California Regulators Force Verizon To Do “Woke” Stuff Like Make Sure Broadband Is Semi-Affordable To Poor People

Broadband

from the basic-accountability-is-woke dept

Last year we reported how Verizon executives happily agreed to be more racist and sexist in exchange for Trump DOJ and FCC approval of their $20 billion merger with telecom giant Frontier Communications. Verizon embarrassingly said they’d cull race and gender equality initiatives, and try harder moving forward to protect downtrodden white people from the scary monster that is diversity.

But California regulators have thrown a few wrinkles into the mix for Verizon. The California CPUC has approved Verizon’s merger request after months of discussions, but required that the company engage in a bunch of stuff the Trump administration has derided as “woke,” such as (gasp) trying to make sure that the heavily taxpayer subsidized company occasionally offers broadband that’s semi-affordable:

“A low-cost Internet plan commitment centers on the Verizon Forward service that offers home Internet for as low as $20 a month. Reynolds said the deal with Verizon “locked in” the $20-per-month plans for low-income consumers for the next 10 years.”

Verizon’s also being required to (double gasp) actually invest in network upgrades to marginalized neighborhoods these companies generally like to neglect:

“At yesterday’s CPUC meeting, Commissioner John Reynolds described Verizon’s commitments. Verizon will deploy fiber to 75,000 new locations within five years, prioritizing census blocks with income at or below 90 percent of the county median, he said. For wireless service, Verizon is required to deploy 250 new cell sites with 5G and fixed wireless capability in areas eligible for state broadband grants and areas with high fire threats, he said.”

Verizon actually doing any of this will, of course, require constant monitoring by the California PUC, something that hasn’t always historically been a strong suit for U.S. regulators. We’ve reported repeatedly how the Trump administration has been waging total war against not just telecom oversight, but literally any effort to make broadband more affordable to the public.

That has even extended to illegally threatening to withhold billions in already awarded infrastructure subsidies to states that attempt to rein in the bad behavior of unpopular telecom giants like Comcast, Verizon, Charter, and AT&T. It’s even involved happily killing popular, bipartisan programs that delivered free Wi-Fi access to schoolchildren, primarily because telecom giants didn’t like it.

You know, real “populist” good faith stuff everybody in long-neglected flyover states were begging for.

Keep in mind this basic attempt to hold Verizon accountable only applies to California. And that’s, again, assuming California regulators hold Verizon accountable for following through.

Most states approved the merger with absolutely no public interest concessions whatsoever, ensuring that Verizon can leverage its even greater scale to dismantle competition, over bill customers in markets with limited broadband options, ignore low-income minority and marginalized communities, and generally behave like a predatory ass.

Because as we all know, doing absolutely anything to inconvenience America’s biggest, shittiest monopolies is woke.

Filed Under: affordability, broadband, california, cpuc, digital divide, doj, fcc, internet access, low income, mergers, telecom, wireless
Companies: verizon

The U.S. Digital Divide Got Measurably Worse After Republicans Killed A Popular Low-Income Broadband Program

Broadband

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Last year Trumplicans killed a popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak.

At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, of course, was that the ACP was popular with their constituents (the majority of ACP participants were in red states) and they didn’t want Dems to take credit during an election season.

A recent report by The Brattle Group actually found that the $7-$8 billion annual taxpayer cost of the program generated between $28.9 and $29.5 billion in savings thanks to expanded access to affordable internet, remote work opportunities, online education tools, and remote telehealth services. In other words: the program more than paid for itself via downstream benefits (something DOGE dudebros and other Trump cultists refuse to think about).

But new data coming out of Ookla indicates that the Republican attack on the ACP had a measurable, harmful impact on the U.S. broadband digital divide. Ookla’s full data shows some progress in connecting urban residents to speeds of at least 100 Mbps, but major problems in shoring up access to rural communities, especially in rural parts of Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Missouri and New Mexico:

“We suspect that some of this [broadband divide] was attributed to the ACP ending,” Sue Marek, editorial director at Ookla and author of the report, told CNET. “We might see some more examples of that by the end of 2025.” 

These are, once again, many parts of the country that tend to vote in favor of Trump. In large part because we’ve been slowly killing off critical journalism and replacing it with either corporatist infotainment or right wing propaganda that obscures the impact of their voting choices.

But the truth is, a lot of recent broadband progress has been made thanks to legislation passed in 2021 that Republicans opposed. That includes the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which included $25 billion in subsidies that have gone to a lot of community-owned or cooperative fiber expansion efforts. In many of those markets, rural users are seeing dirt cheap gigabit fiber access for the first time ever.

