Policy & Regulation

FCC Doubts LEO Satellite Broadband Services Like SpaceX’s Starlink Can Meet Latency Requirements

FCC has cast serious doubts about the capability of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite operators, such as SpaceX's Starlink, to provide low-latency broadband and thus their eligibility to bid. more

Department of Commerce to Allow US Companies Work With Chinese to Develop 5G and Other Standards

A new rule announced by the U.S. Department of Commerce on Monday enables American companies to contribute to standards-development activities in the telecommunications sector more fully. more

Rural Broadband Subsidy – What’s the Rush?

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has adopted procedures for Phase I of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, which will award up to $16 billion in support over ten years for the deployment of fixed broadband networks to homes and businesses in census tracks that are unserved by voice and broadband with download speeds of at least 25 Mbps. more

Privacy in the Age of COVID-19

The Washington Post reports that a recent poll conducted shows that 3 out of 5 Americans are unable or unwilling to use an infection-alerting app developed by Google and Apple. About 1 in 6 adults can't use the app because they don't own a smartphone -- with the lowest ownership levels for those 65 and older. People with smartphones evenly split between those willing versus unwilling to use such an app. more

Canada Caves to the US, Blocks Huawei 5G (Inference)

Huawei is the strong favorite of Canadian network builders, for good products and extraordinary support. It displaced the incumbents at Bell Canada years ago and has a joint "Living Lab" in Vancouver with Telus. Huawei had already won the 5G contracts. It has a thousand researchers and spends a quarter billion dollars on Canadian R&D. It was a government decision. more

A New U.S. National Broadband Plan?

United States Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass) introduced a bill that would require that the FCC create a new National Broadband Plan by July 2021. This plan would lay out the national goals needed for broadband going forward and also provide an update on how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted Internet access. I am not a big fan of the concept of a national plan for many reasons. more

The Costs of Trump’s 5G Wall

Over the past three years, Trump and his followers around Washington have begun to erect the equivalent of his Southern Border Wall around the nation's information network infrastructure - especially for 5G. The tactics are similar - keep out foreign invaders who are virtually sneaking across the borders to steal the nation's information resources and controlling our internet things. The tactics and mantras are almost identical. more

CircleID Launches the First in a Series of Community Dialogues on COVID-19 and the Internet

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the rapid migration of the world's workforce and consumer services to virtual spaces, has amplified the Internet governance and policy issues including infrastructure, access, exponential instances of fraud and abuse, global cooperation and data privacy, to name but a few. The need for practical, scalable and efficient solutions has risen dramatically. more

Internet Governance and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Part 5: Article 15-17

Internet Governance, like all governance, needs to be founded in guiding principles from which all policy making is derived. There are no more fundamental principles to guide our policy making than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (UDHR). This article as Part 5 of the series of articles (published in installments), and we are revisiting Article 15 to look at empowered Digital Citizenship and Internet Governance, to move on to the rights to a family and property more

The Price of Lack of Clarity

As anyone reading this blog, assuredly knows, the world is in the grip of a deadly pandemic. One way to contain it is contact-tracing: finding those who have been near infected people and getting them to self-quarantine. Some experts think that because of how rapidly newly infected individuals themselves become contagious, we need some sort of automated scheme. That is, traditional contact tracing is labor-intensive and time-consuming - a time we don't have. more

Your Data or Your Life? Towards the Acceptance of Digital Technologies and Data in Medicine

There is currently a heated discussion going on in Europe, and particularly here in Germany, about the use of COVID-19 digital tracing apps, a discussion that shows us how much the Internet has become a matter of life and death. The uses for such apps are undeniable, but the idea of deployment still meets with popular resistance. Sensitized by countless leaks and hacks, and chafing under restrictions in their freedom of movement, people are concerned that even the last zones of privacy are to be monitored, and that the personal data collected could be misused. more

Cross-Pollination in Cyberspace and the Internet Governance “Spaghetti-Ball”

In mid-May 2020, UN-Secretary General Antonio Guterres will present a "Roadmap for Digital Cooperation". This will be another milestone in the discussion on the future of cyberspace, pushed further forward by the UN High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation (HLP), co-chaired by Jack Ma (AliBaba) und Melinda Gates (Microsoft Foundation) The HLP Final Report presented five groups of recommendations. Discussion started during the 14th IGF in Berlin... more

Strengthening Caribbean Internet Capacity to Support Local Online Services

The Caribbean needs more robust infrastructure to support the delivery of local online services during the COVID-19 pandemic and for crises to come. Public health and safety mandates, from social distancing and quarantines to stay-at-home orders and curfews, have confined an estimated one billion persons to their homes globally. The sudden restrictions on social movement have created a reliance on the Internet and technology-enabled services. This should come as no surprise. more

5G Security – Metrics of the Engaged

This past month on 03-06 March, the global industry sub-group that exists at the center of 5G security met virtually. It is known as SA3 within the 3GPP organization, and it met over a period of five days to deal with some of the most important 5G security requirements. 3GPP is a "partnership" created among all the world's major standards bodies, which over several decades has cooperatively developed and evolved by far the largest and most successful global electronic communications network. more

Free the Fiber Now

In a previous blog post I mentioned that the FCC had taken away restrictions to allow broadband supplied by E-Rate funding to be used to provide free WiFi for the public. That's a good idea that will provide some relief for areas with little or no other broadband. But the announcement raises a more fundamental question - why was such a restriction in place to begin with? more