An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Facebook will ban ads that wrongly claim victory in the US presidential race. The news comes a week after the company announced it would reject ads from Donald Trump or Joe Biden claiming a premature win on November 3rd. The policy covers ads that claim legal forms of voting -- like voting by mail -- will corrupt the outcome of the election. It also bans ads that claim rampant voter fraud could alter the results of the election.

This is a real concern for the 2020 race. Due to mail-in voting, the electoral process is expected to take longer than in years past, and the official results likely won't be announced on November 3rd. Experts worry that because more Democrats are expected to vote by mail than Republicans, Trump could declare an early victory, then sow doubt about the results as more Biden votes trickle in.

On the eve of the first presidential debate, the Biden campaign is pressing Facebook to remove posts by President Trump -- and slamming the social media company as "the nation's foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process." From a report: By publicly escalating the conflict, the campaign is pressing Facebook to enforce its policies against misinformation more aggressively. "Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression," campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a three-page letter obtained by Axios. "Facebook's continued promise of future action is serving as nothing more than an excuse for inaction," the letter says. "We will be calling out those failures as they occur over the coming 36 days."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society. His analogy continued: "Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis. Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more."

Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content. "The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding -- at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war." As director of monetization, he added, "We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible... We took a page form Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset."

The Washington Post covered "a sprawling yet secretive campaign that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia" during America's last presidential campaign in 2016.

According to four people with knowledge of the effort, "Teenagers, some of them minors, are being paid to pump out the messages..." The campaign draws on the spam-like behavior of bots and trolls, with the same or similar language posted repeatedly across social media. But it is carried out, at least in part, by humans paid to use their own accounts, though nowhere disclosing their relationship with Turning Point Action or the digital firm brought in to oversee the day-to-day activity. One user included a link to Turning Point USA's website in his Twitter profile until The Washington Post began asking questions about the activity. In response to questions from The Post, Twitter on Tuesday suspended at least 20 accounts involved in the activity for "platform manipulation and spam." Facebook also removed a number of accounts as part of what the company said is an ongoing investigation...

The months-long effort by the tax-exempt nonprofit is among the most ambitious domestic influence campaigns uncovered this election cycle, said experts tracking the evolution of deceptive online tactics. "In 2016, there were Macedonian teenagers interfering in the election by running a troll farm and writing salacious articles for money," said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. "In this election, the troll farm is in Phoenix...."

The messages — some of them false and some simply partisan — were parceled out in precise increments as directed by the effort's leaders, according to the people with knowledge of the highly coordinated activity, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the privacy of minors carrying out the work... The messages have appeared mainly as replies to news articles about politics and public health posted on social media. They seek to cast doubt on the integrity of the electoral process, asserting that Democrats are using mail balloting to steal the election — "thwarting the will of the American people," they alleged. The posts also play down the threat from covid-19, which claimed the life of Turning Point's co-founder Bill Montgomery in July...

By seeking to rebut mainstream news articles, the operation illustrates the extent to which some online political activism is designed to discredit the media. While Facebook and Twitter have pledged to crack down on what they have labeled coordinated inauthentic behavior, in Facebook's case, and platform manipulation and spam, as Twitter defines its rules, their efforts falter in the face of organizations willing to pay users to post on their own accounts, maintaining the appearance of independence and authenticity.
One parent even said their two teenagers had been posting the messages since June as "independent contractors" — while being paid less than minimum wage.

