The broadband marketplace is intensely competitive. Cable is taking wireless market share, wireless is taking cable market share, satellite is nipping at the heels of everyone, and consumers are the winners. Broadband pricing has stayed well below the inflationary jumps that have been seen in many other industries/services.

This obvious competition, paired with low inflation, makes a new report from the Public Advocates Office (PAO) of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) all the more curious. The report, “Broadband Competition and Pricing Strategies in California’s Urban Markets,” was based on an interesting new data set that looked at promotional broadband rates in four CA cities by detailed location, and compared those prices to the number of broadband providers and household income at those locations. The report’s goal, using regression analysis, was to show that fewer gigabit providers lead to higher prices and that providers were engaged in digital discrimination. 

We applaud the effort to assemble the data set. However, the analysis makes several fundamental mistakes. First, the pricing analysis left out important variables like population density (which could have easily been added at the census block level). A high-density area is generally cheaper to connect, on a per-household basis. As a result, high-density areas are more likely to attract new providers,  as well as leading existing providers to offer lower promotional rates. Conversely, low-density areas will typically have fewer providers and higher promotional rates. 

Thus, by leaving out density from their analysis, the report potentially found spurious correlations between fewer providers at a location and higher promotional rates. To put it another way, the first sentence of the executive summary says, “Broadband prices in California’s urban markets vary widely depending on the level and type of competition available to households.” But that’s tautologically true because competition was basically the only independent variable in their regression equation (the one exception was income, which we’ll discuss below). And disturbingly, the report even omitted results that did not show the desired correlation between price and competition. The report appendix notes that “Comcast is excluded from the regression analysis because its pricing strategy reflects large, market-wide discounts followed by secondary geographic variation that do not correspond to local competition intensity.” In other words, the Comcast regression did not show the desired results, so the report did not show it. In addition, the report acknowledges (note 37) that its regression analysis produces inconsistent results for Charter.

The second elementary mistake, related to the first, was the repeated confusion between correlation and causation. For example, the report asserts confidently that “San Diego has the most limited competition, with many neighborhoods served by a monopoly gigabit provider.” But as the table below shows, San Diego has half the population density of the other three cities, as well as being hillier. So it might be more accurate to say that out of the four cities, San Diego is the costliest, on a per-household basis, to lay fiber and cable, leading to fewer providers and higher promotional prices. Causality is very different than correlation.

Data: Census Bureau

Third, the report ignores intense competition in sub-gig markets, which many subscribers are intentionally choosing. As a result, the report only focuses on the four top fixed broadband providers, even though satellite providers, such as Starlink, and 5G internet providers, such as T-Mobile and Verizon, are available in many locations covered by the report. 

Finally, we come to the impact of income, which is the one non-competition variable in the report’s analysis. On its website, the PAO alleges digital discrimination in the California broadband space. However, the analysis in this report shows “providers do not systematically adjust promotional pricing based on income levels” (p 16). Truthfully, the report could have been entitled “No Digital Discrimination Found in California’s Urban Broadband Markets.”

The CPUC should be careful not to rely on this flawed study to make any policy judgments related to broadband. Rather, we should take comfort that the increasingly competitive marketplace for broadband is benefiting consumers. 

Introduction

Late last year, Japan joined the recent wave of countries attempting to regulate smartphone platforms such as iOS or Android when its new Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA) went into effect. Like similar statutes around the world, the new legislation aims to give consumers more choices when it comes to how and where they purchase apps, while improving access for third-party developers.     

But compared to some of its international peers, Japan has pursued a more smartly tailored regulatory approach that should be seen as a model. It stands in especially stark contrast to the European Union’s overbroad Digital Markets Act (DMA), avoiding many of the safety and security issues that have been created by the EU’s effort. Here are four key areas where the Japanese and European approaches differ, underscoring how the MSCA offers a better approach. 

Security and User Choice

How to give consumers more choice about where they purchase apps without compromising their security is one of the most important questions in mobile platform regulation. Europe and Japan have taken vastly different approaches to the issue.

Under Europe’s DMA, platforms must allow users to download apps directly from third-party websites, without intermediaries providing protections or checks on in-app content. This approach creates substantial security risks, allowing for the distribution of malware or other content that skirts existing security reviews conducted by platforms.

