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posted by chromas on Wednesday June 26 2019, @12:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the fraudband dept.

Ex-chair of FCC broadband committee gets five years in prison for fraud

The former head of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) was sentenced to five years in prison for defrauding investors.

Elizabeth Ann Pierce was CEO of Quintillion, an Alaskan telecom company, when she lied to two investment firms in New York in order to raise $270 million to build a fiber network. She also defrauded two individual investors out of $365,000 and used a large chunk of that money for personal expenses.

Pierce, 55, pleaded guilty and last week was given the five-year prison sentence in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, US Attorney Geoffrey Berman announced. Pierce was also "ordered to forfeit $896,698.00 and all of her interests in Quintillion and a property in Texas." She will also be subject to a restitution order to compensate her victims "at a later date."

Pierce's industry experience helped her land the top spot on Pai's broadband advisory committee in April 2017. But she left Quintillion in July 2017 as her scheme unraveled, and she resigned from the FCC advisory panel. Pai appointed a new chair for his committee two months later; he thanked Pierce for her service, saying she did "an excellent job" chairing the committee and "wish[ed] her all the best in her future endeavors."

[...] The FCC committee that Pierce used to lead has repeatedly been criticized for favoring the interests of industry over the public at large. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo quit the group in January 2018 out of frustration that its recommendations favor the interests of private industry over municipalities.

The committee has also pushed policy that would benefit telecom companies at the expense of other tech companies. In December 2018, the committee urged states to impose new taxes on Netflix, Google, Facebook, and many other businesses that require Internet access to operate. The resulting funding would have been transferred to ISPs via grants that subsidize private broadband providers' network construction. (Pai didn't back the tax proposal.)

The BDAC is continuing its work, with the FCC saying it will "craft recommendations for the Commission on ways to accelerate the deployment of high-speed Internet access... by reducing and/or removing regulatory barriers to infrastructure investment and strengthening existing broadband networks in communities across the country."


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @02:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @02:03PM (#860084)

    Do Pai next!

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