goombah99 shares a report from The Washington Post: Four years ago, the magazine flagged Donald Trump's disdain for science as "frightening" but did not go so far as to endorse his rival, Hillary Clinton. This year, its editors came to a different conclusion. "A 175-year tradition is not something you break lightly," editor in chief, Laura Helmuth told The Washington Post on Tuesday. "We'd love to stay out of politics, but this president has been so anti-science that we can't ignore it." In a nod to Trump's embrace of anti-science conspiracy theories, Scientific American editors compared the people each candidate turns to for expertise and insight. Biden's panel of public health advisers "does not include physicians who believe in aliens and debunked virus therapies, one of whom Trump has called 'very respected' and 'spectacular,'" the editors write. The editor in chief of Science Magazine, the "apex predator of academic publishing," according to Wired, also denounced Trump but stopped short of endorsing presidential candidate Joe Biden. goombah99 writes: "This may be the most shameful moment in the history of U.S. science policy," writes H. Holden Thorp, a chemist and longtime university administrator. The editorial's key point is that it was negligence but more like malice. "As he was playing down the virus to the public, Trump was not confused or inadequately briefed: He flat-out lied, repeatedly, about science to the American people. These lies demoralized the scientific community and cost countless lives in the United States." This follows on an august issue's lament over the dangerous policies of the unqualified presidential coronavirus advisor Scott Atlas: "Although Atlas may be capable of neurological imaging, he's not an expert in infectious diseases or public health -- and it shows. He's spreading scientific misinformation in a clear attempt to placate the president and push his narrative that COVID-19 is not an emergency." Thorp concludes his article in this prestige journal with a searing indictment "Trump was not clueless, and he was not ignoring the briefings. Listen to his own words. Trump lied, plain and simple."

schwit1 shares a report from TechCrunch: A privacy bug in Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's official campaign app allowed anyone to look up sensitive voter information on millions of Americans, a security researcher has found. The campaign app, Vote Joe, allows Biden supporters to encourage friends and family members to vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election by uploading their phone's contact lists to see if their friends and family members are registered to vote. The app uploads and matches the user's contacts with voter data supplied from TargetSmart, a political marketing firm that claims to have files on more than 191 million Americans.

When a match is found, the app displays the voter's name, age and birthday, and which recent election they voted in. This, the app says, helps users find people you know and encourage them to get involved." While much of this data can already be public, the bug made it easy for anyone to access any voter's information by using the app. The App Analyst, a mobile expert who detailed his findings on his eponymous blog, found that he could trick the app into pulling in anyone's information by creating a contact on his phone with the voter's name. The Biden campaign fixed the bug and pushed out an app update on Friday.

"We were made aware about how our third-party app developer was providing additional fields of information from commercially available data that was not needed," Matt Hill, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, told TechCrunch. "We worked with our vendor quickly to fix the issue and remove the information. We are committed to protecting the privacy of our staff, volunteers and supporters will always work with our vendors to do so."

NPR reporter Shannon Bond reports of a little-known -- and now nearly entirely forgotten -- company called Simulmatics, which had technology that used vast amounts of data to profile voters and ultimately help John F. Kennedy win the 1960 election. From the report: The [...] company was called Simulmatics, the subject of Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore's timely new book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. Before Cambridge Analytica, before Facebook, before the Internet, there was Simulmatics' "People Machine," in Lepore's telling: "A computer program designed to predict and manipulate human behavior, all sorts of human behavior, from buying a dishwasher to countering an insurgency to casting a vote."

Lepore unearths Simulmatics' story and makes the argument that, amid a broader proliferation of behavioral science research across academia and government in the 1960s, the company paved the way for our 21st-century obsession with data and prediction. Simulmatics, she argues, is "a missing link in the history of technology," the antecedent to Facebook, Google and Amazon and to algorithms that attempt to forecast who will commit crimes or get good grades. "It lurks behind the screen of every device," she writes.

If Then presents Simulmatics as both ahead of its time and, more often than not, overpromising and under-delivering. The company was the brainchild of Ed Greenfield, an advertising executive straight out of Mad Men, who believed computers could help Democrats recapture the White House. He wanted to create a model of the voting population that could tell you how voters would respond to whatever a candidate did or said. The name Simulmatics was a contraction of "simulation" and "automation." As Greenfield explained it to investors, Lepore writes: "The Company proposes to engage principally in estimating probable human behavior by the use of computer technology." The People Machine was originally built to analyze huge amounts of data ahead of the 1960 election, in what Lepore describes as, at the time, "the largest political science research project in American history."

