The GOP Is Blocking A Last Ditch Effort To Bring Cheap Broadband To Poor Americans
from the same-old,-same-old 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 every month. But those 23 million Americans are poised to soon lose the discount because key Republicans — who routinely dole out billions of dollars on far dumber fare — refuse to fund a $4-$7 billion extension.
As a result, the FCC is informing struggling Americans that their broadband bills are all about to jump significantly as the program starts to wind down. There’s a last ditch effort to save the program, but it’s unclear if it has traction in one of the least productive Congress’ in U.S. history:
“Speaking at an event hosted by USTelecom on Thursday, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks called the ACP “the most effective program we’ve ever had” for incentivizing low-cost internet plans, and he mourned the fact that its time could be running out.”
The ACP’s death is an interesting case because the telecom industry generally supports it, many Republicans support it, and many Democrats support it.
Big ISPs support it because it basically involves throwing money at them to temporarily reduce broadband prices that wouldn’t be high in the first place if big ISPs hadn’t spent the last 40 years lobbying to crush competition and regulatory oversight (usually with the help of corrupt centrist Democrats and Republicans).
But a handful of Republicans, nervous that the popular program could help Democrats during an election season, are engaging in obstructionism. House Speaker Mike Johnson appears to be slow walking the emergency funding proposal to death.
Most “both sides” news orgs, always wary of upsetting sources and advertisers, lack the courage to inform readers the program is being specifically killed by Republicans. And given these kinds of bread and butter issues don’t generate clicks and ad engagement in the attention infotainment economy, many outlets just won’t cover it at all.
Republicans claim their concern is about costs but it’s not, really; you’ll recall the Trump tax cuts doled out $42 billion to AT&T alone in exchange for a bunch of layoffs. These same Republicans routinely throw absurd gobs of money at all sorts of ideological dipshittery and badly managed corporate handouts. The fiscal conservatism is a performance the press is happy to help parrot to the public.
Some ISPs, like Verizon, say they’ll continue to offer discounts to poor people for about six months even after the program ends. At which point poor Americans are just shit out of luck, and their monthly bill will return to its usual expensive state, potentially driving them offline.
The $42.5 billion in infrastructure bill broadband subsidies flowing to the states try to at least nudge big ISPs to offer a cheaper, low-income broadband plan if they take taxpayer money, but they’re lobbying to have those requirements killed.
Ideally you wouldn’t need such requirements or programs like the ACP (that temporarily and artificially lower rates) if we had policymakers with the political courage to take direct aim at the real problem: highly concentrated monopoly power and the corruption and regulatory capture that protects it.
That’s what causes broadband competitive market failure and high prices across much of the U.S., but Congress and the FCC can’t even admit it exists, much less propose a solution that might offend telecom giants closely tethered to our domestic surveillance systems. The ACP was a backup plan to do the bare minimum for the least fortunate; and Congress couldn’t even accomplish that.
Filed Under: ACP, Affordable Connectivity Program, broadband, congress, fcc, high speed internet, low income
Comments on “The GOP Is Blocking A Last Ditch Effort To Bring Cheap Broadband To Poor Americans”
The GOP’s policies in general are terrible for Americans. That’s why they have to corner the religious nut contingent.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
No I Dont
This is a lie. There was no specific carve out for AT&T. All companies were subject to the same tax rules. Also, a tax cut doesn’t give money from the government to taxpayers; it just allows them to keep the money they earn. This is beneficial because it incentivizes companies to try and earn even more money. As a result, the Federal government collected MORE tax revenue after the tax cut than what it was collecting before.
If you are in favor of the government collecting more money so that it can do more stuff with the money, then you should be in favor of the tax cut.
Re:
“the Federal government collected MORE tax revenue after the tax cut than what it was collecting before.”
if you intended to imply the following:
.. as a direct result of the tax cut ..
I am interested in the data from which this determination was derived – not just some bs article from a known bs website.
Re:
Jesus, Koby. You missed the whole fucking Kansas Experiment.
Re: Re:
That’s because current-day “conservatives” consider contrary data to be, by definition, nothing but lying “woke” propaganda.
Re:
Companies should not be given incentives to make more profit. They should be given incentives for investing into the company and workers.
Re: Re:
So the plan here is:
And being against this plan is… bad?
We get it, ISP monopolies are bad. And it sucks that many people have trouble paying for broadband because of that. But in what world is “well hell, let’s just help fund the monopoly and screw future taxpayers with the bill” a morally defensible plan?
Re: Re: Re:
You replied to the wrong comment?
