UPDATE President Donald Trump reiterated his threat Thursday to veto the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act. The measure contains three telecom-related bills.
“I will Veto the Defense Bill, which will make China very unhappy,” he tweeted. “They love it. Must have Section 230 termination, protect our National Monuments and allow for removal of military from far away, and very unappreciative, lands. Thank you!. [sic]”
Trump objects to Sec. 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides immunity from civil liability for website third-party content. The President wants the FCC to ensure that immunity is not used to protect social media sites like Facebook and Twitter from censoring conservative content, reports NextTV.
Facebook and Twitter say there is no bias against conservative content on their sites and they flag Tweets that are false, deceptive or unproven.
The House and Senate passed a reconciled bill and sent it to the President for his signature last week, Inside Towers reported.
The first bill of interest to telecoms is the Spectrum IT Modernization Act (S. 3717), which would will require the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and other federal agencies to outline a plan for modernizing the information technology infrastructure used to manage federal spectrum. The USA Telecommunications (ORAN) Act (S. 3189) would allocate more than $1 billion to invest in Western-based alternatives to Huawei and ZTE.
The third measure, the Emergency Alert Distribution Improvement (READI) Act of 2020 (S. 2693) would ensure more people receive relevant emergency alerts on their mobile phones, televisions, and radios as well as explore new ways of alerting the public through online video and audio streaming services. If he does veto the defense bill, Congress could cut short its Christmas recess to hold an override vote, Reuters reported.
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