Joe Biden's presidential campaign was hit by an attack that was caught by Microsoft, which reportedly gathered information identifying hackers linked to the Kremlin as the most likely suspects. The Daily Beast reports: Reuters reported Thursday morning that suspected Russian state-backed hackers have attempted to breach the systems at Washington-based SKDKnickerbocker, a strategy and communications firm working hand-in-glove with Joe Biden's campaign. The attacks, which took place over the past two months, were unsuccessful. The failed hacking attempt was brought to SKDK's attention by Microsoft, which reportedly gathered information identifying hackers linked to the Kremlin as the most likely suspects. The attacks are said to have mainly focussed on phishing -- a common hacking method which lures users into disclosing sensitive passwords. That was the method used by Russian hackers to access DNC emails, which were subsequently leaked online, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

A person familiar with SKDK's repelling to the hacking attempts said the agents didn't get very far, telling Reuters: "They are well-defended, so there has been no breach." Another source said it was impossible to confirm if Biden's campaign was the target, or whether the Russians were trying to gather intel on the long list of other SKDK clients.

It took five decades, but the Democratic Party has finally changed its stance on nuclear energy. In its recently released party platform, the Democrats say they favor a "technology-neutral" approach that includes "all zero-carbon technologies, including hydroelectric power, geothermal, existing and advanced nuclear, and carbon capture and storage." Robert Bryce writes via Forbes: That statement marks the first time since 1972 that the Democratic Party has said anything positive in its platform about nuclear energy. The change in policy is good -- and long overdue -- news for the American nuclear-energy sector and for everyone concerned about climate change. The Democrats' new position means that for the first time since Richard Nixon was in the White House, both the Republican and Democratic parties are officially on record in support of nuclear energy. That's the good news.

About a decade ago, a high-ranking official at the Department of Energy told me that a big problem with nuclear energy is that it needs bipartisan support in Congress. That wasn't happening, he said, because "Democrats are pro-government and anti-nuclear. Republicans are pro-nuclear and anti-government." That partisan divide is apparent in the polling data. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Republicans strongly favored nuclear energy but only 42 percent of Democrats did so. The last time the Democratic Party's platform contained a positive statement about nuclear energy was in 1972, when the party said it supported "greater research and development" into "unconventional energy sources" including solar, geothermal, and "a variety of nuclear power possibilities to design clean breeder fission and fusion techniques."

Since then, the Democratic Party has either ignored or professed outright opposition to nuclear energy. In 2016, the party's platform said climate change "poses a real and urgent threat to our economy, our national security, and our children's health and futures." The platform contained 31 uses of the word "nuclear" including "nuclear proliferation," "nuclear weapon," and "nuclear annihilation." It did not contain a single mention of "nuclear energy." That stance reflected the orthodoxy of the climate activists and environmental groups who have dominated the Democratic Party's discussion on energy for decades. What changed the Democrats' stance on nuclear? I cannot claim any special knowledge about the drafting of the platform, but it appears that science and basic math finally won out. While vying for their party's nomination, two prominent Democratic presidential hopefuls -- Cory Booker and Andrew Yang -- both endorsed nuclear energy. In addition, Joe Biden's energy plan included a shout-out to nuclear.

The Democratic and Republican nominating conventions, long mainstays of the US presidential election cycle, have been forced online, creating the biggest test yet for conducting life remotely during the coronavirus. From a report: Robbed of the energy of convention halls, the parties will seek to re-create that enthusiasm in high-production streaming events that beam their luminaries from around the country to online audiences. The Democrats, whose convention begins on Monday after a roughly month-long delay, have lined up the party's most visible figures, including former President Barack Obama. The Republicans, who will make their case for four more years in the White House, grab the spotlight on Aug. 24. Done with savvy and pizzazz, the Democrats and Republicans could galvanize support for their candidates -- former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, respectively -- despite the absence of cheering crowds, over-amplified rock music and blizzards of confetti. If technical glitches hobble the proceedings, the parties risk broadcasting a mammoth Zoom call derailed by freezes, connection mishaps and mute fails.

