DC BLOX sees a business model for building regional data centers in places like Greenville, South Carolina, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama, Alan Poole, general counsel of the Atlanta-based company, said during an Incompas webinar Thursday. As connected devices became more powerful, tech companies realized they needed to move data centers and computing power closer to users, Poole said in a conversation with Incompas CEO Chip Pickering during the session. COVID-19 spurred tech growth, Poole said: “The investment in digital infrastructure around that time to help meet the pace of demand was wild, awe-inspiring, and we’re still going through that,” he said. A key element DC BLOX considers is how welcoming a city will be to investment, as data centers require access to land and electricity. The company also examines potential tax incentives to build. Policymakers must ask what they’ll do if one developer takes all the available power, which is “happening all over the country,” Poole said. One center can require up to one gigawatt of power, which is "eye-popping.” Accordingly, the ability of data centers to generate power onsite, including “green” energy, will become increasingly important, he said. Communities should decide whether they want to compete “because there are many [competing] markets” and they are offering tax and other incentives. “At least at DC BLOX we’re doing everything we reasonably can to head off community concerns as soon as possible, because it makes more sense financially.” The availability of large enough fiber pipelines to handle growing demands is also a concern. “Is there enough fiber on all these routes?” Poole asked. “It was assumed, until very recently, that we were never going to need materially bigger conduits and that has proven absolutely untrue.” Some markets getting high-speed internet for the first time don’t have a nearby internet exchange point yet, allowing ISPs to exchange data with other networks: “That’s where the true internet compute happens and if you’re not close to one of those exchanges, you have problems with things like latency that might make real-time videoconferencing … unworkable.” Pickering said he loves the focus on “Tier 2” markets. “Those are great emerging hubs” and data centers “are a critical component and a critical piece of the infrastructure to make those hubs grow, succeed, prosper.” As communications technology rapidly evolves, “electricity is still kind of in the old world,” Pickering said. As the U.S. competes with China, “electricity and energy really is the supply-chain critical component.”

Tribal-area wireless provider Smith Bagley told the FCC the Navajo Nation this week adopted a legislative resolution supporting the carrier’s April request for a waiver of Lifeline rules. The provider asked the FCC to temporarily provide expanded monthly tribal Lifeline benefits of $25 to $65.75 to make up for the loss of funding following the expiration of the affordable connectivity program (see 2404080030). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Smith Bagley “added 100 Gigabytes of data each month for Tribal ACP customers to use while their Tribal lands were closed down and they were forced to stay home,” said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 11-42. Now that ACP has lapsed, Smith Bagley “can no longer provide the additional 100 Gigabytes of data to Tribal homes,” the filing said: “With minor adjustments, it has returned to its pre-COVID rate plans, which means that high data use customers must purchase additional bundles of data when needed.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced six joint resolutions of disapproval last week that would block the sale of more than $20 billion in U.S. military equipment to Israel, including bombs, fighter jets, ground vehicles, mortar rounds and tank ammunition.

CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related matters:

LONDON -- Officials at a defense industry conference last week were complimentary of defense export control reforms recently announced by the U.S., Australia and the U.K., but they also said the three governments can do more to incentivize companies to make use of the reforms.

Questions about how to define date of arrival and when the 15-day window to file a cargo release dominated CBP’s Oct. 1 call with the trade on issues related to the labor strike at U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast ports.

The railroad industry is too early to challenge a 2023 Virginia law that gave ISPs access rights to railroad properties, said Virginia State Corporation Commission Judge Jehmal Hudson and other state officials in a response brief Wednesday at the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Association of American Railroads (AAR) is appealing a U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia decision to dismiss its lawsuit against the state officials for lack of standing and other reasons (see 2407220018). The Virginia appellees urged the 4th Circuit to affirm the district court’s judgment.

The House Homeland Security Committee passed the Contraband Awareness Technology Catches Harmful (CATCH) Fentanyl Act on Sept. 25, sending the bill to the full House. It would require CBP to establish a pilot program to test at least five types of non-intrusive inspection equipment for goods coming in all modes of conveyance across the land borders. At least one of those approaches must include machine learning or artificial intelligence. No more than three years after passage, the agency would have to report to Congress the effectiveness of the systems tested in finding illegal drugs, guns and other contraband, whether it would work to use the equipment to serve all the land ports of entry, how much it would cost to do so, and how much time would CBP officers need to run these screens.

Advocating for a bipartisan bill introduced by Southwestern lawmakers to direct certain fees to land port expansions, equipment investments and staffing was the top priority for customs brokers in town to lobby as part of the group's annual government affairs conference.

NATOA, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and two more local government groups reinforced their opposition (see 2311060069) to the House Commerce Committee-cleared American Broadband Deployment Act (HR-3557) Wednesday. House Commerce last year advanced the measure, a package of GOP-led connectivity permitting revamp measures, without Democratic support (see 2305240069). NCTA and nine other communications industry groups urged House leaders last month to defeat the measure before the end of this Congress (see 2409050035). HR-3557 “represents an unprecedented and dangerous usurpation of local governments’ authority to manage public rights-of-way and land use,” NATOA and the other groups said in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. The National Association of Counties and National League of Cities also signed. They noted the bill “favors a model for local permitting that unfairly constrains local input and threatens to undo significant local coordination efforts that have occurred across the country to prepare and act upon this historic moment in federal broadband infrastructure investment.” In “return for these gifts, the bill imposes no obligations on cable, wireless, and telecommunications companies to provide broadband to ‘unserved’ and ‘underserved’ Americans and, further, passes on the real cost of deployment to already overburdened American households,” the groups said: “That such flawed legislation has moved as far as it has may be attributed to the fact” House Commerce moved HR-3557 “without the benefit of local government testimony nor insights and consequences of the proposed fundamental changes to our nation’s telecommunications policy and rights-of-way authorities.”