We’re also poised to see an infusion of fiber expansion thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill and BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) program, which is leveraging an additional $42.5 billion in subsidies flowing to the states. There’s been some fussing (by both the GOP and pundits like Ezra Klein) about the delays in getting this BEAD money to market; though a big reason for said delays was the need to completely remap U.S. broadband access after years of corruption-plagued policy failure.

BEAD money should start flowing this year, with a high discrepancy state by state based on which party is in control. Republican-controlled state BEAD money is more likely to be thrown in the lap of Elon Musk or AT&T and Comcast. Democrat-controlled state BEAD money is more likely to be leveraged to build open access middle mile networks, fund popular community owned broadband, or bolster local competition.

So U.S. state broadband data in ten years or show should tell a very interesting story.

These programs–from the ACP to ARPA and BEAD–were almost exclusively the byproduct of Democratic policy (not to suggest Democratic broadband policy hasn’t been without its own ugly problems and corruption issues). Republicans voted against all of them — yet will routinely try to take credit for the programs among their local, rural constituents.

Democrats at least make an effort. Republican telecom policy has involved either coddling monopoly power, destroying the regulatory ability to hold shitty telecoms accountable, or taking an illegal wrecking ball to Congressional-passed laws like the Digital Equity Act (which mandated that government and industry must make very basic efforts to ensure affordable broadband is deployed equitably).

Right now, a key priority for the administration is rewriting key parts of the infrastructure bill in a bid to redirect billions of subsidies away from better alternatives to Elon Musk’s expensive, congested, and environmentally harmful Starlink satellite broadband service. And lobotomizing whatever’s left of federal broadband consumer protection standards.

Official Republican policy on telecom is cronyism, corruption and making everything shittier and more expensive to the benefit of a handful of rich men and their companies (see: Ted Cruz’s latest effort to make it harder for rural school kids to get broadband). Yet when you read the vast majority of mainstream corporate journalism on telecom policy, this undeniable fact isn’t made clear to readers or the electorate.

Republicans rarely have to take agency for poor and unpopular telecom policy in most of the U.S. press, even when data repeatedly shows said policies documentably and intentionally harms their own purported constituents. It is, as they say, why we can’t have nice things.

Filed Under: access, affordability, bead, corruption, digital divide, fiber, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, maps, state broadband
Companies: ookla

$42.5 Billion Broadband Grant Program Being Rewritten To Benefit Elon Musk

Broadband

from the and-by-"fix"-it-I-mean-smashing-it-to-bits dept

We’ve often noted how there are $42.5 billion in broadband grants headed to the states courtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The GOP voted against the bill, but have repeatedly turned around and taken credit for its looming benefits among our broadly misinformed electorate. And, as we predicted, they’re now redrafting key components of the program to the direct benefit of Elon Musk.

To ensure that the $42.5 billion taxpayer money was spent wisely, the bill included numerous provisions, including a recommendation that states try to prioritize the funding of fiber. Because higher capacity fiber is generally future proof, whereas satellite services like Starlink are congested, expensive, harm the environment, and are seeing slowdowns as the network’s customer base grows.

The NTIA also included some bare bones requirements that ISPs taking taxpayer money try to ensure that any resulting service is made affordable to poor people. Big ISPs like Comcast and AT&T were quick to complain last year, and the GOP held fake government “investigations” into the outrageous scandal that is trying to help poor people get online.

These fairly sensible restrictions (which I suspect would have never been enforced in any serious way anyway) are being declared “woke” by the Trump administration, which is changing key parts of the grant program to the direct benefit of Elon Musk:

“Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program in a statement yesterday. Lutnick said that “because of the prior Administration’s woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations, the program has not connected a single person to the Internet and is in dire need of a readjustment.”

One reason it’s taken so long to get the funding off the ground is the U.S. government and states needed to more accurately map broadband access. We’ve noted repeatedly how U.S. broadband maps have been historically terrible. The GOP and telecom industry in lockstep has resisted improving them, knowing full well they would highlight widespread market failure and consolidated monopoly harm.

Under a functional broadband grant program, states would push fiber as deeply into rural communities as possible, ideally in the form of “open access” fiber networks that generate local competition. From there, you’d address the rest of the gaps using fixed wireless and 5G, then fill in the remaining holes with low Earth orbit satellite broadband options like Starlink.

