Supreme Court To Decide Whether Helping Poor Rural Americans Get Broadband Is ‘Unconstitutional’
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
Comments on “Supreme Court To Decide Whether Helping Poor Rural Americans Get Broadband Is ‘Unconstitutional’”
Given how much rural Americans voted for Trump, it seems like he’s gonna shoot himself in the foot.
Except if theses rural people don’t see any consequence in the next four years, and then blame Democrats.
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People who vote Republican do so because of, not despite, the fact that Republicans hurt those people—and that’s because those voters don’t care if they’re hurt, so long as The Other™ gets hurt worse.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” — Lyndon B. Johnson
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That quote is wild because I can’t imagine someone daring to say it today. The resulting smarm and crocodile tears from magas would flood the world.
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Nick Fuentes and other MAGABRO chuds have shown us there is no lower bound, no limit to how low they will stoop.
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Apparently, “Drill baby, drill!” was an immoral encouragement for the MAGA crowd to just keep going lower.
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and that’s because those voters don’t care if they’re hurt, so long as The Other™ gets hurt worse
Hence the popular saying before the election
“She’s not Trump”
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They could see it every year and only for the next four years, and they would still find a way to blame Democrats.
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It’s balanced out by sites like this one where it is always the others fault
Re: The Party of Personal Responsibility is never personally responsible
Republicans politicians could literally call a bill to cut the funding to social services ‘Republicans Hate the Poor’ and their voters would still blame the democrats for the resulting harm and suffering, given a core pillar of their ideology is that republicans are never to blame for anything bad unless they want to be, and even then only to the extent that they want to claim credit.
Leopards ate their faces. And now they also want the leopards to eat their brains.
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Starving leopards, then.
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Starving zombie leopards!
Surely, we can make a deal with them. Surely.
The long history of rural electrification and telecom service goes down the tubes
It’s worth noting that it’s not only the residents who suffer from lack of rural broadband, but also the people who want to sell them stuff or the urbanites who want to visit those areas.
And of course farmers and other rural folk might want to run their own businesses too.
Governments that expect rural folk to fill out their forms online, including other local government entities like schools, won’t care.
I expect Starlink to be feeding at this trough even more than AT&T. What could go wrong?
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They don’t want us in those areas anyway. Any threat to their collective ignorance is treated with hostility by the hill people.
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The fact that rural telecom deployment was never finished is… something.
Really, who's a more trustworthy recipient of subsidies to help the poor than them?
No worries, I’m sure the money given to the major ISP’s from the Woke Tax will all be carefully tracked and accounted for to ensure that it’s being used to pay for the program like those supporting the tax insist it will be, and will most certainly not just go straight into exec bonuses and company coffers as they leave ‘unprofitable’ areas cut off from internet services and just pocket the money.
One good way to counter the “non-delegation” argument is to point out that Congress doesn’t need to delegate power to the executive branch. The Constitution already does that in Article II Section 3 where it says of the President “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed”.
Well, of course it is. Since 303 Creative, helping any minority group get a leg up (providing equity) is unconstitutional.
Re: Wow, it is funny how wrong your statement is.
The 303 creative case had nothing to do with “equity” it had to do with compelled speech. The question was can a creative be forced to produce speech with which they disagree. Can an African American be forced to produce a web site for a KKK group? SCOTUS ruled that for creative works, no one can be forced to generate speech with which they disagree.
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On this site, I quote many comments (or parts thereof) I disagree with just so I can criticize them. In the same way, my asking a bakery, T-shirt printer, or (as in 303 Creative v. Fictional Gay Couple) a website designer to make something for me isn’t compelling speech, it’s asking them to use their skills to facilitate my speech. That’s what makes the decision in that case so dangerous, because it compels silence from minorities, violating the First Amendment.
Completely misleading title.
The argument has noting to do with whether helping rural Americans is constitutional, but rather if the method Congress implemented to fund it is. They Rural Electrification Administration received federal funds from Congress. This system is a tax implemented by a private company with no real oversight. Would be totally legal if Congress paid for it directly.
You mean the Universal Service Fund that is run by the FCC, a government agency?
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No, the USF is administered and has it rates set by the Universal Service Administrative Company. They decide the rates and if the FCC does nothing, that is the tax. The FCC does not “run” the USF, the USAC does. The FCC rarely approves the rates and almost never rejects the new tax.
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You said the tax is implemented by a private company, but it’s not implemented by the company. It’s under the direction of the FCC. It derives its authority to do so from the FCC which derives its authority from Congress. And the “private company” is a non-profit, which is far less sinister than the idea that it’s run by a profit-driven corporation. You can argue that the FCC doesn’t regulate it enough, but its existence at all is due to the FCC and the power of Congress behind it to regulate.
Karl is pretty much anti trump clown and have no clue on what he is talking about. Beads and USF is wasteful spending for tax payers. It also screws over small ISPs and wisps who use private funds gets over build by big corporations
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Like most government funding of essential services for poor people, it’s a compromise because the wealth-corrupted politicians won’t let something like that get funded if it isn’t giving money to their wealthy friends. It’s just like the ACA and the ACP. But if you think Trump isn’t just going to give a bunch of tax payer money to the wealthiest billionaire in the US to do nothing more than pad his pockets, you’re dumber than Trump.