As Democrats and Republicans prepare to hold their national conventions starting next week, YouTube on Thursday announced updates to its policies on deceptive videos and other content designed to interfere with the election. From a report: The world's largest video platform, with more than 2 billion users a month, will ban videos containing information that was obtained through hacking and could meddle with elections or censuses. That would include material like hacked campaign emails with details about a candidate. The update follows the announcement of a similar rule that Google, which owns YouTube, unveiled earlier this month banning ads that contain hacked information. Google will start enforcing that policy Sept. 1. YouTube also said it will take down videos that encourage people to interfere with voting and other democratic processes. For example, videos telling people to create long lines at polling places in order to stifle the vote won't be allowed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: After months of speculation, Joe Biden has picked California Sen. Kamala Harris to be his vice-presidential running mate in the race for the White House. The choice fulfills a pledge from Biden, the Democrats' presumptive nominee for president, to name a woman to his ticket as he seeks to unseat Donald Trump in the November election. [...] Here's what we know about Harris' stance on tech issues:

A California senator and former candidate in the 2020 presidential race, Harris made her name in Washington by grilling Trump nominees and officials from her seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Harris, 55, is known for being a tough-on-crime prosecutor earlier in her career. That toughness, however, didn't carry over to Big Tech companies when she was California attorney general, critics charge. During her time as the state's top law enforcement officer, Facebook and other companies gobbled up smaller competitors. Harris, like regulators under Obama, did little from an antitrust perspective to slow consolidation, which many members of Congress now question.

During her 2020 presidential bid, Harris' stance on consumer protections and antitrust issues weren't as tough as those of some of her rivals, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who called for the breakup of large tech companies, like Facebook and Google. Still, Harris was vocal last year in urging Twitter to ban Trump from the platform for "tweets [that] incite violence, threaten witnesses, and obstruct justice." This was a demand Twitter rejected. She has also been critical of Facebook for not doing more to rid its platform of misinformation.

Twenty state attorneys general on Wednesday called on Facebook to better prevent messages of hate, bias and disinformation from spreading, and said the company needed to provide more help to users facing online abuse. From a report: In a letter [PDF] to the social media giant, the officials said they regularly encountered people facing online intimidation and harassment on Facebook. They outlined seven steps the company should take, including allowing third-party audits of hate content and offering real-time assistance to users. "We hope to work with you to ensure that fewer individuals suffer online harassment and discrimination, and that it is quickly and effectively addressed when they do," said the letter, which was addressed to Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. The officials who signed the letter, all of them Democrats, represent states including New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, as well as the District of Columbia. The letter adds to the rising pressure facing Mr. Zuckerberg and his company to stop disinformation and harassment on Facebook. Civil rights leaders, advertisers and some of the company's own employees have criticized Facebook for failing to curtail the spread of noxious content. Extremists and conspiracists have turned to social media -- most often Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- to circulate falsehoods about the coronavirus pandemic, the coming presidential election and Black Lives Matter protests.

Facebook and other social media companies have made some changes to dismantle misinformation and hate on their services. Last month, Twitter announced that it would remove thousands of accounts associated with the fringe conspiracy movement QAnon, saying their messages could lead to harm and violated Twitter policy. In June, Facebook took down a network of accounts tied to boogaloo, an antigovernment movement in the United States that encourages violence. That same month, YouTube banned six channels for violating its policies, including those of two prominent white supremacists, David Duke and Richard Spencer. But according to the attorneys general, Facebook in particular has not done enough. The officials pointed to Facebook's recent Civil Rights Audit -- which found that advertisers could still run ads that painted a religious group as a threat to the "American way of life" -- as evidence that the social network had fallen short. "Facebook has a hate speech, discrimination, disinformation problem," Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal, of New Jersey, who led the letter, said in an interview. "The way I view it, as an attorney general, is that it directly affects public safety in my state, that the groups that are allowed to find community online, on Facebook, allow hate to be normalized."