But Musk being Musk, and the GOP not really being interested in doing the reading, want to simply throw Starlink at as many Americans as possible, ignoring the service’s congestion problems, high costs, and environmental impact. They want to act as if Starlink is magic, slather their favorite conspiratorial billionaire with subsidies, then declare U.S. broadband effectively fixed.

It’s also worth noting that in many instances they’re renaming the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) to strip the word “equity” out. Because, you know, racist kakistocracy.

The problem is that by redirecting billions of dollars to Musk, you’re directing it away from a lot of locally owned businesses and smaller providers that are intimately familiar with and directly serve these neighborhoods. You’re also potentially directing funds away from extremely popular community owned fiber providers that have made affordability a key focus of their deployments.

Given states have been spending years developing their state specific spending plans for this BEAD program, it’s not entirely clear how successful the GOP will be in rerouting a big chunk of the $42.5 billion to their cronies, but it’s abundantly clear they’re going to give it the old college try.

Filed Under: 5g, bead, broadband, digital divide, elon musk, fiber, grants, infrastructure bill, ntia, satellite, telecom, wireless
Companies: spacex, starlink

Congress Still Trying To Fund Plan To Rip Huawei Gear Out Of U.S. Telecom Networks

Overhype

from the dysfunction-junction dept

Long before TikTok histrionics took root, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent numerous years freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei.

The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on Americans at a massive scale. Congress then proposed a solution: it would require that U.S. telecom operators (large and small) rip out all Huawei equipment from their networks at great expense, then replace it with usually more expensive alternatives.

So in early 2020 Congress passed the Secure And Trusted Communications Act effectively banning Huawei from U.S. telecom networks. Congress doled out $1.9 billion to rip out and replace Huawei gear, but it’s estimated to cost around $5 billion to actually complete the effort. But instead of finishing the job, Congress fell asleep, resulting in huge costs for telecom providers (especially small ones).

Last week, the House announced it was finally prepared to vote on funding the $3 billion difference so that a job government started back in 2020 actually gets finished:

“The 1,800-page text was released late Saturday and includes other provisions aimed at China, including requiring a report on Chinese efforts to evade U.S. national security regulations and an intelligence assessment of the current status of China’s biotechnology capabilities.”

If Congress can’t fund the difference, it will mostly fall on the backs of smaller providers in connectivity-challenged rural areas, which risk curtailing coverage to parts of rural America we profess to care so much about. FCC officials have also indicated it could also harm the availability of reliable 911 services.

What nudged Congress out of its apathy? I’d wager it has something to do with the recent news that Chinese hackers infiltrated eight different unnamed U.S. ISPs. That massive attack was so significant ISPs say they still haven’t managed to root the invaders out of their networks yet (there is no evidence I’ve seen that Huawei gear played any specific role). A great job all around.

There’s a chasm between all the sound and fury aimed at shoring up U.S. privacy and security (see: our obsession with TikTok) and actual, coherent action. Congressfolk have been whining about Huawei’s purported security risks for the better part of fifteen years, and we still haven’t actually taken action to fix the problem. Too much time fighting over whether candy marketing is too sexy, I’d wager.

Filed Under: 911, china, congress, connectivity, digital divide, fcc, national security, privacy, rip and replace, security, telecom, wireless
Companies: huawei, tiktok

AT&T Refuses To Upgrade Millions Of DSL Customers To Fiber Despite Untold Billions In Taxpayer Subsidies And Government Favors

Broadband

from the ill-communication dept

Four years years ago AT&T, a company that, for years, cheapened out on upgrading its broadband lines to fiber, effectively stopped selling DSL. While that’s understandable given the limitations of the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due to a lack of competition.

There are other issues at play too. AT&T has, for decades, received countless billions in tax cuts, subsidies, merger approvals, and regulatory favors (remember how killing net neutrality, broadband privacy rules, or approving a wave of doomed mergers were all supposed to unleash untold innovation, job creation, and fiber network expansion? Yeah, AT&T doesn’t either).

In many states, AT&T has managed to lobby lawmakers into removing any requirement that the company continue servicing these users, many of whom are elderly folks still using traditional landlines used for 911 access. That’s been easier in some states than others. It was caught bribing Illinois lawmakers to pass such “reform.” California’s also been resistant to letting AT&T off the hook.

Last week, AT&T more formally announced what was already clear: it stated it would not be upgrading tens of millions of copper-based phone and DSL customers to fiber. The numbers aren’t insignificant:

“AT&T’s wireline footprint has 88 million locations, said Susan Johnson, an AT&T executive VP in charge of supply chain and wireline transformation.

