Biden Re-Announces $42 billion Investment In Broadband, Because Apparently People Didn’t Notice The First Time
from the if-at-first-nobody-notices... dept
While the Biden administration has been a bit of a hot mess on broadband consumer protection (see: the Gigi Sohn fiasco), the administration has done some amazing things for overall investment in broadband. Largely thanks to both COVID relief legislation (The American Rescue Plan Act, ARPA) and the IIJA (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act).
When the IIJA was signed into law in late November of 2021, the administration, and most of the press, clearly pointed out the bill included a whopping $42 billion to shore up broadband access. Apparently nobody noticed, because the White House is… announcing it again now that money is about to start flowing in earnest:
President Biden on Monday is set to announce more than $42 billion to expand high-speed internet access nationwide, commencing the federal push to help an estimated 8.5 million families and small businesses finally take advantage of modern-day connectivity.
The money, which the administration plans to parcel out to states over the next two years, serves as the centerpiece of a vast and ambitious campaign to deliver reliable broadband to the entire country by 2030 — ensuring that even the most far-flung parts of the United States can reap the economic advantages of the digital age.
It didn’t get much traction the first time around because it’s not as attention-grabbing as falsely claiming rudimentary “AI” chatbots will kill us all or falsely claiming poorly drawn NFTs will revolutionize the planet. But it’s going to be transformative all the same. You can see a breakdown here of how much each state is prepared to receive in broadband subsidies, and the totals are historic.
I spend pretty much every week now talking to a different city, town, utility, or cooperative, and they’re all busy using (or planning to use) either COVID relief money or infrastructure bill cash to build amazing things. Many of them are in the process of delivering affordable, gigabit-capable fiber to rural regions for the first time in history, or building open access fiber network that will finally drive competition to markets long ago monopolized by companies like AT&T and Comcast.
The problem, of course, will be several fold. One, despite spending $400 million on the problem, the government still doesn’t have particularly accurate broadband maps. And while the FCC is working to slowly fix that, the end result has been a bit of a mess so far, and it’s something entrenched monopolies can exploit to overstate coverage and misdirect essential funds away from promising challengers.
The new FCC maps do have a welcome new challenge system (where municipalities or locals can challenge inaccurate data), but state leaders routinely tell me the system favors the deep-pocketed monopolies over often under-funded local representatives. It’s hard to fix a problem you can’t measure, and we’re still struggling to measure U.S. broadband gaps.
The other problem is we still don’t really have an FCC that’s willing to stand up to monopolies. Nor do many U.S. states (the ones in charge of dispersing the funds). As a result we’re already seeing telecom and cable giants (with a long, long history of subsidy fraud) exploit state corruption to funnel a big chunk of historic funding away from potential competitors and back into their own pockets.
So while some states are going to use the funds to shore up funding of independent challenges to monopoly power (like open access fiber networks shared by multiple competitors), significantly more are going to throw the lion’s share of this money at the very monopolies responsible for the problem we’re trying to fix.
So yes, there’s going to be an historic, welcome infusion of broadband subsidies to areas that need it, but I’m also positively certain that without competent state and federal corruption reform — and a general lack of interest in reining in monopoly power (in both markets and across government) — there are also going to be telecom boondoggles, waste, and fraud on a scale we’ve never quite seen before.
The end result might still be a net overall benefit, but it won’t have the same overall impact it could have had if we had lawmakers and regulators keen on genuinely taking aim at the real reason the “digital divide” still exists in 2023: regional telecom monopolization and the corruption that protects it.
Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, monopoly, open access, telecom
Comments on “Biden Re-Announces $42 billion Investment In Broadband, Because Apparently People Didn’t Notice The First Time”
I think this problem is overstated, and don’t see why it’s the federal government’s problem anyway. Push it onto the large ISPs: make them give details of speed availability throughout the territory they’re operating in (or looking to expand into), have an intern overlay it onto a map, and hold the companies to it. Ensure the fines are large enough that, in the case of any discrepancy, it’s cheaper for an ISP to fix their network to provide whatever they promised.
Or forget about the mapping altogether, and let any ISP claim money to build infrastructure in areas they don’t already serve (and, again, hold them to whatever’s promised). Honestly, what are the chances that broadband’s already so amazing there that we’ll end up with too many great choices? 400 million dollars to prevent a problem that most Americans would love to have and few have ever experienced.
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I’d suggest that the fines should be the same amount for what it would actually cost to build out the network to match the discrepancy and let a third party build it as an LLU.
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No, the big ISPs will find it much cheaper to simply fight the fines in court, and the court will invariably rule in favour of the big ISPs, resulting in absolutely nothing changing. Big corporations are the government in the capitalist dictatorship known as the United States.
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And without the mapping, how does the government know whether they already serve an area or not?
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That’s where enforcement needs to come in. Anyone lying about coverage—taking money for an area they already serve, or not serving an area they claim to—needs to face stiff penalties. Not the meaninglessly small fines they’ve been dealing with so far, but something that actually motivates them to fix things.