Re: Re: Re:
“And it sucks that many people have trouble paying for broadband”
Do any employers conduct market analysis to determine how much their potential employees should be making in order to maintain a standard of living compatible with the business to which an employer maybe looking to fill positions?
Some used to, when they experienced a brain drain and needed to hire experienced people quickly.
Re:
Why did you quote and then misquote the line? Giving a tax break to all companies would include giving a tax break to one company. It doesn’t require a carve out for an individual company for that statement to be true.
When a company pays nothing in federal income tax (https://www.axios.com/local/dallas/2022/04/27/att-2021-federal-taxes), we are giving them money because they are receiving government benefits and infrastructure investments and market stability for free. The term “the money they earn” is subjective. Price-gouging customers with poor coverage and utilizing public infrastructure while taking millions to not roll out sufficient broadband for the target populations isn’t exactly earning anything but derision.
This is blatantly false. Higher taxes incentivize higher earnings because you need to make more to keep more. Lower taxes just make it easier to keep more (while degrading essential tax-funded services). The federal government doesn’t get more tax revenue from tax cuts. When the rate drops, they receive less than before, even on higher profits.
Great theory, Gipper. It’s not like that myth hasn’t been debunked a thousand times over.
Re: Re:
Slightly related notion: Taxes are meant as deterrents to certain kinds of behaviors. A “sin tax” on cigarettes, for example, is meant to deter people from smoking. Under that notion, a tax on corporate profits is meant to deter companies from making too much profit—or, when seen from a different point of view, to encourage companies to invest those profits into paying workers (especially those on the lower end of the ladder) a higher salary. That such behavior doesn’t happen because of greedflation, C-suite executives being overpaid, and the tax system in general being skewed in favor of overtaxing the poor while undertaxing the wealthy is a goddamned shame.
Re:
… in fact, if we could cut taxes to zero, the government would have infinite dollars for public spending!
/sarcasm
Seriously, you need to learn (at a bare minimum) to distinguish between the claims (a.k.a. promises or ideological fantasies) that politicians make when proposing legislation, and the actual results achieved after the law has been passed.
Re:
“No specific carve out for AT&T in tax cuts” =/= “AT&T did not benefit from tax cuts to the tune of $42 billion dollars,” mendacious troll.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Karl Bode cant code
Is it too much to expect you to do a little work in Excel to give us some actual profit margin numbers, and to not make absurd statements like Trump “doled out” money to ATT, because he lowered the overall corporate tax rate, how is that “doling out money” when the money never belonged to the government, and how was the tax rate change made “in exchange” for layoffs?
Also, you mention monopoly power, when in fact the telecom, (just like water, sewer, and electric) are “natural monopolies”, by virtue of their physical fixed infrastructure. But how do you assert that they are abusing that monopoly to charge high rates, when you don’t actually provide some analysis on the actual ROI that they’re getting on their infrastructure expenditures.
Re:
fyi – use of excel does not require any knowledge of ‘coding’.
side note, the term coding is deprecated.
Re:
Tell me you don’t know how networks function while pretending to be an expert on economics.
Re:
Yeah, there aren’t enough excel coders these days. It’s really sad to see the art of coding in excel be lost.
Re: Re:
It’s true. Anytime one of the drones wants help with Excel coding, I have to be like “sorry, our engineers don’t do VBA.”
Re:
A lot of the infrastructure is publicly owned and funded. It’s not a natural monopoly. The large companies just want to make it seem that way. If they build their own infrastructure, they do so after government tax cuts and subsidies, so it shouldn’t be considered theirs either. And some companies do literally share their infrastructure, so even that isn’t a reason to justify a monopoly because it is possible to coexist on the same infrastructure.
Re:
You’re quite the neckbeard, aren’t you?
First off, I don’t believe in the internet, so none of this even matters.
Re:
It is not a big truck, it is a series of tubes.
Re: Re:
“Cheap broadband”?
What…a all chick rock band? SIGN ME UP!
acp
con gress can find $150 billion to give zelensky but supposedly cant find $9 billion to save acp smh
Re:
both sides troll
Re:
Conservatives can support giving money to Ukraine because they invest in and get campaign donations from defense contractors who are benefitting from the spending. Poor people who can’t afford price-gouged internet service aren’t filling the conservative coffers so they don’t give a shit about them.
The GOP realize that knowledge is their enemy. If their voter base gets broadband, they might use it to educate themselves, at which point they’ll likely reach an understanding of who it is that has ACTUALLY been screwing them all these years. This is the “wokeness” the GOP fear, and for good reason.
Re:
Literally, the GOP is adversarial to education.
Re: Re:
Look at how hard it’s been trying, especially in recent years, to either undermine or wholly dismantle public education in favor of private (and largely religious) schools.