In a move likely to draw fire from Big Government-bashing Republicans, the Biden administration has established a network of government officials — the Rural Partners Network (RPN) — it plans to embed in rural communities to make sure they can access infrastructure spending in the American Rescue Plan, including the billions for rural broadband going to states and principally overseen by the Department of Commerce.

The administration has said it wants to prioritize municipal broadband buildouts and will now place federal staffers in more than two dozen rural communities to “help local leaders navigate and access the federal resources they need to build a strong and vibrant economy,” including through the “once-in-a-generation investment in affordable high-speed internet,” as well as money for water, electricity, roads and bridges.

The Commerce Department will be one of the participating agencies in the RPN, which will be principally funded by the Department of Agriculture.

Also: NTIA Says Broadband Grants Aren't One Size Fits All

“Just making resources available is not enough — the federal government must better serve rural communities, so that they can take full advantage of these unprecedented opportunities,” the White House said Wednesday (April 20), adding that RPN will also “also identify challenges preventing rural communities from accessing federal support.”

Alan Davidson, head of Commerce’s National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA), has already said his agency is taking a customer-service approach to overseeing the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) initiative going to the states for broadband buildouts. That includes an NTIA point person to help apply for the money. ■

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has tested positive for COVID-19 and will be working from home as she self-isolates for the next five days, according to the Commerce Department.

The secretary had spoken Tuesday to the North America Building Trades Union (NABTU) Annual Legislative Conference at the Washington Hilton Hotel about the Biden administration's big-bucks investments in broadband deployment and adoption in the Bipartisan Innovation Act — $65 billion.

Commerce said it was in the process of contacting anyone she may have come in contact with per Centers for Disease Control guidance.

The Commerce statement about her diagnosis said she was only revealing her positive status “out of an abundance of transparency,” saying she had only mild symptoms and had taken an at-home antigen test Wednesday, adding, “She is fully vaccinated and boosted, and she is confident that the vaccine has prevented her from experiencing more significant symptoms.” ■

The Commerce Department is looking for input on how to incentivize investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

Commerce points out that semiconductors are must-have tech for everything from securing the communications (5G) supply chain, to AI, to autonomous systems of all types, to quantum computing.

Commerce pointed out that from about 40% of chip fabrication in 1990, the U.S. accounted for only 11% of the global market by 2019.

On the "glass a little more full front," Intel announced last week, and the White House promoted heavily, that it would be building a $20 billion facility outside of Columbus, Ohio, which the President said would mean 10,000 new jobs, including 3,000 full-time. "My administration is going to keep using all of the tools we have to re-shore our supply chains, strengthen our economic resilience, and make more in America."

The President and Commerce are also pushing Congress to pass the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which authorizes almost $90 billion for R&D, manufacturing and supply chains.

Also: Telecom, Video Pinched by Global Microchip Shortage

Topics Commerce said it was particularly interested in hearing about from stakeholders:

1. "A semiconductor financial assistance program that would provide funding, through a competitive process, to private entities, consortia of private entities, or public-private consortia to incentivize the establishment, expansion, or modernization of semiconductor manufacturing facilities and supporting infrastructure.
2. "A National Semiconductor Technology Center to serve as a hub of talent, knowledge, investment, equipment and toolsets.
3. "An advanced packaging manufacturing program that focuses on the challenge of embedding fragile computer chips into very small configurations that combine multiple systems resulting in benefits including lower costs, increased functionality and improved energy efficiency.
4. "The current and future workforce development needs of the semiconductor industry." ■

The Commerce Department has identified drone maker DJI, the Shenzhen, China-based company whose drones are used in TV and movie production, among other things, as a company that is acting "contrary to the foreign policy or national security interests" of the U.S. and has added it to the Entity List.

That means it will limit the export, re-export and transfer of the technology, which includes gimbal cameras and camera stabilizers that have been used in a number of TV and movie productions, according to the DJI website, including Watchmen on HBO, Dead to Me and Mindhunter for Netflix, and Castle Rock on Hulu.