As to how the government would find out, that seems well within the realm of effective regulation. Publish details of all the grants, take complaints (which people are quite willing to provide with respect to ISPs), put in “test orders”, do random audits of billing data, and so on.
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Having collected all that data, how does the Government, or anybody else for that matter make it useful other than plot it on a map. Indeed, given localised data, modern GIS tools make creating the maps quite easy.
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I’m not aware of much evidence that this 400-million-dollar map—actually a 400-million-dollar data collection project, I hope, ’cause anyone with GIS expertise could plot a map in an afternoon—has been useful.
Your comment refers to this data collection in the past tense. Except, it’s not done now, and I don’t see why so much data needs to be proactively and centrally collected before investing in broadband. By contrast, governments are willing to make welfare payments, for example, even if they don’t have an up-to-date poverty map. People have a tendency to ask for money when they need it, and fraud-detection can be done later (provided someone’s willing to punish fraud).
Of course, maps can be useful, and if existing data can be cheaply mapped, go ahead. I just don’t agree that the lack of map data should be seen as a major part of the problem, nor do I really see much of a plan for what to do with such a map once it exists.
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The reason is has not been useful is because the ISPs have ensured that it is not accurate, The ISPs have refused to provide accurate data, and therefor we should not make any effort to collect accurate data is a sure recipe for wasted money, and transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the name of promising but not delivering service to the poor.
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“Push it onto the large ISPs: make them give details of speed availability throughout the territory they’re operating in (or looking to expand into), have an intern overlay it onto a map, and hold the companies to it.”
One, giant telecom monopolies lie about coverage, constantly. Two, they have spent twenty years lobbying government to ensure telecom regulators are too feckless, feeble, understaffed, and underfunded to hold them accountable for anything.
Your proposal basically involves throwing untold billions at a big ambiguous mountain of predatory monopolies and just hoping it all works out
Without reform and taking aim at state and federal corruption, none of this works out particularly efficiently, which is kind of explained in the post you responded to.
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I don’t see how. I specifically suggested effective regulation (fines; and I like Rocky’s idea of using them to fund the competition). What good’s a map if we don’t have that? As you wrote, “significantly more [states] are going to throw the lion’s share of this money at the very monopolies responsible for the problem”, and isn’t that another way of saying “throwing untold billions at a big ambiguous mountain of predatory monopolies”? (Okay, and instead of hoping it all worked out, we’ll eventually check the map to see just how much they screwed us—probably about the same as usual, ’cause if regulators can’t do anything about it afterward, why not lie?)
And, of course, there’s substantial evidence that these government-granted monopolies are a bad idea. 400 million dollars worth of government lawyering might’ve been able to break them up, require them to provide access to third-party ISPs, or both.
Do we have any idea how much useful data has come from these mapping efforts? I mean, don’t we already mostly know where broadband sucks? Have there been any big surprises worth spending that amount of money to find? Something we couldn’t have found by data-mining complaints from Twitter etc., or by asking municipalities?
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So you do see why it’s the government’s problem.
More money for the oligopoly…no follow up to verify that the promises are kept…maybe this will work
Throw in 5G cryptographic AI quantum computing for $99/month and I’ll bite.
Socialism for the rich,
Capitalism for the poor.
Privatized profits,
Socialized losses.
Rinse,
Repeat.
But how much of that money will got to lining pockets that already have or exceed maximal sane lining 🙁
funny-money
Of course, the Federal Government really does not have $42,000,000,000 laying around somewhere to spend on this.
the $42B will be digitally “printed” by the Federal Reserve Bank with a few computer keystrokes.
This dark Federal process causes money INFLATION — which we all love and support….
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Ummmm, afaik inflation is caused by business raising prices. The cause of business raising prices is varied, some even legal.
Do you have any evidence of this “dark Federal process”?
Is this dark federal thing located in Mt Rushmore?
maybe ‘people’ didn’t but i’ll bet a dollar to a pinch of crap that all the bosses of the incumbent broadband suppliers did and have already worked out how that serious amount of money is gonna be shared between them while doing fuck all to install or even improve the broadband for hard- pressed customers! i have to ask what precautions will be taken to ensure the funding is used as it should be and the providers get nothing unless they can prove worthy of payment and what punishments will be given to those who take the funding and literally do fuck all or next to fuck all in return? i’ll bet none! because too many in government will be getting ‘encouragement’ to ensure the incumbents get massive amounts of tax dollars for doing nothing to improve anything!!
Make it so private citizens can sue them for lying
Seems to have worked well for forced-birth Texas. If the law were written to allow private citizens to sue the shit out of ISPs who lied about broadbandmap, no one would have to fucking wait for the FCC to grow teeth, since I’d be out there suing them already…
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Do you not realize just how expensive such lawsuits would be?
Joe “re-announced” it because he didn’t remember it was announced the first time.