FCC To End Broadband Discounts For Poor People After Republicans Undermine Program
from the screw-you dept
The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23 million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount. While it didn’t get much hype, that’s a big deal in a country where broadband affordability is a massive obstacle due to muted competition.
But those 23 million Americans are poised to soon lose the discount because Republicans — who routinely dole out billions of dollars on far dumber fare (like a $42 billion Trump era tax break for AT&T in exchange for doing absolutely nothing) — are refusing to fund a $4-$7 billion extension.
Jessica Rosenworcel has written to Congress, informing them that poor Americans are going to see a significant spike in their broadband bills — and that they may lose access to broadband altogether in some instances — as the agency winds down the program:
“If Congress does not provide additional funding for the ACP in the near future, millions of households will lose the ACP benefit that they use to afford Internet service,” Rosenworcel wrote. “This also means that roughly 1,700 Internet service providers will be affected by the termination of the ACP and may cut off service to households no longer supported by the program.”
Republicans, and the press that often parrots them, claim their resistance to funding the program is because of cost. But as we’ve long noted, Republicans have historically had no problem throwing untold billions in regulatory favors, tax breaks, merger approvals, and wasteful subsidies at regional telecom monopolies like Comcast and AT&T, in exchange for network upgrades that mysteriously never fully materialize. I’ve spend 20+ years documenting this waste and fraud in great detail.
In reality, Republicans oppose the ACP program because it’s popular among constituents, and you wouldn’t want said constituents thanking Democrats for cheaper broadband during an election season. Republicans, of course, can’t admit this, so instead you get a sort of idiot theater, where a party that slathers corporations in cash for doing nothing pretends to be concerned about wasteful spending.
That’s not to say that there aren’t better ways to bring down broadband prices, of course. The ACP gives money to regional telecom monopolies to temporarily lower prices that wouldn’t be high in the first place if companies like Comcast, Charter, Verizon, and AT&T hadn’t spent 30 years waging an all out war on healthy competition.
The problem is that Republicans (and Manchin-esque Democrats) also uniformly oppose policies that would address the real underlying problem of telecom monopolization and muted competition (antitrust reform, community broadband, price regulations, crackdowns on pointless mergers and consolidation, appointing real reformers to the FCC), so this temporary discount was the best political reality achievable.
In short Republicans are going to screw over 23 million poor Americans because they don’t want Democrats getting political credit for helping them during an election season. And because our press is generally broken and afraid of calling a duck a duck, this is going to get dressed up as a genuine concern about wasteful spending by a party that’s long been a huge fan of no shortage of wasteful spending.
Filed Under: ACP, Affordable Connectivity Program, broadband, fcc, high speed internet, internet access, low income, poor americans, prices, republican
Comments on “FCC To End Broadband Discounts For Poor People After Republicans Undermine Program”
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
No biased reporting here
What I love most about Techdirt is it’s entirely unbiased articles that highlight waste in US government regardless of who does it. Cough
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You should have that couch checked out by a medical professional, not those internet “doctors” who prescribe animal dewormer and bleach.
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TBH, there’s no evidence that Hunter Biden’s crack dealer is even neurodivergent, much less autistic.
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HAve you heard of Kansas and Brownback?
Republicans with the republican governor passed tax cuts to THEIR wealthy friends. It ended in Kansas being behind every other state in recovering from the 2008 financial crisis. They violated the state constitution, and ended up threatening the republican judges to rule in their favor.
Move forward. Republicans in florida want to give tax payer money to Trump directly.
If you problem is that republicans always get highlighted for their wasteful, greedy, costly, and corrupt behavior then maybe your problem is with them repeating the behavior.
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Tell me you’re not a regular Techdirt reader without telling me you’re not a regular Techdirt reader.
Re: GENERALLY
Bias is followed by Erroneous Data about Said Person/thing/whatever.
But if its Just facts? Where is the Bias? Post from the other side of the coin, IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING to say about WHY it would be a good thing to Cut those 23 million off the internet.
repubs: bums should go get a job
repubs: bums have cell phones?
jobs: apply online
gov: here is a break
repubs: no break for you
also repubs: no one wants to work anymore
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Toilet Flush With An Echo
One government boondoggle does not justify another government boondoggle.
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Is hypocrisy a foreign concept to you?
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False equivalence is, for sure.
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I see. So “helping the poor connect to the internet” is “a waste of time and money”? Should we discontinue other welfare programs, like social security, medicaid/medicare, and food stamps, too?
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“Should we discontinue other welfare programs, like social security, medicaid/medicare, and food stamps, too?”
Sadly, many think so.
If we are to eliminate ‘entitlements’ in this hypothetical mind game, this would also include corporate subsidy.
In the absence of government assistance, business will experience difficulty hiring because no one wants to work anymore.
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You and I likely have very different definitions of what constitutes “help”. I don’t doubt your compassion. Liberals typically measure success by the number of people subscribed to a government program. Conservatives often measure success by the number of people that DON’T need a government program.