DJI is one of 34 Chinese companies added to Commerce's Entity List this week. That is the same list to which Huawei and ZTE were added for their ties to the Chinese government.

“Today’s decision by the Treasury Department to add DJI to its investment blacklist is welcome news," said FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, who called for a review of DJI back in October over security concerns. "Treasury’s determination that DJI is actively supporting the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to surveil and repress religious minorities in China only adds urgency to my call for national security agencies to provide their views on adding DJI to the FCC’s Covered List.”

That is a list of suspect tech companies--including ZTE and Huawei--that can't get government subsidy money. ■

Republican legislators are telling the Biden Administration to move more quickly to block Chinese telecom Huawei's access to U.S. tech saying "poorly enforced regulations carry neither the force of law nor the respect of the private sector."

Huawei's tech was deemed by the Commerce Department (and the FCC) to be a national security threat. The FCC banned the use of Huawei in U.S. networks subsidized with government funds and Commerce put the company on its Entity List of companies that U.S. tech companies are prohibited from supplying.

Also: Commerce Expands Huawei Restrictions

But in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, and others they said the Administration needed to move quickly to prevent unlawful shipments of prohibited products to Huawei and other on the Entity List. They also said the Bureau of Industry Security needs to have the muscle to enforce Commerce export controls.

The letter follows a report from Senate minority (Republican) staffers that concluded Huawei was still getting access to U.S. made hard drives it should have been prohibited from securing.

“The Commerce Department’s lax enforcement of this rule has the effect of incentivizing other tech-focused companies throughout the supply chain to jeopardize our country’s security by transacting with Entity List companies like Huawei,” they told Raimondo.

Also signing on to the letter were Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Todd Young (R-Ind.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). ■

The Commerce Department has issued a fact sheet breaking out how it will be handing out the vast majority of broadband subsidy funds just approved in President Joe Biden‘s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act infrastructure bill.

Commerce‘s National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) is overseeing the lion‘s share ($48 billion) of that funding or what it calls its “pivotal” role in rolling out broadband.

The Federal Communications Commission is already handing out billions through various other programs and legislative mandates, a point it has made this week in multiple announcements of the latest subsidies, including $700 million for rural broadband announced Wednesday and reaching a $150 million telehealth subsidy benchmark Tuesday (Nov. 9).

The Commerce fact sheet suggests that the funding is critical, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said this week that it should be enough to get affordable, high-speed broadband to everyone in the country.

NTIA pointed out in the fact sheet it will be handing out:

1. “$42.45 billion in grants to states (including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico), and territories focused on funding high-speed broadband deployment to households and businesses that currently lack access to such services.” Each state gets $100 million and each territory $20 million.

2. “$2 billion for Tribal broadband grants, which is more than double the funding for NTIA‘s existing Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program.”

3. “2.75 billion to fund digital equity. Those will include additional digital equity planning grants to states to "accelerate the adoption of broadband through digital literacy training, workforce development, devices access programs, and other digital inclusion measures.”

4. $1 billion for middle-mile connections ”to build a high-speed backbone for communities, businesses, and anchor institutions.“

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) says that TikTok should have no role in the upcoming first-ever U.S. Cyber Games.

Also Read: Biden Rescinds Trump's TikTok WeChat Ban

The games are a private industry-led effort to promote careers in cybersecurity, but receive funding from the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

That could be tough since the social media giant is a founding sponsor of the games and is on the advisory board alongside representatives of U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

For Wicker, ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, that‘s the big problem and he made that clear in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“Allowing TikTok to play any role in the first U.S. Cyber Games, including joining its board alongside U.S. federal officials, is unacceptable,” Wicker wrote. “TikTok should be given no opportunity to interfere in any of the nation’s cyber initiatives, let alone those carried out with financial support from American taxpayers.”

Wicker pointed out that last April the Chinese Communist Party took an ownership stake in a subsidiary of ByteDance, the parent of TikTok.