A virus has brought the world's most powerful country to its knees. From a report: A pandemic can be prevented in two ways: Stop an infection from ever arising, or stop an infection from becoming thousands more. The first way is likely impossible. There are simply too many viruses and too many animals that harbor them. Bats alone could host thousands of unknown coronaviruses; in some Chinese caves, one out of every 20 bats is infected. Many people live near these caves, shelter in them, or collect guano from them for fertilizer. Thousands of bats also fly over these people's villages and roost in their homes, creating opportunities for the bats' viral stowaways to spill over into human hosts. Based on antibody testing in rural parts of China, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that studies emerging diseases, estimates that such viruses infect a substantial number of people every year. "Most infected people don't know about it, and most of the viruses aren't transmissible," Daszak says. But it takes just one transmissible virus to start a pandemic.

Sometime in late 2019, the wrong virus left a bat and ended up, perhaps via an intermediate host, in a human -- and another, and another. Eventually it found its way to the Huanan seafood market, and jumped into dozens of new hosts in an explosive super-spreading event. The COVID-19 pandemic had begun. [...] Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, "so that when something like this happens, you're moving quickly," Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. "By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken." Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, and urged Americans to avoid going there.

The Federal Communications Commission will take public comment for 45 days on a petition filed by the Trump administration seeking new transparency rules in how social media companies moderate content, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said on Monday. From a report: Pai rejected calls from Democrats that he summarily dismiss the petition without public comment. The decision came after President Donald Trump directed the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to file the petition after Twitter Inc in May warned readers to fact-check his posts about unsubstantiated claims of fraud in mail-in voting. Pai has said previously he does not see a role for the FCC to regulate websites like Twitter, Facebook or Alphabet's Google, but said on Monday the FCC "should welcome vigorous debate -- not foreclose it. The American people deserve to have a say, and we will give them that chance." FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter that Congress, not the FCC, should act. "Perhaps when comments are in we can package up the whole docket and send it over to Congress-where this debate belongs," Starks wrote.

Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who ended Wednesday's hearing by saying some Big Tech companies need to be broken up, says that Facebook in particular lacks significant competitors and should not have been allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp. From a report: Cicilline chairs the antitrust subcommittee, which has been looking into competition issues in the digital space. "Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged in this hearing that his acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram were part of a plan to both buy a competitor and also maintain his money, power, or his dominance. That's classic monopoly behavior," Cicilline said on the "Axios Re:Cap" podcast. Cicilline's criticisms weren't limited to Facebook, pointing to the power Google and Amazon also hold in their respective markets. "I think what we saw today was confirmation that these large technology platforms have enduring monopoly power," he said in the interview with Axios' Dan Primack. A key issue remains whether existing antitrust law is broad enough to address the modern tech industry, especially companies that provide their products at no direct charge to consumers. "Congress is going to have to 'think outside the box' in a comprehensive way about what antitrust laws should look like in the 21st century," Neguse told Axios' Ashley Gold after the hearing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The White House has officially moved to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), a senior administration official confirmed Tuesday, breaking ties with a global public health body in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. has submitted its withdrawal notification to the United Nations secretary-general, the official said. Withdrawal requires a year's notice, so it will not go into effect until July 6, 2021, raising the possibility the decision could be reversed.