About 21 million of those have access only to voice service. The other 67 million are eligible for Internet access, and 29 million of those have access to fiber already. AT&T plans to boost its number of fiber locations to 45 million by the end of 2029 but says it isn’t profitable enough to build fiber to the other parts of its old landline phone and DSL networks.”

Again, when AT&T says it’s going to deploy fiber to 45 million people, you should always take those promises with a grain of salt. They’re experts at something I affectionately call “fiber to the press release.” AT&T insists that less affordable, more expensive, and more capacity-constrained satellite or wireless will have to be “good enough” for users left just out of reach.

It’s essential to note that AT&T has received untold billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks in exchange for near-Utopian promises of new fiber deployment. It received $42 billion alone from the last set of Trump tax cuts. It has spent untold millions of dollars lobbying to successfully defang the FCC and eliminate whatever’s left of consumer protections. It’s been accused of ripping off low income programs for the poor and rural school broadband projects.

Nobody’s ever done an audit of AT&T’s fraud, waste, and abuse because AT&T’s a trusted domestic surveillance partner effectively immune from meaningful government accountability. AT&T’s about to get a major chunk of the $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies included in the 2021 infrastructure bill.

Ars Technica kind of just floats over all of this as if it’s kind of an afterthought. The problem isn’t just that AT&T has refused to upgrade millions of locations despite already getting paid for it. It’s also been at the forefront of lobbying for state laws banning towns and cities from building their own affordable fiber networks, even in instances where AT&T refused to.

So superficially you’ll see people say things like “of course AT&T doesn’t want to spend money to upgrade aging lines to fiber, it’s expensive!” But they ignore a very long history of the company endlessly defrauding taxpayers, ripping off subsidy programs, and just generally taking untold billions of dollars for networks that routinely, mysteriously, wind up half completed.

Filed Under: deployment, digital divide, dsl, fiber, high speed internet, ma bell, subsidies, upgrades
Companies: at&t

Supreme Court To Decide Whether Helping Poor Rural Americans Get Broadband Is ‘Unconstitutional’

Broadband

from the corruption-dressed-up-as-reform dept

The FCC has long run an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called the Universal Service Fund. The historically bipartisan program has long been funded by a fee on traditional phone lines. But with traditional phone lines dying, there’s been a long, ongoing discussion about how to best continue to fund the program.

The program has certainly seen fraud and abuse (much, much improved in more recent years). But it’s also done a mammoth amount of good getting neglected communities connected to the internet. A lot of folks like to singularly focus on the former to support the belief that government is always inherently bad.

The program is definitely in need of reform. Enter Republicans, who aren’t so much interested in how to fix the program, as they are redirecting taxpayer funds to their friends at companies like AT&T. Republicans insist they have the fix: to impose a massive new tax on “woke” tech companies and services (read: you), then give it to telecom giants like AT&T with a long, proud history of subsidy fraud.

The Trumplican-stacked Fifth Circuit court of appeals has proposed a novel solution to the USF problem: they’ve simply ruled the entire program unconstitutional (pdf), throwing efforts to actually fix it into chaos. The ruling, which ignored past Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent, effectively declared the USF an unconstitutional, illegal tax, something seven court dissenters said was a preposterous leap.

Now the Supreme Court has stated they’ll hear the case, which will ultimately determine whether federal efforts to expand broadband access to poor, rural neglected communities is effectively illegal or not:

“The last time the Supreme Court invoked what is known as the non-delegation doctrine to strike down a federal law was in 1935. But several conservative justices have suggested they are open to breathing new life into the legal doctrine.”

The disruption to the USF and E-Rate — which focuses on connecting school and library broadband — could be massive.

Trump 2.0 will be a corruption-fueled effort to dismantle the federal regulatory state, something the press refuses to cover with any sense of urgency or alarm. All dressed up as “populist” reform despite being decidedly unpopular among those who’ll field the brunt of the harm. This fight over the USF is just one of countless cases trying to dismantle everything from federal consumer protection to labor rights.

This particular effort to “reform the USF” is framed by Republicans as a serious, good faith effort at saving taxpayer money and helping rural Americans. But the lawsuit at the heart of this was spearheaded by a Republican fake consumer group named Consumers’ Research, whose website encourages people to report “woke” companies for making bare-bone efforts at empathy and inclusivity.

