Agencies
Commerce Department Secretary Gary Locke announced 10 broadband grants totaling $357 million to spur access and adoption in California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin. The grants will connect “millions of households and businesses,” and “thousands of schools, hospitals, libraries and public safety offices to the information superhighway,” NTIA said Thursday. West Virginia and Pennsylvania received the largest grants. In Pennsylvania, NTIA awarded the Keystone Initiative a $99.7 million broadband infrastructure grant to build a 1,700-mile fiber Research and Education Network, and gave the state’s executive office $28.2 million to increase broadband speeds for anchor institutions and underserved areas in the mountains. NTIA gave the executive office of West Virginia $126.3 million to expand the state’s existing microwave public safety network and add 2,400 miles of fiber. The agency also gave the Future Generations Graduate School $4.5 million to spur adoption among low-income and rural areas in West Virginia.
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The FCC pushed back to May 7 from March 8 the deadline for comments on its notice examining the “future of media and information needs of communities in a digital age,” an order released Thursday said. APTS, NPR, CPB and PBS asked for the extension.
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Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines and the Russian Federation should be added to the U.S. Trade Representative’s Special 301 Priority Watch List of countries that don’t adequately protect intellectual property rights, said the International Intellectual Property Alliance. The alliance submitted its response to a Federal Register notice soliciting submissions about which countries should be on the list. The alliance estimated that U.S. businesses lost $14.3 billion in business software piracy and another $1.5 billion in music and records piracy, according to a report it submitted to the USTR.