Under the law, platforms are also required to let developers use an alternative payment system — so, for instance, your favorite music streaming app could direct customers to its own payment system and entirely bypass Apple or Google’s, which might charge the companies a fee.  As a result, users might no longer be able to use trusted platform payment options and instead be forced to share their financial information with an unfamiliar firm. The tools and protections that users have come to know and trust (like refund and fraud monitoring) could be removed as a result of poorly designed attempts to increase user choice. 

By contrast, the MSCA takes an approach that protects security while still encouraging user choice. By permitting measures “ensuring cybersecurity for smartphone use,” mobile platforms can ensure that alternate app stores include security protections or block criminal content. Meanwhile, alternative payment systems must appear alongside platform payment systems, expanding user choice with flexibility rather than reducing it. 

The MSCA’s approach acknowledges that competition regulation should expand the choices users have, not eliminate existing ones or push users towards less secure alternatives. 

Protecting Kids

Policymakers around the world are grappling with a difficult question: how do we keep young people safe online in an increasingly digital world? There are no easy answers to this question. But at the very least, online competition rules shouldn’t make it more difficult to protect kids. 

Unfortunately, the DMA, passed in 2022, fails on this front. For starters, it does not include explicit protections for minors. As a result, children are treated the same as adults when it comes to the DMA’s rules on alternative app distribution and payment services, discussed above. Since the law forces platforms to allow relatively free access to sites and systems outside of the platform owner’s control, efforts to restrict the content that kids can access could be considered a violation of the DMA. For example, age restrictions for apps distributed outside the app store may not be permissible under the DMA; platforms have already been forced to allow apps containing explicit content to be installed through alternate app stores. Lacking a carveout for youth protections, kids could be left with unmitigated access to explicit or harmful content online.

Unlike the DMA, the MSCA permits measures “safeguarding youth who use smartphones.” Measures that might face legal challenges under the European approach can remain in place in Japan. Tools like limiting transaction links in apps designed for children, restricting access to alternative markets through controls at the operating system level, and limiting targeted advertising to minors are all possible through the MSCA, empowering parents. 

As PPI has previously explored, parents are strongly supportive of these sorts of controls, which enable them to make decisions about their kids’ online access. The MSCA’s approach does not resolve all of the difficult questions about kids’ online safety, but it provides the flexibility needed to maintain existing safeguards while still preserving competition. 

Interoperability and Privacy

Interoperability — allowing third parties to interface with a platform’s systems and data— is an admirable strategy for strengthening competition and helping users get more out of their devices. But it is not without tradeoffs: integration inherently requires control and access to potentially sensitive data. Competition regulation should be selective about where and how interoperability is mandated in order to maximize the benefits for users while maintaining safety as much as possible.

The European approach forces platforms to provide third parties with sweeping access to user data for interoperability purposes. For example, mobile platforms have faced requests to hand over the full contents of users’ notifications or the history of Wi-Fi networks they have connected to, regardless of how the third party intends to use the data. Notification contents could expose two-factor authentication codes or private details, while Wi-Fi history could reveal where and how a user is spending their time. With no option for platforms to deny requests for sensitive user information, third parties may maliciously harvest and monetize data for their own gain, all while consumers remain unaware of risks. These overly broad interoperability mandates harm user privacy and could eventually erode trust in platforms,  hurting the market for all developers.

Japan’s competition law takes a narrower approach to interoperability access. The MSCA requires that requests remain “proportionate to the competition related problems at hand” and allows platforms to reject inappropriate data access attempts. Platforms can also reject requests from parties who are legally required to share collected data with foreign governments, keeping user data safe. These measures mean that opportunities for interoperability, which benefit users, can remain in place, while those that exploit them are rejected.  

Innovation and Intellectual Property

Governments also need to balance their desire to encourage competition with the need to incentivize innovation. Requiring platforms to share features or access with competitors can provide users more choice, but it also weakens the returns from research and development. This can lead to stagnation as companies find themselves unwilling to invest in innovation. In designing competition regulation, policymakers are forced to make a choice about how to strike this balance, and the DMA and MSCA represent meaningfully different answers with real consequences for users.

