Address TikTok’s threat to US national security

Address TikTok’s threat to US national security

TikTok:

• poses a serious and unacceptable risk to America’s national security.
• allows Beijing to run a foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to Americans

As of this writing, the Biden Administration’s Treasury Department has not announced a final decision concerning its long-pending review of TikTok. If that inaction persists, or if the Administration allows TikTok to continue to operate in the U.S., a new Administration should ban the application on national security grounds.

Publish a foreign adversary transparency list.

As part of the FCC’s ongoing work to secure our networks from entities that would do the bidding of our foreign adversaries, the FCC should do more to shine the light of transparency on the scope of the problem.

To this end, the FCC should compile and publish a list of all entities that hold FCC authorizations, licenses, or other grants of authority with more than 10 percent ownership by foreign adversarial governments, including the governments of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, or North Korea. A bipartisan bill that would require the FCC to publish this type of list has been introduced in the House of Representatives by Representatives Elise Stefanik (R–NY), Ro Khanna (D– CA), and Mike Gallagher (R–WI).

Fully fund the federal “rip and replace” program

In 2019, Congress established a $1.9 billion Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program (known colloquially as the “rip and replace” program) to reimburse communications providers for the reasonable expenses they would incur to remove, replace, and dispose of insecure Huawei and ZTE gear.

However, $1.9 billion is about $3 billion short of the total amount of funding needed to complete the rip and replace process. A new Administration should ensure that the program is fully funded and should look first at repurposing and applying unused COVID-era emergency funds for this purpose.

Launch a Clean Standards Initiative

During the Trump Administration, the U.S. government launched a worldwide Clean Networks program.25

As a result, many of the U.S. government’s allies started the process of ending their relationships with Huawei.

An Administration should build and expand on this groundbreaking work by taking a similar approach to the standard-setting process. Right now, the CCP is seeking to extend its influence by exerting control over the development of standards in a variety of areas, including technology and telecommunications. It is vital that the United States meet this threat with a comprehensive clean standards initiative.

Stop aiding the CCP’s authoritarian approach to artificial intelligence.

The CCP has set itself a goal of becoming the global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. Beijing is bent on using this technology to exert authoritarian control domestically and export its authoritarian governance model overseas. U.S. businesses are aiding Beijing in this effort—often unwittingly—by feeding, training, and improving the AI datasets of companies that are beholden to the CCP.

One way that U.S. companies are doing this is by giving Beijing access to their high-powered cloud computing services. Therefore, it is time for an Administration to put in place a comprehensive plan that aims to stop U.S. entities from directly or indirectly contributing to China’s malign AI goals.

Unleashing Economic Prosperity

The FCC needs to advance a pro-growth agenda that gives every American a fair shot at next-generation connectivity. This is vital for economic opportunity and prosperous communities.

The current Administration has appropriated a lot of money for broadband infrastructure projects, but it has failed to pair that spending with reforms that free more airwaves for wireless connectivity or streamline the permitting processes for broadband builds.

That failure is holding back America’s hardworking telecommunications crews and leaving Americans stuck waiting on the wrong side of the digital divide.

It is time for a return to the successful spectrum and infrastructure policies that prevailed during the Trump Administration—policies that enabled the U.S. to lead the world in 5G.

Facilitate coordination on spectrum issues

Wireless services now play a central role in advancing America’s economic and national security interests. Over the past few years, this dynamic has led to an increasing number of headline-level disputes between the commercial wireless sector and federal agencies.

These disputes are often framed in zero-sum terms as commercial wireless and federal agency stakeholders argue over the appropriate types and amount of airwaves that the government should allocate for various purposes.

On the one hand, America’s global economic leadership depends on its ability to free spectrum that will power the U.S. commercial wireless industry. On the other hand, we must ensure that America’s national security and other federal agencies have access to the spectrum resources that they need to carry out their vital missions.

Refill America’s spectrum pipeline

From 2017 through 2020, the FCC took unprecedented steps to free the airwaves needed to power 5G and other next-generation wireless services. This work not only helped to secure America’s wireless leadership and bolster competition, but also enabled the private sector to create jobs and grow the economy.

Recently, the FCC has failed to match the pace and cadence of those spectrum actions.

Therefore, the FCC and a new Administration should work together to develop a national spectrum strategy that both identifies the specific airwaves that the FCC can free for commercial wireless services and sets an aggressive timeline for agency action.

The current process is not delivering optimal outcomes. In December 2021 and January 2022, for instance, the lack of interagency coordination and communication about mid-band 5G spectrum allocation between the FCC and the Federal Aviation Authority led to significant challenges for the U.S. aviation industry.

Over the past two years, the FCC has failed to move spectrum into the commercial marketplace at the same pace and cadence that it did in the recent past. Creating better mechanisms to improve communication and cooperation between different federal agencies could enable a more effective and coordinated U.S. government telecommunications strategy. The White House should work with Congress to establish a spectrum coordination process that will work for both commercial and federal users.

Modernize infrastructure rules. By 2016, the construction of new cell sites—the building blocks for 5G—had essentially flatlined in America. Because of outdated permitting rules, it cost too much and took too long to build wireless infrastructure, so the FCC went to work.

The agency updated the environmental and historic preservation rules that needlessly drove up the cost and slowed down the timeline for adding small cells. The FCC put in place guardrails to address outlier fees and delays imposed at the state and local levels on those same small-cell projects. It modernized the permitting process in several additional ways as well.