Don’t worry about the USF though! Republicans have a “fix” they’ll be pushing heavily in the new year. It involves imposing steep new taxes on “woke” tech companies and their services (passed directly on to you in the form of higher bills for Netflix or YouTube), then throwing it into the lap of giant telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast. And away from more popular alternatives like community broadband, cooperatives, or city-owned utilities.

AT&T and friends have been priming the pump on this plan for several years with the help of the FCC’s Brendan Carr, who will now be in charge of the FCC under Trump. Again, his plan to offload billions from Big Tech to Big Telecom to “fix rural broadband” will be framed by the press as a good faith effort to repair a broken program, but the Republican animosity toward the poor is palpable, and the last time Carr and Trump were in charge of a government broadband subsidy program it went… extremely poorly.

With control of the Presidency, both Houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, I suspect we’ll see more than a few of these “telecom reform” efforts that are more about creating giant new slush funds for AT&T than any serious reform. And, as per tradition, a lot of corrupt Democrats, and a feckless U.S. journalism industry, will be extremely eager to help prop up the façade.

Filed Under: broadband, digital divide, fcc, high speed internet, low income, supreme court, telecom, universal service fund

Republicans: Helping Poor People And Minorities Afford Broadband Is Illegal Now, Sorry

Broadband

from the this-is-why-we-have-nice-things dept

We’ve noted more than once that the 2021 infrastructure bill is poised to deliver $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies to the states. A lot of that money will be thrown in the lap of incumbents with long histories of empty promises, but a lot of it will be leveraged for genuine, major improvements in broadband options by ISPs, municipalities, cooperatives, and utilities.

Republicans, of course, voted against these improvements. At the same time, Republicans have lied repeatedly to their constituents and tried to take credit for them. They’ve also been whining for much of the last year about some pretty flimsy requirements requiring that ISPs have to try to make sure there’s a slower, more affordable option for poor people (the gall!).

They’ve had several show hearings about this massive indignity. Republicans are also simultaneously mad that nonprofits are poised to receive $1.25 billion in “Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program” grants to “support efforts to achieve digital equity, promote digital inclusion activities, and spur greater adoption of broadband among Covered Populations.” The horror.

There’s always been racial discrimination involved in determining both where fiber broadband gets deployed (“redlining”), and how much broadband costs. Data indicates big ISPs routinely skip over minority and low-income populations for upgrades (even when taking billions in taxpayer subsidies). Data also has shown Big ISPs charge minorities more money for slower service in many areas.

U.S. broadband generally sucks, and is patchier, slower, and more expensive than in most developed nations. And however bad it is, it’s routinely worse for low income and minority communities. That’s documentable and not, as Republicans like to insist, up for debate.

The government only just last year even acknowledged this was happening. Note they didn’t really do a whole lot about it beyond that; but even the action of acknowledging racism was involved in fiber upgrades was enough to send Republicans into a hissy fit.

The Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program’s NOFO (Notice of Funding Opportunity) states that grant winners must use the funding to serve members of “covered populations,” defined to include “individuals who are members of a racial or ethnic minority group.” Basically, it’s a bare bones effort to ensure that some money is spent shoring up the decades of discrimination in broadband deployment.

Republicans and Ted Cruz don’t like that (for what should be obvious reasons), so Cruz last week fired off a letter to the NTIA (which manages the program in conjunction with the states) insisting that trying to help poor minority communities afford broadband is “unconstitutional.” In large part because the corrupt, Trumplican-stocked Supreme Court has looked poorly on similar programs:

“NTIA has not yet finalized a grant for any Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program funding to any applicants. Therefore, NTIA still has time to reverse course before it breaks the law. As the Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, we urge you to strike this unlawful Guidance now.”

Cruz, likely the incoming chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, is also calling for a pause of the Broadband Equity Access And Deployment (BEAD) infrastructure program more generally. In part because Republicans want to redirect subsidies away from community owned broadband initiatives (that focus on affordable fiber), and toward AT&T, Comcast, and Elon Musk’s expensive satellite services.

Of course guys like Cruz, who happily rubber stamp every unconstitutional whim King Donald has, couldn’t actually care any less about what is or isn’t constitutional. They’re simply upset that the federal government identified systemic racism and made the slightest effort to do something about it. All the legal arguments are just decorative, and routinely aren’t based in reason or precedent.