The DMA’s “interoperability by design” approach means that platforms are often required to share features and IP with third parties without compensation, including early notice about coming updates. This gives competitors valuable insight into platforms’ future plans, and introduces significant costs for platforms to make new systems and features compatible while competitors’ development costs are effectively subsidized. 

These misaligned incentives mean that platforms may withhold or delay new features, leading to a worse experience for users. Recently, Apple has delayed iOS features like Live Translation or withheld others like iPhone Mirroring entirely in Europe as a result of the DMA. Apple argues that because of concerns over privacy and compliance with interoperability requirements, such delays are likely to continue. Today, European users have a limited product compared to their international counterparts, not due to technical limitations but because of the high costs of legislative compliance.

Japan’s “proportional interoperability” approach is narrower and contains protections for “legitimate exercise of intellectual property rights,” including the ability for platforms to charge for interoperability access. Platforms maintain the right to evaluate whether to implement interoperability access on some features, allowing them to more effectively use resources and preserving incentives for R&D investment. Tellingly, Japanese users have so far not faced the same feature delays or limitations that European users have. The results show that the MSCA’s proportional approach can still address genuine competition concerns without severely damaging incentives for innovation.

Conclusion

The DMA and MSCA present two significantly different approaches to increasing competition in the smartphone ecosystem. The DMA’s hardline, no-exceptions approach has lofty ambitions, but has already led to negative tradeoffs for consumers, including reduced protections for minors, privacy risks with interoperability, and delayed features. While the full impact of the still-young MSCA remains to be seen, its moderate approach appears poised to avoid the same pitfalls that have hampered the DMA to date. 

As both laws mature and their impacts are fully understood, the comparative outcomes will be instructive for policymakers around the world considering similar legislation. Effective competition policy should expand user choice without major sacrifices to security, privacy, or other protections that users value, and Japan’s efforts show this balance is achievable.

Congress is moving swiftly ahead on legislation that would require smartphone apps to verify the ages of their users in order to protect children’s safety online. But with full markups on several bills scheduled for the coming weeks, lawmakers face an important choice between competing approaches.

Among the leading bills, H.R. 6333, the bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA) introduced by Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Erin Houchin (R-Ind.) stands in strong contrast to H.R. 3149, the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) introduced by Rep. John James (R-Mich.). Though both bills aim to safeguard kids through requirements on app stores, POPA stands out as a more practical, privacy-forward, and parent-aligned approach. Here are four key policy areas where the two bills differ. 

Shared Responsibility

Checking an app users’ age is a complex task, and responsibility for it should fit with the actual roles of app developers and stores. While both bills enlist mobile app stores in the age assurance process, ASAA establishes onerous requirements that would require them to collect government IDs from all users — minors and adults alike — regardless of what kind of app they want to download.

While app stores may be well-positioned to use basic age information to limit the apps younger people can download, they have little control or knowledge of what happens once an app is installed. The ASAA would make the point of download the only major check on online safety, with app developers holding minimal responsibility for providing safer experiences after their product is loaded onto a child’s phone. This strategy could inadvertently lead to poorly applied restrictions with content minimally tailored to be age appropriate and little control of how apps are actually used.

By contrast, POPA proposes a shared responsibility across the ecosystem, requiring app stores to conduct age checks at the point of download and developers to do the same when consumers use certain parts of their apps. As PPI wrote last month, parents believe strongly that verification should go beyond a one-time check. 

Consent Fatigue

For parental consent to be meaningful, it must be sustainable: Too many requests lead users to accept terms without reading them, much the way most of us now automatically click through the ubiquitous cookie consent banners websites started displaying following enforcement of Europe’s GDPR. This phenomenon, known as consent fatigue, should be carefully considered in the design of an age verification framework.

POPA gives parents tools to manage kids’ access without becoming overly frequent or demanding. For example, parents are able to restrict access by category or age rating, rather than at every app download. Giving parents these tools means they still can still make meaningful decisions about their kids’ activity without being inundated by routine approvals that might cause them to tune out. 

Though designed with good intentions, ASAA’s approach is much more likely to overwhelm parents. The bill would require app stores to receive parental consent during each and every download request. Even if parents decide that their kids are ready to download some kinds of apps independently, ASAA does not provide a mechanism to let them do so. And with requirements to receive additional parental consent after “significant changes” are made to any app, requests are likely to be frequent.