Those FCC reforms delivered results. They allowed America’s private sector to bring thousands of families across the digital divide and to keep Americans connected during the pandemic. In fact, infrastructure builds accelerated at a record pace after those reforms. In 2019, for instance, U.S. providers built over 46,000 new cell sites—a sixty-fivefold increase over 2016 levels.

The FCC has not engaged in any similar infrastructure reforms in recent years, and there is much more that needs to be done. For instance, the FCC’s prior reforms focused on streamlining the rules for small wireless facilities.

The FCC should now explore similar action for the deployment of other wired infrastructure by imposing limits on the fees that local and state governments can charge for reviewing those wireline applications and time restrictions on the government’s decision-making process.

The next Administration should also work to address the delays that continue to persist when it comes to building Internet infrastructure on federal lands. This is an area where the FCC itself has very little jurisdiction, so a new Administration should redouble efforts to require timely reviews and final actions by agencies with jurisdiction over federal lands, including the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.

Advance America’s space leadership. One of the most significant technological developments of the past few years has been the emergence of a new generation of low-earth orbit satellites like StarLink and Kuiper. This technology can beam a reliable, high-speed Internet signal to nearly any part of the globe at a fraction of the cost of other technologies. This has the potential to significantly accelerate efforts to end the digital divide and disrupt the federal regulatory and subsidy regime that applies to communications networks. The FCC should expedite its work to support this new technology by acting more quickly in its review and approval of applications to launch new satellites. Otherwise, the U.S. risks ceding space leadership to entities based in countries with more friendly regulatory environments.

End wasteful broadband spending policies. Many of the broadband spending policies being pursued by the current Administration are poised to waste taxpayer money while leaving rural communities and unconnected Americans behind. At the same time, the dramatic recent increases in funding through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act mean that the federal government has more than enough resources to meet its broadband connectivity goals. Congress should therefore hold the agencies accountable so that taxpayer money is used effectively to promote broadband connectivity across the nation.

To that end, the next Administration should instruct the various departments and agencies that are administering broadband infrastructure funds to direct those resources to communities without adequate Internet infrastructure instead of to places that already enjoy broadband connectivity. Take, for example, the final rules that the Treasury Department adopted in 2022 that govern the expenditure of $350 billion in ARPA funds. Rather than directing those dollars to the rural and other communities that have no Internet infrastructure, the current

Holding Government Accountable. Federal technology and telecommunica- tions programs have been plagued by a troubling lack of accountability and good governance. They would benefit from stronger oversight and a fresh look at elim- inating outdated regulations that are doing more harm than good. Administration gave the green light for recipients to spend those funds to overbuild existing high-speed networks in communities that already have multiple broadband providers. A new Administration should eliminate government-funded overbuilding of existing networks.

Adopt a national coordinating strategy. Hundreds of billions of infrastructure dollars have been appropriated by Congress or budgeted by agencies over the past couple of years that can be used to end the digital divide. Yet, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “U.S. broadband efforts are not guided by a national strategy”; instead, “[f ]ederal broadband efforts are fragmented and overlapping, with more than 100 programs administered by 15 agencies,” risking overbuilding as well as wasteful duplication.26 Many of these programs remain plagued by inefficiency, further contributing to waste of limited taxpayer dollars.  Moreover, the federal government is failing to put appropriate guardrails in place to govern the expenditure of billions in broadband funds. This is the regulatory equivalent of turning the spigot on full blast and then walking away from the hose. There is a worrisome lack of adequate tracking, measurement, and accountability standards governing all of this broadband spending. As a result, we are likely to see headline levels of waste, fraud, and abuse.

A new Administration needs to bring fresh oversight to this spending and put a national strategy in place to ensure that the federal government adopts a coordinated approach to its various broadband initiatives. Similarly, the next Administration should ask the FCC to launch a review of its existing broadband programs, including the different components of the USF, with the goal of avoiding duplication, improving efficiency of existing programs, and saving taxpayer money.

Correct the FCC’s regulatory trajectory and encourage competition to improve connectivity. The FCC is a New Deal–era agency. Its history of regulation tends to reflect the view that the federal government should impose heavy-handed regulation rather than relying on competition and market forces to produce optimal outcomes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recommended that Congress create the FCC in February 1934 for the purposes of establishing “a single Government agency charged with broad authority” over the field of communications.27

Congress subsequently established the FCC through the Communications Act of 1934.

Congress has passed a number of additional statutes—some broad, some narrow—that pertain to the FCC’s authority, including most significantly the Telecommunications Act of 1996,28 which opened up markets for greater competition and largely deregulated industry segments.

Technological change in the connectivity sector is occurring rapidly. We are now seeing an unprecedented level of convergence, innovation, and competition in the market for connectivity. On the one hand, traditional cable providers like Charter are now offering mobile wireless services to consumers in direct competition with traditional wireless companies like Verizon. On the other hand, a new generation of low-earth orbit satellite services like StarLink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper stand to offer high- speed home broadband in competition with legacy providers. Furthermore, broadcasters are offering high-speed downloads directly to consumers over spectrum that previously provided only TV service.

Ultimately, FCC reliance on competition and innovation is vital if the agency is to deliver optimal outcomes for the American public.

The FCC should engage in a serious top-to-bottom review of its regulations and take steps to rescind any that are overly cumbersome or outdated.

The Commission should focus its efforts on creating a market-friendly regulatory environment that fosters innovation and competition from a wide range of actors, including cable-based, broadband-based, and satellite-based Internet providers.

These rapidly evolving market conditions counsel in favor of eliminating many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo. These include many of the FCC’s media ownership rules, which can have the effect of restricting investment and competition because those regulations assume a far more limited set of competitors for advertising dollars than exist today, as well as its universal service requirements.