Securing Undersea Cables and Revitalizing Local News Ecosystems

Securing Undersea Cable Infrastructure

• 💡 Undersea cables are crucial for global communications, carrying approximately 99% of internet traffic and are vital for US economic and national security.
• 🚀 Accelerating and streamlining undersea cable deployment is essential for redundancy, resiliency, and fostering a more diverse ecosystem of American-owned cables.
• 🛡️ The FCC's new rule requiring cybersecurity and physical security risk management plans helps identify threats, reduce vulnerabilities, and establish response plans for sabotage or compromise.
• 🇺🇸 Congress can promote more US-led cable projects and diversify traffic patterns to mitigate single points of failure and strengthen emergency response.

Revitalizing Local News

• 📉 The decline of local newspapers and the dominance of national programmers pose a threat to local news and reporting.
• 📰 Policies are being considered to create incentives for investment in local news gathering, which is generally more trusted than national media.
• 🏛️ A lack of local news circulation leads to citizens being unaware of local governance, potentially undermining the functioning of democracy.
• 📺 Ideas are being explored to empower local TV stations to reclaim nightly news time for local content, addressing the current dominance of national programming.
• 🗣️ The current state of the news ecosystem is described as an "indictment on our news ecosystem", suggesting intentionality is needed to fix it.