Friday Fun Off-Topic Megathread - Politics

Friday Fun Off-Topic Megathread
I’m Shireen Santosham, Chief Innovation Officer of San Jose, California. We recently resigned from FCC’s broadband committee to shine a light on industry influence on the committee and highlight why we need to ensure everyone has access to broadband. AMA!
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Posted: 08 Feb 2018 09:29 PM PST

It's Friday, so let's have some fun. Please feel free to share any political cartoons, image macros, infographics, memes, or other things that would typically be off-topic here on /r/politics. Please keep in mind that civility rules are still in place, and that meta discussion should be saved for modmail or our monthly meta thread.

post echidnas

submitted by /u/Qu1nlan
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I’m Shireen Santosham, Chief Innovation Officer of San Jose, California. We recently resigned from FCC’s broadband committee to shine a light on industry influence on the committee and highlight why we need to ensure everyone has access to broadband. AMA!

Posted: 09 Feb 2018 09:16 AM PST

If net neutrality is about fair access to highway lanes, then equitable broadband deployment is about giving everyone the chance to buy a car. I'm glad that we've been paying attention to net neutrality, and I think we should talk about broadband deployment because internet access is now crucial for everything from finishing homework to applying for jobs.

Over the past year, I've been participating in many meetings of the FCC's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee along with and on behalf of our mayor. However, we put in our resignation a the end of January because even though there are members with good intentions, it became clear that the industry-heavy group will simply promote the interests of big telecom.

Here are some of San Jose's efforts on this front:

A recent Interview I gave about the FCC resignation and the digital divide in San Jose
A video of our mayor's announcing a new Net Neutrality bill with California State Senator Kevin de León
My Congressional testimony on rolling out 5G without leaving people behind
San Jose led the charge on defeating California Senate Bill 649, which would have given huge subsidies to big telecom and allowed them to put up refrigerator-sized equipment with no oversight
Worked on closing the homework gap for all San Jose students through partnerships with corporate and nonprofit partners to ensure students have access to broadband at home
We authored a digital inclusion report highlighting our 95,000 residents who don't have access to broadband
Launched SpeedUp San Jose to crowdsource 3,000 data points of internet speeds to hold the telecoms industry accountable for their service