Republicans just genuinely despise helping the plebs. You might recall House Republicans tried to ban towns and cities from offering their residents affordable community broadband during peak COVID. They killed a COVID-era program that provided a $30 broadband discount for poor people. And they broadly support telecom monopolies’ quest to rip off captive customers in uncompetitive markets.

This is usually framed as a concern about taxpayer costs or “government overreach”; a concern that’s absent when it comes time to hand out fat subsidies to their cronies like AT&T, Comcast, or Elon Musk, or threaten journalists’ broadcast licenses for protected speech. The pseudo-legalese to justify the corruption and racism is the flimsiest, laziest scaffolding imaginable to disguise the active disdain the party has for poor minority communities. And given the corrupt nature of the courts, it often succeeds.

Keep in mind: it’s not like these Democratic equity programs are hugely transformative. They’re often the flimsiest effort imaginable to address longstanding systemic inequity. The FCC’s belated acknowledgement of racial discrimination in broadband earlier this year, for example, couldn’t even state offending ISPs by name or provide any real solutions for past inequities.

But even these day-late-dollar-short efforts are deemed radical and illegal by corrupt Republicans like Cruz. And when our broken press can be bothered to cover these efforts (see: Fox News), they take Republican opposition in exclusively good faith, utterly refusing to illustrate the inconsistent reasoning or underlying discrimination. It is, as they say, why we can’t have nice things.

Filed Under: bead, bigotry, broadband, digital divide, discrimination, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, racism, redlining, ted cruz

Telecoms Bankroll More Misleading Attacks On Community Broadband Networks

Broadband

from the manufactured-dissent dept

I’ve written for years about how U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That’s resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband.

Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, or AT&T could have responded to this organic trend by offering better, cheaper, faster service. But ultimately they found it far cheaper to undermine these efforts via regulatory capture, congressional lobbying, lawsuits, protectionist state laws, and misleading disinformation.

They’re big fans of creating fake consumer groups that then attack community broadband networks under the pretense of being “locally concerned citizens,” which you might recall is something Charter recently got busted for in Maine.

They also enjoy funding various “think tanks” who don’t “think” about policy issues, so much as they parrot false industry attacks. Usually under the pretense of being objective, concerned locals simply looking out for the public welfare.

Like in Idaho and Massachusetts, where telecom-financed groups like the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) and the Mountain States Policy Center have been peppering local news outlets with misleading local editorials that lie to locals, and portray community broadband as some sort of inherent government boondoggle. Like this editorial by the TPA in the Cape Cod area:

“The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) has reported on the dangers of GONs to taxpayers and electric ratepayers through such reports as “GON with the Wind: The Failed Promise of Government Owned Networks.” GONs frequently fail to achieve their coverage goals and taxpayers of the municipalities where they exist often end up paying for the revenue shortfall themselves.”

So there are countless different types of community broadband networks, including municipal networks, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, or even public-private partnerships. There’s also a broad variety of ways to fund them, many of which never touch a dime of taxpayer money. A lot of these networks have been helped greatly by the billions in subsidies included in 2021 COVID relief and infrastructure bills.

Telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast are concerned that some of the $42.5 billion in looming infrastructure bill broadband subsidies might (gasp) fund competition in their existing, stagnant markets. Or worse (double gasp) that the money might me used to help fund a broadband network actually owned by local community members with a vested interest in actual locals (shiver).

So they’ve been priming the policy pump all over the country to ensure the lion’s share of money gets dropped into their back pocket, and vilify community broadband as a waste of taxpayer money wherever and however possible.

Popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn, who you might recall was booted from an FCC nomination after the telecom industry ran a successful smear campaign against her in the media, is now the Executive Director of an organization called the American Association For Public Broadband. Her org has been busy trying to counter the disinformation telecom-backed groups are pushing to the public.

Chief among them being that community broadband networks are inherent boondoggles (surely a surprise to hugely popular networks like Longmont Colorado’s Nextlight, Utah’s UTOPIA or Chattanooga’s EPB):

“The groups roll out outdated claims, insisting that public broadband networks are failures. Yet they ignore that the vast majority of community broadband networks are thriving, including two of the oldest and most successful public networks in Idaho Falls and Ammon Idaho.”

These community owned networks usually have broad, bipartisan support. And they routinely offer locals symmetrical gigabit fiber for as little as $70 a month, without usage caps, weird fees, long-term contracts, and other misleading crap. They tend to treat broadband as an essential utility and public good, with a priority on consumers. You can see why AT&T and Comcast wouldn’t like that.

