We Just Keep Throwing Billions At Telecom Monopolies In Exchange For Half-Completed, Shitty Broadband Networks
from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept
The Wall Street Journal has offered up a helpful report (outside the paywall, for now) on the giant mess that is U.S. broadband subsidy efforts. Like many previous studies, it points out how we’ve spent just countless billions of dollars on expanding broadband access with decidedly mixed results. Also like many previous mainstream stories of this type, it focuses pretty much exclusively on government dysfunction.
And to some degree that’s understandable. Government has long done a terrible job tracking where broadband is or isn’t available, then throwing billions in unchecked subsidies at regional monopolies in exchange for half-completed projects. It doesn’t genuinely hold big companies accountable for fraud, and generally doesn’t embrace policies that ever seriously challenge those companies’ dominance.
An analysis of U.S. broadband deployment by the Journal found, unsurprisingly, that funding has been thrown numerous times at the same regions that are still (gasp!) somehow waiting for modern-era broadband to arrive:
The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars on several rounds of programs to upgrade internet speeds in rural areas over the past decade. Despite those efforts, many residents are still stuck with service that isn’t fast enough to do video calls or stream movies—speeds that most take for granted.
Many communities have been targeted for broadband upgrades at least twice already, but flaws in the programs’ design have left residents wanting.
So weird how that happens. I’ve spent the better part of a life writing about how federal and state telecom regulators and politicians throw billions at companies for fiber networks that then somehow, repeatedly and quite mysteriously, never arrive. It happens over and over and over again, with only fleeting penalties for big ISPs that miss meaningful deployment goals.
The takeaway from the Journal report is that this is entirely the fault of government and government programs. In fact this is the kicker quote the paper chooses to use to frame the problem:
“In retrospect it’s not surprising that companies made a business decision to do the bare minimum,” said Carol Mattey, an industry consultant and former senior FCC official.
What the Journal just weirdly omits is that consistently terrible U.S. federal and state broadband policy is the byproduct of 30 years of lobbying by regional monopolies. Every shred of U.S. telecom policy dysfunction exists to the direct benefit of entrenched giants that don’t want to try very hard.
We can’t measure broadband gaps accurately. We can’t track where subsidies go very well. We can’t protect consumers from very obvious telecom pricing scams. Policymakers in both parties rarely if ever acknowledge that monopolies exist or that consolidation is a problem.
Instead we’ve labeled the problem an ambiguous “digital divide,” with apparently no known cause or origin, that you throw money at repeatedly, year after year, without an honest reckoning on whether it’s working.
Yes, government is broken, but that’s often a byproduct of pretty obvious corruption, which you’d think might warrant a mention if you’re actually informing your readers about the scope of the problem.
We’re about to spend $42 billion more in broadband subsidies despite the fact we still haven’t fixed longstanding broadband mapping problems. There are some useful mapping improvements in the pipeline, but they’re not expected to even start to arrive until long after the money starts flowing, meaning much of the money will again go toward regional monopolies for networks they half deploy.
Telecom monopoly lobbyists are already hard at work trying to ensure that this money all goes to them (for their perpetually half-delivered networks) and not to any potential competitors. That’s proven to be particularly easy in some states where telecom monopolies effectively control the legislatures.
So yeah, the U.S. government is a mess, Congress can’t function, and a lot of states aren’t much better. But that’s not necessarily because government itself is inherently flawed, it’s because this is the desired outcome from a generation of lobbying by monopolies that like things precisely how they are. Big news outlets and politicians alike avoid mentioning this because it’s in their financial best interests to avoid it.
Filed Under: broadband, competition, corruption, digital divide, high speed internet, regulatory capture
Comments on “We Just Keep Throwing Billions At Telecom Monopolies In Exchange For Half-Completed, Shitty Broadband Networks”
A typo
Many communities have been targeted for broadband upgrades at least twice already, but flaws in the programs’ design have left residents wanting.
The WSJ omitted the word ‘deliberate’. 😉
Journalism?
I highly suspect that WSJ is owned by Rupert and the reporter is in the pocket of one of the aforementioned monopolies. They blame the government so that when people get angry that the ISP’s wasted the latest subsidy, the ISP’s don’t get the blame.
the flaws in the programs designs seem to, funnily enough, match the rises in top management bonuses. how strange is that?
the only way to get decent broadband for everyone is to put bombs under the incumbent suppliers we have atm AND stop the corruption in politics. as there’s no chance of any changes in either and even less in politicians acceptance of back handers, things are gonna stay as they are, where public money that could be used for hospitals etc is gonna continue going as is. how disgraceful is that?
But we’ve always done it this way, so just keep throwing money at the same money pit that never gets anything done.
I wonder how much fiber could have been laid across the country for the amount of corporate handouts that haven’t laid barely any.
Perhaps its time to stop giving money to those who have such a track record of failure & try something different.
We Just Keep Throwing Billions At Telecom Monopolies In Exchange For Half-Completed, Shitty Broadband Networks
Well, why not? It’s been working well for us thus far.
Re:
Indeed. God bless Citizens United. 🙂
... Big Tech?
How is it that big telecom seems to keep getting money thrown at them, yet they continue to b!tch that Big Tech is getting a free ride?
I know, I know… totally not the point of this article, but if telecom is being mentioned it’s one of three things…
Then getting a government handout
sh!tty coverage for the cost
whining about big tech not paying it’s share
Re:
Telecom plays the game. I have heavily suspected that those subsidies are payments for services rendered to the NSA and their ilk.
The bare minimum – to not get sued out of the water in a massively corrupt system. They certainly do not meet any other kind of business or normal reality bare minimum.
Personal experience
We Just Keep Throwing Billions At Telecom Monopolies In Exchange For Half-Completed
I’d be a lot happier if it were as MUCH as half.
And the monopoly exclusion laws allow for some really bad outcomes. Turns out that in some states, if you erect your own telephone poles and put power, cable, or telephone on them, all the sudden not only do those poles became a common right of way along with an easement, but they no longer belong to you and you are forced to remove your own damned wires.
Big media companys are owned by corporations which depend on advertising ,they are not inclined to criticise other big corporations, for donating to politicans in order to get policys which give them large tax breaks ,or make laws that reduce competition .the people the corrupt system really hurts are the ordinary consumers who pay extra for mediocre service, lack of choice, and the lack of broadband services
in rural area,s or small towns.
This is more important when students and workers
want to work from home as house prices rise in citys and urban area.s
Just 1 comment
Where are the Agencies that are responsible for monitoring WHAT has been done?
There are 2 agencies that have been Cut back so much, That are responsible for monitoring the Food from farm to our tables. That they can only scan/search 8% of the corps that are responsible for creating all of our food. They have asked Most Corps to hire independent services to do THAT JOB and send in the paper work.
So we would rather pay the Military conglomerates most of our tax money then to Fix our Food Problems?? No wonder we have had Lettuce poisonings.