman Carr, Republican Commissioner Olivia Trusty, and Commissioner Gomez. We know what it looks like to not have a quorum since this happened a number of times in the past. The most recent time was last year when Commissioners Geoffrey Starks and Nathan Simington both resigned from the FCC in June 2025. That left only Chairman Carr and Commissioner Gomez, and the FCC was unable to conduct business until Commissioner Trusty was approved by the Senate.

The FCC doesn’t shut down without a quorum. The agency continues with all of its normal functions, like reviewing and approving new communications devices or granting simple wireless licenses for things like microwave connections. But nothing can be done that requires a vote of the Commissioners, including starting new proceedings. The Congressional mandate that established the FCC also requires the composition of a full Commission must be bipartisan, with no more than two of the four Commissioners from a given party (not counting the party of the Chairman).

But the speculation about firing Commissioner Gomez ramped up last week when President Trump nominated a third Republican Commissioner. He chose Republican Danielle Thumann Severs, who is currently a senior counsel to Commission Carr, to fill one of the two open seats on the commission. The nomination was immediately sent to the Senate to start the confirmation process. If confirmed, she would serve the remaining three years on a seat with a 5-year term that began on July 1, 2024.

Thumann Severs currently advises Carr on matters before the Wireline Bureau, the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, and the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. She had been an advisor to Carr’s office from March 2021 to July 2023 and worked at Crown Castle before rejoining the FCC in August 2024.

It will raise questions about the future of the FCC and other independent agencies if Commissioner Gomez is fired after Thumann Severs is seated. Will future Presidents immediately terminate Commissioners of the opposing party in all independent agencies upon taking office? I’ve been watching the FCC for decades. My observation has been that a new Commissioner to the FCC is rarely fully effective until they’ve been in the position for a year or two and get to know staff and get deep into the issues at the agency. Having a constantly revolving door in the future would not be efficient for getting anything done.

It’s also worth noting that FCC Commissioners have regularly reached bipartisan agreement on many issues. There is no policy reason to fire Commissioner Gomez, other than to eliminate her opposing opinions that are posted after votes. I suspect that if every new president routinely fires Commissioners of the opposing party, then every decision at future FCCs will become highly partisan. As much as the big ISPs love it when they get a Commission that sides with them on issues, they also put a high value on regulatory consistency, and the big players regulated by the FCC don’t want to see rules that yoyo with every change of administration.

Foreign Ownership of ISPs

I saw a recent announcement that the FCC’s Wireless Competition Bureau had approved the transfer of WideOpenWest to Japan’s Softbank Group. WideOpenWest is the eighth-largest cable company, which operates under the brand name of WOW! The proposed transaction has Softbank buying the DigitalBridge Group, which is WOW!’s majority owner. This deal was announced at the end of 2025, just a few days before DigitalBridge and Crestview Partners took WOW! private.

The blog raises the question about foreign ownership of ISPs because the current administration has put a huge amount of emphasis on America First, which emphasizes, among other things, domestic ownership of corporations doing business in the country. There has been a statutory limit on foreign ownership in U.S. corporations that hold common carrier status or hold broadcast licenses that was created by the Telecommunications Act of 1934. However, the FCC has the ability to waive the 25% limit if it thinks the foreign ownership is in the public interest.

What prompted my question was that the FCC just announced a ban on foreign-made advanced robotic devices. This ban covers all mechanical devices, including autonomous mobile robots, humanoid robots, and quadrupeds that are capable of locomotion, obstacle avoidance, navigation, or movement that operate at a distance from a human operator.

The FCC ban was done by adding foreign-made robots to the Covered List, which is a list the FCC maintains of electronics and devices that are banned from the U.S. At the same time the FCC banned robots, they also banned foreign-made power inverters. At least for now, this ban would even stop the sale of Roombas and other automated vacuums. The FCC knew this ban would be controversial and published a lengthy FAQ about the robot and power-inverter bans. You may recall that the FCC added WiFi modems to the covered list recently.