Chinese chip maker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), which reportedly supplies Qualcomm, Broadcom, and others, has been put on the Department of Commerce's Entities List, meaning U.S. manufacturers are presumptively barred from selling to the company.

It Joins other prominent Chinese tech giants including Huawei and ZTE on that list of companies non grata.

The Department of Commerce announced the move early Friday (Dec. 18) after Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross confirmed it on Fox Business, according to Bloomberg.

Also Read: Commerce Expands Huawei Restrictions

According to Commerce, that decision "limits SMIC’s ability to acquire certain U.S. technology by requiring U.S. exporters to apply for a license to sell to the company. Items uniquely required to produce semiconductors at advanced technology nodes—10 nanometers or below—will be subject to a presumption of denial to prevent such key enabling technology from supporting China’s military-civil fusion efforts."

“We will not allow advanced U.S. technology to help build the military of an increasingly belligerent adversary. Between SMIC’s relationships of concern with the military industrial complex, China’s aggressive application of military civil fusion mandates and state-directed subsidies, SMIC perfectly illustrates the risks of China’s leverage of U.S. technology to support its military modernization,” said Ross in a statement supplied to Multichannel News. 

Also Read: ZTE Says Denial Order Is Unfair

Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security uses the list to restrict the export, re-export or transport inside the country of U.S. tech to companies or persons "reasonably believed to be involved, or to pose a significant risk of becoming involved, in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States."

There had been reports dating back several weeks that SMIC was headed for restrictions based on its connection to the Chinese military industrial complex.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Russ signaled Tuesday that if a Sprint-T-Mobile merger proved a 5G spur to AT&T and Verizon, that could be a good thing.

The CEOs of Sprint and T-Mobile, which have proposed yet again to try and merge -- their third attempt -- pitched the deal as a way to beat China to the next-gen wireless broadband punch.

In an interview on CNBC, Ross was asked whether the companies' CEOs were correct that China was ahead of the U.S.

Ross said it was hard to say who was ahead or behind until the technology was "truly perfected," which he said has not happened yet.

But he described the pitch from Sprint and T-Mobile that their merger "would propel Verizon and AT&T into more active pursuit of 5G" as "an interesting one."

Read More: Complete Coverage of the T-Mobile-Sprint Deal

Commerce does not have a role reviewing the proposed deal, but its National Telecommunications & Information Administration is the White House's top communications policy adviser.

"Whoever pursues it, whoever does it, we're very much in support of 5G," Ross said. "We need it for defense; we need it for commercial purposes; we really need to be a player in 5G."

Former FCC chair Tom Wheeler has been arguing that a shared commercial 5G network with some government participation (given national security implications) was preferable to counting on the merger of the third and fourth largest wireless companies to advance U.S. 5G.

WASHINGTON — Last week's rollback of the FCC's privacy rules spurred legislative action in the Minnesota State Senate, while in the U.S. Senate, the Intelligence Committee launched hearings on Russia's interference with the 2016 presidential election. Meanwhile, the Commerce Department tapped AT&T to build and maintain the nation's first-responder network. Following are highlights from last week in D.C.

Minnesota Adopts Own Privacy Rules
The Minnesota State Senate had its own exclamation point for Congress’s move to roll back broadband privacy rules. In light of Congress’s approval of the Congressional Review Act, and the president’s expected signoff, the state Senate voted to adopt its own version of the regulations, according to the Twin Cities Pioneer Press.

Republicans had argued that state privacy laws would remain in effect even after the Federal Communications Commission’s rules were scrapped. Minnesota’s Senate took that cue and added its own.

An amendment to an economic development bill passed the Minnesota Senate with the help of one Republican vote. A similar amendment was added to the House bill, which must now be reconciled with the Senate bill.

The Minnesota amendment would prevent any ISP with a franchise agreement in the state from collecting personal information from customers “without express written approval from the customer” or from denying service if that approval was not given.

