When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color. The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.
See this page in the PDF
Federal Communications Commission
The FCC has facilitated the transition from 3G to 4G and now 5G offerings in two ways. First, it has freed spectrum—the airwaves needed to deliver wireless services. Second, it has preempted state and local siting and permitting laws that could otherwise slow down the buildout of next-generation infrastructure. One of the FCC’s great success stories from 2017 to 2020 was securing U.S. leadership in 5G.
The FCC also administers an approximately roughly $9 billion-a-year program called the Universal Service Fund (USF), which has been funded by a line-item charge that traditional telephone companies add to consumers’ monthly bills. Expenditures from this fund subsidize rural broadband networks and low-income programs as well as connections for schools, libraries, and rural health care facilities. Through various COVID-era laws, Congress has also provided the FCC with a one-time $24 billion appropriation for various low-income initiatives.
POLICY PRIORITIES The FCC needs to change course and bring new urgency to achieving four main goals:
• Reining in Big Tech,
• Promoting national security,
• Unleashing economic prosperity, and
• Ensuring FCC accountability and good governance.”
Reining in Big Tech. The FCC has an important role to play in addressing the threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market. Nowhere is that clearer than when it comes to Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.
Today, a handful of corporations can shape everything from the information we consume to the places we shop. These corporate behemoths are not merely exercising market power; they are abusing dominant positions. They are not simply prevailing in the free market; they are taking advantage of a landscape that has been skewed—in many cases by the government—to favor their business models over those of their competitors. It is hard to imagine another industry in which a greater gap exists between power and accountability. That is why a new Administration should support FCC action on several fronts. Specifically, the FFC should:
• Eliminate immunities that courts added to Section 230. The FCC
should issue an order that interprets Section 230 in a way that eliminates the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute.