GOP Moves Forward With Plan To Pull Billions In Broadband Grants From States That Attempt ANY AI Oversight

Broadband

from the the-dumbest-and-cruelest-people-imaginable dept

Republicans are currently trying to force through a massive and cruel new legislation package that will impose historic cuts in public services to the benefit of the nation’s richest assholes. The bill will add $3.8 trillion to the deficit over a decade and includes an unlimited number of major hand outs to the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations.

One key part of the bill is a proposal to ban all AI oversight over the next decade. This is part of the so-far successful GOP effort to destroy all federal consumer protection, corporate oversight, environmental protections, and public safety oversight. Unfortunately the U.S. press hasn’t done a very good job illustrating what this means for everything from public health to national security.

The rich assholes and corporations pushing for this have a problem. If you kill federal consumer protection, states may rush in and fill the void. You saw this happen in areas like net neutrality and privacy. Courts have repeatedly ruled that if the federal government abdicates its responsibility for things like consumer protection, it can’t then turn around and tell states what they can do.

So to prevent states from doing basic corporate oversight the GOP has had to get creative.

For example, to try and stop individual states from regulating AI in the wake of federal apathy, the GOP is including provisions in their giant bill that will try to ban states from receiving their share of $45 billion in broadband grants if they engage in any oversight of AI giants in the next decade. Any oversight. Even bare-bones environmental standards (see: Elon Musk’s xAI pollution problem in Memphis, or similar concerns about Meta’s AI data center environmental impact on parts of Louisiana).

The idea was proposed in early June by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and since then both the House and Senate have taken steps to codify it into the proposed bill.

“States that refuse to impose a moratorium will not get those dollars. Amba Kak, co-executive director of AI Now Institute, an independent research institute, said the change could leave states in an uncomfortable dilemma, choosing between broadband dollars and the power to protect their constituents from AI harm.

“I can imagine that for lawmakers, Republican or Democrat, whose districts rely on BEAD funding for broadband access to their rural communities, it’s really a strange bargain,” Kak said.”

Some of what was originally in the gargantuan, ugly-ass bill has been jettisoned after the Senate Parliamentarian found they violated Senate norms and the law. But the state and federal ban on all AI oversight remains somewhat intact.

Granted anything done through reconciliation can be undone through reconciliation, so a “ten year ban” isn’t written in stone. And there’s some indication that the idea’s architect, Ted Cruz, is struggling to gain full Republican support for the ploy as he tries to thread the needle. With any luck that may result in the proposal being watered down and/or killed.

Still, it’s stupid and harmful and opens the door to a lot of potential problems.

As we noted previously, these broadband funds had already been awarded. States had already spent years carefully crafting their fiber investment plans on the basis of awarded funds. Now, if they attempt oversight of an AI industry that’s shown itself so far to be amoral and reckless, they risk harming their own communities by leaving them stuck without broadband access.

Unlike many past U.S. broadband subsidy programs, a lot of thought was actually put into this infrastructure bill program (BEAD, or the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program). It’s a major reason its taken so long. They tried to accurately map broadband access. Many states tried to ensure that a lot of money went to popular community-owned alternatives, and not just giant telecoms. It took years of collaboration between states, feds, and local communities to jointly develop these plans.

But there are also several layers of irony for long-time Techdirt readers. The GOP’s plan is harming their longstanding allies in “big telecom” (who risk losing billions in subsidies) to the benefit of their supposed ideological enemies in “big tech.” They’re also likely delaying the implementation of a broadband grant program they spent most of election season whining about taking too long.

Republicans are also busy trying to redirect billions of BEAD program dollars to their increasingly incoherent billionaire benefactor Elon Musk. It’s all just utterly, transparently buffoonish and corrupt, yet our press (and even many policy people) seem intent on normalizing it.

There are still a lot of moving parts. Again, several terrible aspects of the bill violate the law and Senate procedural norms and may be jettisoned. Others, like the plans to sell 250 million acres of public land, are getting no shortage of bipartisan blow-back. There are still chances for the bill to get better or much worse; but even any sort of “best” case scenario will be a historically corrupt (and historically deadly) piece of gargantuan shit that utterly fails to serve the public interest.

Filed Under: ai, automation, bead, broadband, corruption, fiber, oversight, regulation, ted cruz