Assuming that the WOW! transaction will be completed, they won’t be the only foreign-owned ISP in the country. The biggest is T-Mobile, with a majority ownership by the German firm Deutsche Telekom. I wrote a blog recently talking about how Deutsche Telekom is trying to merge with T-Mobile to increase the ability of T-Mobile to expand and grow much larger. It seems likely that if Deutsche Telekom can pull off this merger, the combined company would pursue the acquisition of other large U.S. ISPs. Timotheus Höttges, the CEO of Deutsche Telekom, thinks T-Mobile should be competing on an equal footing with AT&T and Verizon.

Another foreign-owned ISP is Altice USA, which is owned by the French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, who holds the 74% of shares of stock and 98% of the voting rights of the company. Altice operates under the brand name Optimum and has almost 5 million customers in 21 states. I’ve written several blogs about Altice, which is currently facing a major debt crisis. The company has $21.8 billion in debt, with a payment of $6.2 billion due in 2027. Altice has sued two of its major creditors of the company, Blackrock and Apollo Asset Management, claiming they are blocking the company from refinancing the debt.

Another foreign-owned ISP is Zipley, which is owned by BCE Inc (Bell Canada Enterprises). BCE acquired Zipley for $5 billion in 2025 after receiving a foreign ownership waiver from the FCC.

I don’t have a strong opinion about foreign ownership of ISPs. But I do find it curious that most of the other bans, like robots and WiFi modems, are being done for national security reasons. I can’t think of many industries that we care about more than those that operate and control access to the Internet, and I find it curious that the FCC continues to make exceptions to the 25% foreign ownership cap without much public debate.

Technology-neutral Policy

Arielle Roth, the Administrator of NTIA, made a speech to the American Enterprise Institute that was titled There Is No Such Thing as “Future-Proof” Technology. Her speech was in reference to the upcoming 6G technology.

She made a really interesting observation about 6G that I hadn’t seen before: That lesson is especially timely as we stand at the frontier of AI-native 6G . . . Perhaps the defining feature of AI-native 6G is not simply that it will make communications networks more intelligent. It is that it will make the future of communications even less predictable. Previous generations of wireless networks were designed primarily to move information faster. The next generation promises networks that increasingly optimize, adapt, and derive insight from the information they carry. As intelligence becomes embedded within the network itself, we should become more humble about our ability to know which technologies, architectures, or applications will ultimately prevail.

Obviously, NTIA is on the 6G bandwagon, much like the first Trump administration was on the 5G bandwagon. To some degree, it’s the government’s role to promote new technologies, and this is done for many other technologies outside of telecom.

I have my doubts that carriers are going to build networks that are less predictable, because that sounds rife with risk. I have serious doubts that the big carriers are going to hand off the responsibility to operate 6G networks completely to AI. The industry learned a lesson last year with the big Verizon outage that lasted far longer than it should have when technicians couldn’t figure out how to fix problems in AI-generated software. Everything I’ve been reading is that the big nationwide networks are bringing more human intervention back into the operation and troubleshooting of networks.

The speech then went on to talk about technology-neutrality. Roth said that the government should never favor any technology, since doing so changes the direction of industry by crowding out innovation.

To some degree, it’s hard to argue with that statement since there are many examples in the past where governments stuck with older technologies and ignored innovations. But it’s hard to say that the current Administration is technology-neutral when it favors traditional power technologies over wind and solar.

Roth said that technology-neutrality matters the most in rural areas, where low-Earth orbit satellite constellations have reduced the cost of reaching people. She said satellite has made obsolete the idea that we need to build wireline networks to reach homes.

I don’t think she is going to find very many local governments and people in rural areas who share her vision that satellite technology is superior to fiber networks. I’ve worked with several hundred counties who understand that a fiber network build today puts their county in a good competitive position for the rest of this century. I don’t know one rural county who regrets the construction of fiber networks.

I find it interesting that she brought up rural broadband in the context of touting 6G, because 6G is not coming to most of rural America, just like 5G didn’t. If anything, the transition from using lower frequencies for 4G to higher ones for 5G and 6G means that rural cellular coverage will continue to shrink over time.

Just as an aside, as she has done in the past, Roth referred to the reduction of BEAD infrastructure grants as a savings to the taxpayer – again hinting that NTIA is going to be reluctant to release much, if any, of the BEAD nondeployment funds.