An excellent recent example is college tuition. Politicians nowadays promise to boost funding for loan programs in order to make college more affordable. But after years of government backed loans, the cost of tuition has skyrocketed, saddling borrowers with astronomical debts, while not particularly improving the quality of education. At no point did it become more affordable. A better use of the money would have involved establishing more colleges to accommodate demand.
I forsee the same outcome with government subsidized telecom. The way to lower prices is to introduce competition, not to bail out overpriced and poor service corporations with government money.
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Spoken like someone who has never met an actual liberal in their life and believes what Fox News mis-reports.
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I appreciate you timestamping the shadowban. Thank you.
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What shadowban? You weren’t shadowbanned. If you were, you wouldn’t have gotten a reply.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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“Liberals typically measure success by the number of people subscribed to a government program.”
I know a few of these so called liberals and they do not think this way at all. In fact, success is when government program is not needed.
Many times, a government program is needed only because some asshole fucked things up.
This kind of funding need to come ahead of Ukraine funding.
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Well, I guess that’s fine if you aren’t in Ukraine, isn’t it?
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“This kind of funding need to come ahead of Ukraine funding.”
I too enjoy unsubstantiated claims.
Sounds like the GOP’s plan (screw everyone who probably isn’t a Republican) is working as intended. (poor Republicans don’t really matter)
Oh, it goes further than that. After forcing the program to close, they’ll turn around and say “Vote for us! This wouldn’t have happened under a Republican president! We’ll give the ISPs subsidies so they can offer poor people more affordable rates!”
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Hahaha… no
They will claim that under a Republican president, regulation would be eliminated and there would be such glorious commerce and competition that prices would naturally go down and everything wonderful would be affordable by everyone! And in the event there is a Republican president and none of this happens, there is plenty of pointing at completely false “facts” associated with completely unrelated things that the Democrats support, and blaming those things for why bad policies have bad outcomes. Either way, it’s definitely not their fault for never wanting to help the poor people who are more and more their core supporters. MAGA! Oh yeah, they will also keep cutting education under the cover of saving children and being patriotic so that few people are smart enough to see how dumb the excuses actually are.
Re: Re: Live in the USA long anough have you?
Wow, you act as if you are over 40 years old, watching all the games people play in the last 60 years.
Now can you tell the Conservative Christians, what a conservative republican is/is doing.
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Please, Republicans, fly that anti-corporatist flag. Go for it.
PS.
You MIGHT add, if you can find the data, How many of the ISP’s Raised prices BEFORE telling people they Had this offer.
Mine did, by $30 for each service.
The only welfare republicans consistently support is corporate welfare, so of course they’ll happily throw no-strings-attached billion dollar subsides/tax breaks at major companies while whining about how throwing any money at all to those not rolling in money is a waste of taxpayer money.
Good cancel all government subsidies
Government sybsidies arent good it just funnels tax dollars directly to the inner circle corporations
Cancel all government assistance watch cost of goods drop nationwide as less muney in circulation
More assistance just means more taxes aint nothing free
And they always keep a large chunk
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In the absence of government assistance for business, said business will fail because they do not pay what it costs for an employee to live within commuting distance from the place of work.
When a full time employee, 40 hrs/wk, is unable to procure living quarters within commute, the employer is not paying enough to run its business. Bad business models abound everywhere these days, they can not survive without their government assisting them meeting payroll and their employees require food stamps.
Re: 'Cheaper food' doesn't matter to someone who can't afford it any more
Well that’s one way to kill a bunch of people without having to do so directly…
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…said no human, ever.
You must instead be a Republican.
ACP
Thank you Karl Bode for your article. Just got word from my provider of this programs end. Won’t be able to get groceries delivered since I am disabled and without transportation let alone check my email for government correspondence. Perhaps the Lifeline program will be allowed to exist so they can inform me by text that my social security benefits are being cut off as well. Wonder if the death benefit still exists…
Maybe if house Dems didn’t want to give Billions of dollars to Ukraine with no guidance or clue where it’s actually going or better yet to fund THEIR social programs, we might have money to help our own citizens. Unless it’s housing and taking care of illegal aliens or cleaning up the streets for a communist visitor like xi the Pooh, seems like the left doesn’t give two craps about its own people. So don’t push this whole ACP denial off on republicans.
Subsidies for the internet are not the solution. Nothing is stopping these monopolistic providers from raising prices more in the future. If they regulated the price and stopped this monopolistic price gouging, that would solve the problem. I wouldn’t count on either side doing this since they are all bankrolled by these very corporations. Look at where the money goes. Democrats and Republicans both obey their donors; corporate American, lobbyist who work for corporations, the top 1% rich. Also, this blame republicans for not funding this is outrageous. Democrats wasted billions on so called foreign aid while people in this country suffered. Republicans passed bills, as have democrats, that only helped their donors and not the people of this country. Stop believing either of these lying party of hypocrites are on your side.