One popular trick AT&T and Comcast like to employ is to fund these groups pretending they’re just super concerned about taxpayer waste. But you might notice their attacks only attack community broadband. They never take aim at the billions upon billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies giants like AT&T and Comcast receive in exchange for fiber upgrades that are routinely half delivered. Notes Sohn:

“They also argue that it’s unfair for so-called “private networks” to compete with “government-funded” networks. This is laughable. Every single one of the largest broadband providers has taken millions and in some cases, billions of state and federal dollars. And they are all champing at the bit for a piece of the $42.5 billion in BEAD funding that the states and territories will soon distribute.”

If you’re a local monopoly like AT&T, it’s pretty trivial to throw a few thousand dollars at some dodgy proxy organizations, think tanks, and consultants in order to create a sound wall of illusory “astroturfed” opposition to what’s actually a very popular idea.

But it’s a pretty tired playbook at this point. Regional telecom giants dismantle all meaningful competition via regulatory capture, take billions in subsidies for networks they don’t consistently upgrade, raise prices endlessly, and then fund covert attacks on anybody that might dare do things differently, whether that’s reformers at key regulatory agencies, or locals trying to build their own reliable fiber network.

None of this is to say that community broadband networks are some kind of magic panacea. Like any business plan, they’re highly dependent on smart budgeting and savvy local leadership. But they’ve proven time and time again that not only are they a useful way to upgrade long-neglected communities, they’re a lovely motivator for entrenched regional monopolies that simply stopped trying years earlier.

Filed Under: american association for public broadband, astroturf, broadband, community broadband, digital divide, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, telecom

Study: 76% Of U.S. Residents Want Government To Do Something About Soaring Broadband Prices

Broadband

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

A new U.S. News And World Report survey of 2,500 Americans across the five most populous U.S. states (PA, TX, NY, CA, and FL) found that U.S. broadband prices continue to soar for most users. Most of the survey’s findings aren’t surprising; broadband access costs are reaching $100 for most users, and Americans continue to pay some of the highest rates for access in the developed world.

As usual the study doesn’t bother to actually explain why (lest industry get offended): regional monopolies, protected by regulatory capture and corruption, routinely carve out uncompetitive regional fiefdoms, from where they face little real pressure to compete on price, speeds, availability, or quality. This lack of competition also incentivizes bad behavior like privacy and net neutrality abuses.

One interesting part of the survey: 76 percent of Americans want the federal government to cap the cost of broadband access. Such “rate regulation” is routinely portrayed as the most extreme sort of draconian anti-free-market overreach by U.S. telecoms and libertarian types, though I can’t recall any point in the last thirty years where it’s been seriously considered by even the more regulation-enthused Democratic party.

“Rate regulation’s” primary function in U.S. telecom policy has been a telecom lobbyist and libertarian think tank bogeyman leveraged to fend off any competent consumer protection enforcement. For example, see how telecoms are using the threat of it to suggest that the FCC’s effort to crack down on harmful and pointless broadband usage caps is somehow “radical rate regulation.”

Once they were informed what it actually is, the survey also found that 86 percent of Americans think the government should restore the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provided a $30 discount off the broadband bills of low-income Americans.

The ACP, formalized by the 2021 infrastructure bill, was killed last April when House Republicans refused to continue funding it, leaving 22 million struggling Americans suddenly facing higher broadband bills. When most press outlets explained why the program was killed, they oddly avoided making it clear it was a Republican decision (again, you wouldn’t want to upset industry by explaining causation clearly).

Now there are multiple (and probably better) ways to fix America’s expensive broadband without restoring to price caps and rate regulation, which, to be clear, are difficult to define, implement, and enforce.

Policymakers could, for example, take direct aim at the roots of consolidated monopoly power by boosting antitrust enforcement, blocking pointless mergers, broadly supporting community owned broadband networks, not letting AT&T dictate the entirety of U.S. policy, and adequately funding federal consumer protection efforts. But most U.S. policymakers can’t even admit monopoly power is a problem, much less propose a solution.

Seriously: find me the last time an FCC official even publicly acknowledged that consolidated power at the hands of AT&T and Comcast harms competition and consumer welfare. Instead, the “solutions” usually involve regulatory performances fixated on “transparency.” Such as the FCC’s new “nutrition labels” that help you clearly see you’re being ripped off, but do nothing about you actually being ripped off.