Parental Control & Data Sharing

When handling sensitive personal information, privacy and choice should be foundational priorities. The age assurance process should strive to minimize data collection and sharing, obtaining only the information needed for age assurance and nothing beyond.  While POPA gives parents the agency to decide when and where their child’s age is shared, ASAA mandates broad sharing without consent. 

ASAA requires all new users to undergo age verification, and developers of all apps – even those without age restricted content — to receive information about all users’ ages by default. This approach violates the principle of data minimization and puts all users at risk. Even if a user wishes to download an app that does not include age-restricted content, like a notetaking app or their favorite coffee shop’s app, they will still be required to undergo the age verification process. Parents and other users have no choice over the collection and sharing of their information.

POPA takes a narrower approach, allowing users to declare their age and giving parents the ability to choose to share age information with developers. While the bill encourages app stores to use techniques like age estimation to provide age assurance, it does not require it. 

Legal Considerations

Crucially, the concerns over scope and applicability considered in this piece are not purely speculative. Last month, a federal judge temporarily blocked Texas’s state-level age verification law on the grounds that it was “exceedingly overbroad” and “unconstitutionally vague.” If Congress is serious about protecting children and giving parents choice, it should pursue a legally durable approach that can withstand the same first amendment challenges that the Texas law faced. POPA’s measured scope, with a defined set of covered applications and focus on parental consent and choice, appears up to this legal scrutiny. As markup approaches, lawmakers now have an opportunity to advance legally durable and practically designed age assurance legislation. Congress should choose POPA. 

In the face of prevailing industry headwinds, many local news outlets around the country have shuttered. Their continued overreliance on an advertising-based revenue model, a vestige of the pre-internet times, leaves them vulnerable to further decline. Just in the last year, 130 more newspapers folded — a rate of two and a half a week — leading to a total loss of over 7,000 newsroom jobs. At the same time, others who took note of changing consumer preferences for the digital over print format saw a net increase of 105 outlets. To not just survive, but thrive in today’s fast-moving news media landscape, where consumers lean towards new formats such as short-form video, local outlets must embrace a tech-forward attitude. This means adopting the newest tools on the block, including AI, that advance newsroom productivity and capacity for producing high-quality, public interest journalism.

Building networks of trust among communities and sustaining vibrant information ecosystems are non-negotiables for healthy democracies. When local news deserts proliferate, communities experience diminished civic engagement: lower voter turnout, fewer contested races, and poorer public participation. It’s no secret either that the loss of reliable sources of information exacerbates urban-rural polarization. National news media rarely covers localities, and even less so when they are located in rural areas. Simultaneously, the most prolific outlets are also often the least attuned to the situation on the ground in most of working America, undermining valuable discourse in overlooked communities.

Reversing these trends requires an honest reckoning with the multi-faceted challenges that local newsrooms face. Their tenuous fiscal situations leave them under-resourced on several fronts. Local reporters must juggle multiple beats at a time, covering city council hearings, school board meetings, and small business openings, all the while performing serious investigative work. This workload makes devoting the requisite attention to unearthing and covering scoops well extremely difficult. Understaffing also inhibits other critical newsroom functions, such as fact-checking, translating, and distributing published stories. Without these supporting activities, local news risks its journalistic credibility and loses reach into communities. The shift to digital further exposes key skill deficiencies in local newsrooms, namely expertise in audience analytics and web design, that inhibit their ability to cater to relevant audiences. That’s especially important at a time when more young people are turning to social media for information that was once the bread and butter of a local newsroom — restaurant recommendations, classifieds, community events, and sporting fixtures.

Given the status quo, local newsrooms should welcome artificial intelligence as a tool for increasing high-quality coverage. AI holds enormous potential for local outlets because it excels at many functions that newsrooms currently lack due to budget cuts. For one, AI thrives when tasked with pattern recognition, which is highly useful for investigations that require journalists to process large datasets, such as troves of municipal documents. Another area of strength is AI’s aptitude for automating already standardized tasks like translation. For local outlets that serve multilingual audiences, accessible translations may meaningfully increase public engagement with existing coverage. 