Those were two key elements of the FCC regulations that were rolled back. (Pictured: The Minnesota State Capitol)

9/11 Overhaul
More than 15 years after 9/11, the Commerce Department last week announced that AT&T had been awarded the 25-year, $46.5 billion contract to build out and maintain FirstNet, the interoperable broadband first responder network. AT&T will invest $40 billion, and in exchange will get access to the network during nonemergencies.

The network is being built using 20 MHz of spectrum set aside from the FCC’s 700-MHz auction and the government’s $6.5 billion contribution to the cause came from the FCC’s AWS-3 wireless spectrum auction.

Smaller and rural broadband providers were looking to get in on some of that action. “NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association and its members, network operators in rural areas of the country with substantial assets and infrastructure, are eager to partner with AT&T to leverage this infrastructure and to promote success in the quest to build, operate and maintain a ubiquitous public safety network throughout the country,” said association CEO Shirley Bloomfield after the announcement. Read more here.

Fake News, for Real
Broadband was much on the minds of the Senate Intelligence Committee as it launched a series of hearings on Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. That included both cybersecurity issues and the proliferation of fake news that has been amplified by mainstream, and nonmainstream, media chasing the latest story.

Committee ranking member Mark Warner (D-Va.) cited the media “echo” chamber as partly to blame.

“The Russians employed thousands of Internet trolls and botnets to push out disinformation and fake news at high volume, focusing this material onto your Twitter and Facebook feeds and flooding our social media with misinformation,” Warner said. “[T]his fake news and disinformation was then hyped by the American media echo chamber and our own social media networks to reach — and potentially influence — millions of Americans.” Read more here.

The Department of Commerce Thursday proposed a framework for advancing the Internet of Things (IoT), saying it must be connected, open and interoperable, and is seeking comment on its "findings, approach and next steps."

The framework identifies four areas of engagement:

• "Enabling Infrastructure Availability and Access: Fostering the physical and spectrum-related assets needed to support IoT growth and advancement.

• "Crafting Balanced Policy and Building Coalitions: Removing barriers and encouraging coordination and collaboration; influencing, analyzing, devising, and promoting norms and practices that will protect IoT users while encouraging growth, advancement, and applicability of IoT technologies.

• "Promoting Standards and Technology Advancement: Ensuring necessary technical standards are developed and in place to support global IoT interoperability and that the technical applications and devices to support IoT continue to advance.

• "Encouraging Markets: Promoting the advancement of IoT through Department usage, application, and novel usage of the technologies; and translating the economic benefits and opportunities of IoT to foreign partners."

Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker committed that the agency would create the conditions for the emerging technology to thrive.

The basic prinpciples driving the plan are that Commerce will make sure IoT is inclusive, widely accessible, stable, secure, trustworthy, globally connected, open and interoperable.

It also promised to convene stakeholders to deal with the public policy challenges of Iot, including cybersecurity, privacy, innovation and intellectual property.

The report itself was informed by comment from, among others, NCTA: The Internet & Television Association.

It remains to be seen whether the new administration will follow through with the plan.

Alan Davidson, director of New America's Open Technology Institute, is joining the Obama administration.

Davidson (pictured at left) has been tapped to be senior advisor to the Secretary of Commerceand will be working on Internet policy and digital economy issues, the institute said.

OTI has been supportive of the Obama Administration's backing of strong Title II-based Internet regulations. OTI and the Administration are also in sync on backing passage of the USA Freedom Act, which would limit bulk data collection of communications info.

"The Commerce Department will play a central role in some of the biggest Internet policy debates of the next few years, and I am honored by this chance to make a contribution there,” Davidson said. Commerce's role will include freeing up government spectrum for more wireless broadband and transitioning the Internet naming and numbering function oversight to a multistakeholder model.

Kevin Bankston, OTI's policy director, will succeed Davidson as director. “Working with Kevin Bankston has been one of the great experiences of my tenure at New America,” Davidson said of his successor. “Kevin is a deeply committed advocate, as well as an energetic leader and deep subject-matter expert. I am delighted that he will be taking over as OTI’s director.”