The New Mexico legislature passed a broadband bill that would allow Sacred Winds Communications to collect a state rural telecom subsidy (see 2103150050). The House voted 66-1 Wednesday for SB-204; the Senate earlier passed the bill unanimously. In other state broadband votes, the Michigan House voted 59-50 Wednesday for HB-4210 to exempt broadband equipment from certain property taxes in underserved areas. The Senate passed the similar SB-46 last month. A $250 million Kentucky broadband funding bill (HB-320) headed to Gov. Andy Beshear (D) after Tuesday passing the House 94-0 and the Senate 36-0. Beshear plans to review bills over the next 10 days, but he has 148 bills before him, after getting 111 from the legislature Monday and Tuesday, a spokesperson said. The governor sought $50 million for last-mile broadband in his budget proposal. The Michigan and New Mexico governors didn’t comment Thursday.
SolarWinds and other recent cyberthreats prove that “stopping a breach is no longer just about protecting end points” but also “encompasses cloud workload security and identity protection,” said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on a Tuesday call for fiscal Q4 ended Jan. 31. Organizations globally “are shedding legacy and inferior next-gen security technologies and accelerating their move to modern cloud-native technologies to meet the demands of today's threat landscape,” said Kurtz. “Legacy tech is no match for today's adversaries.” SolarWinds “raised awareness at the board level and will serve as an additional tailwind to the industry over the long term,” he said. CrowdStrike was a beneficiary of the trend, getting 77% subscription revenue growth in the quarter, with a record 1,480 net new subscription customers, he said. SolarWinds and the more recent Hafnium cyberthreat (see 2103030023) are driving “a crisis of trust within the Microsoft customer base,” said Kurtz. “Customers are looking to de-risk their security architecture by choosing an alternative vendor to Microsoft.” CrowdStrike is seeing fallout “across the board,” he said. “Just about every incident response we do involves Microsoft technology. So obviously we're focused on being able to protect it, but there's a lot of customers that are looking at this and saying, ‘Hey, we need to de-risk our environment, and we need another provider.’” Microsoft declined comment Wednesday.
California banned the use of “dark patterns” and related deceptive online navigation methods, Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) announced, with new regulations under the California Consumer Privacy Act. California’s Office of Administrative Law approved the additional regulations, giving “new tools” for protecting data privacy, effective Monday. Regulations include “an eye-catching Privacy Options icon that guides consumers to where they can opt-out of the sale of their personal information,” he said. The dark patterns provision “prohibits companies from burdening consumers with confusing language or unnecessary steps such as forcing them to click through multiple screens or listen to reasons why they shouldn’t opt out.”
Final rules for drone remote identification and regulating flights over people and moving vehicles and at night (see 2012290025) take effect April 21, the FAA announced Friday. Remote ID “requires identification of drones in flight as well as the location of their control stations or takeoff point,” the agency said. Drone operation over people and moving vehicles and at night is prohibited without a waiver.
Walmart is investing $153 million for 0.9% of Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce company announced Friday. It's “in line with other recent strategic equity investments the company has made that enable Walmart to benefit from future growth in a rapidly changing global retail environment,” said Walmart. Also planning to invest are Tencent (a 3.6% stake) and Japan Post Holdings (8.3%). Citing evolving “new lifestyles,” Rakuten said businesses that operate retail stores such as supermarkets are now “required to provide services that are more convenient for users, not only providing services online, but also transcending the boundaries between online and offline (real stores).”
Citizens broadband radio service band use is accelerating, and Verizon is using the band in 70 metropolitan areas, RootMetrics reported Thursday, detecting no use by AT&T or T-Mobile. “CBRS spectrum will play an important role in the mobile network marketplace, boosting capacity for both 4G LTE and 5G networks in highly populated areas,” RootMetrics said. Main uses are for wireless capacity in urban markets, rural fixed broadband and private wireless networks, the report said.
Antitrust lawsuits against Facebook filed by the FTC and state attorneys general are “legally deficient” and lack allegations of harm to competition or consumers, the company said Wednesday in motions to dismiss. People use TikTok, iMessage, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube and other apps to connect, the company said in a statement. “Facebook competes with all of those services for people’s time and attention every day.” New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) said in a statement that “Facebook is wrong on the law and wrong on our complaint. We are confident in our case, which is why almost every state in this nation has joined our bipartisan lawsuit to end Facebook’s illegal conduct.” The FTC didn’t comment.
The FCC Wireless Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology certified Key Bridge Wireless Tuesday as a spectrum access system administrator in the citizens broadband radio service band, the sixth SAS approved in the 3.5 GHz band. “We are making history with this innovative band,” said acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.
"Figure out how to fund a long term, permanent broadband subsidy" to assist low-income consumers, because the emergency broadband benefit program is a "temporary solution," the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council asked acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a filing said Tuesday in docket 20-445. MMTC supports allowing school districts to temporarily use E-rate funds for remote learning. It wants to ensure that "diverse suppliers have an opportunity to compete for downstream opportunities from auctions and appropriate transactions within the FCC's jurisdiction."
New America's Open Technology Institute urged better use of use-it-or-share-it rules for licensed spectrum. This promotes "more intensive use of fallow spectrum capacity, lowering barriers of entry to a diverse range of uses and users,” OTI said Monday.