AI may also help newsrooms scale their digital presence to better deliver content in the format that most audiences now prefer, including generating audio and video versions, summaries, and visual explainers. When local news media are able to engage well with their audiences online, their reach significantly expands. AI can help local newsrooms level the playing field in the face of upstart new competitors (like news creators on Instagram), and the larger hedge fund-owned conglomerates (who can invest in digital expertise and apportion the cost across multiple mastheads).

Indeed, it’s clear that newsroom productivity and the development of new capabilities are critical issues given new competitive dynamics and shifting consumer expectations. Consumers have a preference for new formats, as shown by the rise of TikTok as a source of news and the continuing long-term decline in consumers’ use of publisher-owned and operated platforms (e.g., websites and apps) in favor of social media. 

At the same time, due to staffing shortages, local reporters have a lot more on their plates than in the past. For example, local reporters covered an average of 3.8 different levels of government in 2000 (e.g., cities, counties, school boards, special districts, townships), which increased to 10 different levels of government in 2020. When they are already spread so thin, building trustworthy sourcing, chasing new leads, parsing through troves of documents, or otherwise pursuing time-consuming investigations becomes a near impossibility. 

With the acknowledgement that local newsrooms are under-resourced, AI can play a crucial role in expanding their investigative capacity. Tools like LocalLens, an AI-powered application launched in 2023 that automatically transcribes and summarizes local government meetings, allow journalists to cast their net far and wide for potential story ideas. LocalLens has also helped reporters connect with sources, such as student speakers at school board meetings, whom they might not have found on their own. Another example is the Associated Press’ 2024 launch of LocalLede, which uncovers relevant regulations from over 430 federal agencies for local jurisdictions. LocalLede can serve as a useful starting point for writing stories, flagging new federal announcements like changes to Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) thresholds. Other AI tools have further enriched investigative journalism, helping reporters process large amounts of public records, including campaign finance disclosures, civil complaints, and municipal budgets.

AI tools also streamline repetitive tasks, allowing local news outlets to redirect limited resources to where they are needed most. Their pervasiveness in copy editing at major publications, for fact-checking and grammar and style corrections, should serve as a model for local newsrooms that still perform these tasks by hand. Natural language-processing-based services like Otter.ai save reporters countless hours whenever they need written transcriptions after conducting interviews. AI has also shown promise in automating translation work. When wildfires swept across Los Angeles in January 2025, the Boyle Heights Beat used a beta version of English-to-Spanish translation GPT to make their coverage and social media updates available to Spanish-speaking members of the community. 

For local newsrooms falling behind in their digital offerings due to the lack of technical expertise on staff, AI provides a means to catch up with larger counterparts. THE CITY, a non-profit outlet that covers all boroughs of New York City, currently offers AskNellie, an AI assistant that answers readers’ questions ranging from rent regulations to upcoming elections by connecting them with previous coverage. In 2024, the publication previously used artificial intelligence to create an online map of its areas of coverage, which provided transparency to audiences about whether or not they were sufficiently documenting underserved communities. ARLNow, a local Northern Virginia outlet, increased online engagement through publishing an automated daily newsletter, which they lacked the staff to compile before using AI to do so. 

While artificial intelligence has the potential to significantly improve local news media, it is important to approach its rollout with prudence. Failing to think through the specifics of applying AI to specific use cases will result in conspicuous misfires. For example, shortly after launching AI-authored high school sports coverage at several of its local news outlets, including the Columbus Dispatch in 2023, newspaper conglomerate Gannett pulled the project due to widespread backlash from readers for poor quality post-game summaries. Also in 2023, at CNET, editors had to issue numerous corrections to financial advice articles written by AI that contained obvious factual errors. Sports Illustrated showed poor judgment in November 2023 when the publication added fake journalist names and profiles to AI-generated content. When used judiciously, AI is a valuable tool for revitalizing local outlets, bringing them into the modern news media landscape, but it cannot be applied as a blanket solution without thoughtful consideration.

Ultimately, local news must keep up with the times. Embracing AI enables local outlets to make the most out of their limited resources — continuing to produce high-quality investigations, reach larger audiences, and put out competitive digital offerings. While local newsrooms may not completely reverse their decline anytime soon, adopting a tech-forward attitude will at least help them take steps in the right direction, ensuring that they can serve as more robust informational backbones for local communities who rely on their coverage.