Republicans have spent the last 40 years crushing any and all consumer protection efforts and letting AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon dictate all state and federal policy, with the expected results. Democrats have spent most of that time saying all the right things about “bridging the digital divide,” yet repeatedly failing to fixate on the core source of the problem: corruption-coddled, consolidated monopoly power.

Democratic FCC regulators, worried about imperiling future political or industry think tank employment opportunities, absolutely adore politely nibbling around the fringes of the actual cause of shitty U.S. broadband. At some point I’d love to live to see an FCC that can even admit that corruption-coddled monopoly power is a serious problem, but I long ago stopped holding my breath.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, digital divide, high speed internet, monopoly, prices, regulatory capture, telecom

U.S. Broadband Maps Suck Slightly Less, But Still Let ISPs Comically Over-State Coverage

Broadband

from the prepare-to-flush-billions-of-dollars-down-the-toilet dept

We’ve noted more than a few times that for all of the government’s talk about wanting to “bridge the digital divide,” it’s consistently struggled to even map where broadband access is or isn’t available. The government has spent more than $400 million on trying to map broadband access to date, and while there certainly have been improvements, the end result continues to be a decidedly mixed bag.

With $42 billion in looming broadband subsidies headed to the states courtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill, the states and feds are in a rush to finally address our shitty mapping to try and minimize waste and make sure this money goes to areas that need it most.

While the new maps are definitely an improvement, the FCC’s latest still has problems with over-stating coverage and available speeds (try it for yourself). You can input any address and watch in real time as the FCC basically hallucinates competitors and speeds, routinely claiming that areas under a Comcast monopoly actually have the option of a dozen different meaningful competitors.

The FCC also still refuses to collect and share pricing data, which industry opposes because it would only work to further highlight monopolization, consolidation, and muted competition. And the underlying data isn’t transparent or owned by the public itself, with the latest improved $44 million mapping contract doled out to a company named Costquest that won’t let anybody look under the hood.

Recently the FCC released the 4th version of its National Broadband Map, with data it claims to be accurate as of December 2023. In the 3rd version of the map, the FCC insisted there were still 10.1 million locations deemed “underserved or unserved” when it comes to broadband access. Broadband mapping gurus say that in just six months that number has dropped a whopping 11 percent to 8.8 million.

But the kind of folks who actually work with the reality on the ground, like broadband consultant Doug Dawson (who advises municipalities on how to improve regional broadband infrastructure), that quick of an improvement raises more than a few eyebrows:

“Is it believable that 1.3 million fewer unserved locations in the country got upgraded to faster technology in a six-month period? Almost by definition, most of the unserved and underserved locations are rural. While there is a lot of fiber construction underway due to broadband grants, it’s hard to picture that grants covered that many new rural locations during a six-month period.

Consider the amount of investment that would have required. If the average cost per upgrade was $6,000, this would have meant completing $7.8 billion of construction in the second half of last year in rural areas. It’s hard to think even half of that was spent in a six month period.”

So what’s actually likely to account for our sudden improvement in broadband coverage? ISPs are likely changing the areas they claim to cover and the speeds they are claiming to provide in order to elbow in on billions in looming subsidies. That’s made possible, in part, because the FCC allows ISPs to declare broadband coverage based on “advertised” speeds, not reality:

“The FCC mapping rules only require ISPs to report marketing broadband speeds. If an ISP markets to customers with speeds ‘up to 100/20 Mbps’ it is not breaking FCC rules to make that claim in the maps – even if it only delivers 30/5 Mbps to a location. This FCC rule to allow marketing speeds instead of some approximation of actual speeds has made a travesty out of the maps.”

Given I talk to a different municipality pretty much every week about broadband access, I know for a fact that the infrastructure bill’s BEAD (Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program) funding is going to do a lot of good for disconnected communities. But from decades of telecom reporting experience I also know the government’s belated and clumsy rush to finally care about accuracy in broadband mapping is going to result in oodles of fraud.

This is an industry filled with clever regional monopolies that have abused federal subsidy programs for decades with very little accountability, grabbing billions upon billions of dollars in exchange for fiber networks that are always somehow mysteriously left half-deployed, if they’re deployed at all. Often managed by an FCC that, across parties, routinely redefines feckless oversight (it’s why the Biden administration chose the NTIA and states to manage BEAD funding).

The scale of the infrastructure bill broadband subsidy program is staggering, and while well intentioned and genuinely poised to do a lot of good, we’d likely have avoided a significant chunk of looming fraud if the government had shaken off lobbying influence and started caring about factual reality decades earlier.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband maps, digital divide, fcc, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, ntia, states