The formal notification of withdrawal concludes months of threats from the Trump administration to pull the United States out of the WHO, which is affiliated with the United Nations. President Trump has repeatedly assailed the organization for alleged bias toward China and its slow response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. But public health experts and Democrats have raised alarms that the decision may be short-sighted and could undercut the global response to the pandemic, which has infected 11.6 million people worldwide. The U.S. has the highest number of reported cases in the world at nearly 3 million. They have also argued that some of the WHO's initial missteps can be attributed to China's lack of transparency in the early stages of the outbreak.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In just the last week, Google Docs has emerged as a way to share everything from lists of books on racism to templates for letters to family members and representatives to lists of funds and resources that are accepting donations. Shared Google Docs that anyone can view and anyone can edit, anonymously, have become a valuable tool for grassroots organizing during both the coronavirus pandemic and the police brutality protests sweeping the US. It's not the first time. In fact, activists and campaigners have been using the word processing software for years as a more efficient and accessible protest tool than either Facebook or Twitter.

It wasn't until the 2016 elections, when misinformation campaigns were rampant, that the software came into its own as a political tool. Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communication at Merrimack College, used it to create a 34-page document titled "False, Misleading, Clickbaity-y, and/or Satirical 'News' Sources.'" Zimdars inspired a slew of political Google Docs, written by academics as ad hoc ways of campaigning for Democrats for the 2018 midterm elections. By the time the election passed, Google Docs were also being used to protest immigration bans and advance the #MeToo movement. Now, in the wake of George Floyd's murder on Memorial Day weekend, communities are using the software to organize. One of the most popular Google Docs to emerge in the past week is "Resources for Accountability and Actions for Black Lives," which features clear steps people can take to support victims of police brutality. It is organized by Carlisa Johnson, a 28-year-old graduate journalism student at Georgia State University.

House Democrats approved a bill to admit Washington, DC, as a state on Friday, marking the first time either chamber of Congress has advanced a DC statehood measure. From a report: The bill, introduced by DC's nonvoting House member, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, would shrink the federal capital to a small area encompassing the White House, Capitol building, Supreme Court, and other federal buildings along the National Mall. The rest of the city would become the 51st state, named the Washington, Douglass Commonwealth after abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The bill passed with a vote of 232-180. Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota was the only Democrat to join Republicans in voting against it. Independent Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan also voted no. The bill would grant DC two senators and make the existing sole House representative a voting member. It is unlikely to gain traction in the Republican-held Senate, however, and the White House said (PDF) this week that President Donald Trump would veto the bill if it came to his desk.

Proponents of making DC a state also point to the area's large population, which surpasses the populations of Wyoming and Vermont. As of June 2019, DC had more than 705,000 residents, according to estimates from the US Census Bureau. To become law, the bill's supporters argue it would only have to pass both chambers of Congress with a simple majority and then be signed by the President. They say the legislation's strategy of resizing the capital area would sidestep constitutional questions about making the rest of DC a state. But Republicans who oppose DC statehood maintain that adding the district as a state would require a constitutional amendment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: House Democrats yesterday unveiled a $100 billion broadband plan that's gaining quick support from consumer advocates. "The House has a universal fiber broadband plan we should get behind," Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Legislative Counsel Ernesto Falcon wrote in a blog post. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC.) announced the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, saying it has more than 30 co-sponsors and "invests $100 billion to build high-speed broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved communities and ensure that the resulting Internet service is affordable." The bill text is available here.

In addition to federal funding for broadband networks with speeds of at least 100Mbps downstream and upstream, the bill would eliminate state laws that prevent the growth of municipal broadband. There are currently 19 states with such laws. The Clyburn legislation targets those states with this provision: "No State statute, regulation, or other State legal requirement may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting any public provider, public-private partnership provider, or cooperatively organized provider from providing, to any person or any public or private entity, advanced telecommunications capability or any service that utilizes the advanced telecommunications capability provided by such provider." The bill also has a Dig Once requirement that says fiber or fiber conduit must be installed "as part of any covered highway construction project" in states that receive federal highway funding. Similar Dig Once mandates have been proposed repeatedly over the years and gotten close to becoming US law, but never quite made it past the finish line.