'Vital and Clear Message' in White House Broadband Council Recommendations, Wheeler Says

The recommendations on deployment from the White House’s Broadband Opportunity Council, released Monday (see 1509210053), send “a clear and vital message: access to broadband means access to opportunity,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said in a statement Tuesday. “The FCC remains committed to working with government and private-sector partners to harness the power of broadband to grow our economy and improve the lives of American people.” TechFreedom lashed out at parts of the report. The document “stops short of saying what should be uncontroversial: Federal money shouldn’t fund government-owned broadband networks before the Dig Once approach has been tried,” President Berin Szoka said Tuesday. “Letting private providers bid to lease Dig Once conduits and deploy their own networks gives private companies an opportunity to upgrade their networks -- or deploy new ones, as Google Fiber has started doing. If no private providers come forward, state and local governments can still deploy their own networks in that conduit. But at least they won’t have wasted taxpayer dollars building networks that private capital would have paid for.” PCIA lauded elements of the report, such as its focus on creation of “an online inventory of data on Federal assets, and maintain the points of contact tasked with overseeing broadband build-out.”