Activists Say California Is Backtracking On Plan For Statewide Affordable Broadband

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

While the California legislature often screws up tech policy, they’ve generally been pretty good on broadband. At least in relation to most U.S. states. California was among the first in the country to pass a net neutrality law after the telecom industry got Trumpists to dismantle federal rules.

The state also unveiled a major broadband plan a few years ago that, among other things, aims to spend $3.5 billion to create a massive, open access “middle mile” fiber network in a bid to boost competition. It’s part of a broader quest to make broadband both more affordable and more competitive (see our Copia report from last year discussing the potential impact of open access fiber).

The open access network is designed to dramatically drive down market entry costs for all ISPs in the state, but it was generally a broadside against incumbent regional monopolies like AT&T. AT&T, unsurprisingly, first worked to undermine the bill during crafting, and has whined about it ever since.

Facing a budget deficit as well as “inflation and rising construction costs,” state leaders announced earlier this year they’d be making some notable cuts to the program. As usual, the folks most impacted by the cuts wound up being low income, minority, and otherwise marginalized populations, who’ve already routinely found themselves “redlined” by giant telecom monopolies disinterested in upgrading them.

But folks in impacted neighborhoods like East Oakland and South Central Los Angeles were quick to express their annoyance at the cuts. And with the help of tech activism orgs like the EFF, have managed to get Governor Newsom to reverse course:

“Inflation and rising construction costs still constrain the state’s allotted $3.87 billion for these expansions, said Liana Bailey-Crimmins, director of the California Department of Technology. However the state is still determined to universalize broadband service in California.”

Activists I’ve spoken to aren’t sure that the state will follow through and fully restore funding to these already neglected areas. Many, like Patrick Messac, director for #OaklandUndivided, an internet advocacy nonprofit, noted that the decision to prioritize cuts to long-marginalized neighborhoods speaks to a deeper problem in both policymaking and data collection:

“I’m still concerned that the state isn’t doing anything to address the underlying issue, which is the discriminatory” data that the state used to identify which regions to scale back from, Messac said.

And the promised funding, which Messac said he is still not sure will come, leaves him unsettled.

“So many promises have been broken to Black and brown communities” — the communities Messac said would be disproportionately harmed by the state’s prior decision to scale back on broadband expansions — “that it makes it difficult to celebrate this moment.”

The FCC is engaged in a proceeding that’s supposed to take aim at the way big telecom monopolies intentionally screw over poor and minority neighborhoods, but like so much the generally feckless FCC does, it’s wholly unclear if the inquiry will result in meaningful action.

What California originally promised — investment in a core open access fiber network in a bid to drive competition to market and reduce costs — is precisely the sort of thing federal telecom regulators refuse to do. For decades the FCC has played a form of regulatory theater wherein they talk a lot about the “digital divide,” while proposing superficial fixes for the symptoms of monopoly power, but generally lack the backbone to assault monopoly power straight on.

New York City had considered something similar — a major open access fiber network that all competitors could compete over — but the Adams administration effectively gutted that project in the middle of project planning after repeated complaints by Comcast and Verizon.

Fixing expensive, spotty, and sluggish U.S. broadband access requires a frontal assault on monopoly power. But so far only a few states (like Washington and California) have genuinely had the backbone to even think about trying. A growing parade of long-frustrated towns, from Chattanooga to Palo Alto, have even decided to build their own community-owned networks.

Federal policymakers have repeatedly had the opportunity to assault monopoly power by cracking down on monopoly fraud, supporting open access fiber networks, and embracing community broadband.

But instead of doing that, federal regulators have generally just thrown billions in subsidies at the very same monopolies directly responsible for patchy, expensive U.S. broadband in the first place. That lack of leadership has driven a few states, like California, to take aim at the problem themselves.

But for every California, there are at least a dozen states whose broadband policy approach genuinely involves simply doing whatever AT&T and Comcast wants. And even in California, unsurprisingly, keeping incumbent telecom monopolies from undermining the occasional quest to do the right thing on affordable broadband access is a full time job.

Filed Under: broadband, california, digital divide, fcc, high speed internet, redlining

AT&T Once Again Wants ‘Big Tech’ To Pay For Broadband Upgrades

Broadband

from the sorry-you-have-no-credibility-here dept

For decades AT&T has sought to shovel its broadband network upgrade costs on to the shoulders of other companies. It was the primary catalyst for the net neutrality wars, after AT&T made it clear it wanted to (ab)use its monopoly over broadband access to force companies like Google to pay an extra troll toll if they wanted their traffic to reach AT&T customers.

In recent years AT&T’s tactics have shifted.

The FCC’s Universal Service Fund (USF) program historically involves a small surcharge on voice and broadband lines that helps pay for broadband to rural schools and unserved regions. The program has been facing a shortfall thanks to the death of the landline, forcing many to suggest expanding the contribution base to include tech giants like Netflix, Google, and Facebook.

The FCC is having conversations about how to shore up the contribution base so funding for the program remains stable. AT&T, unsurprisingly, has been quick to enter those conversations with enthusiastic support for making tech giants pay for broadband upgrades. From the company’s policy blog:

“the biggest winners in today’s internet ecosystem should lead the way in funding its realization.

Contributions from large technology companies, edge service providers, and others that directly benefit from the nation’s universal service goals will ensure the fund is big enough to continue to support American connectivity needs and the USF’s objectives.”

As an aside, I’m impressed that AT&T policy folks wrote a blog post on this subject without accusing companies like Netflix and Google of “getting a free ride” on the internet, which suggests a more subtle approach by AT&T. Some variant of that claim almost always gets included in these arguments.

Here’s the problem.

A major reason U.S. broadband access is so spotty is that regional monopolies like AT&T spent decades attacking competitors, suing governments, undermining consumer protection regulators, effectively defrauding the government, refusing to upgrade old DSL lines in marginalized neighborhoods, and generally dismantling absolutely any effort that might encroach on the company’s monopoly power.

All while getting untold billions of dollars in regulatory favors (like the death of net neutrality and broadband privacy protections), subsidies, and massive tax breaks — often in exchange for network upgrades that are somehow always half-completed.

The reason U.S. broadband remains spotty, sluggish, and expensive in 2023 is concentrated monopoly power and the corrupt politicians who protect it (see: the entirety of the GOP, and a sizeable chunk of the DNC). Yet somehow when it comes time for the FCC to shore up the USF and expand access to affordable broadband, cracking down on monopoly power never even enters the conversation.

It’s literally not mentioned by careerist U.S. policymakers. As in, never.

The GOP has loyally protected America’s broadband monopoly problem for forty years. But even Democratic FCC officials like Jessica Rosenworcel, often heralded for her quest to “bridge the digital divide,” seem afraid to even acknowledge America’s obvious broadband monopoly problem (as of just a few years ago, something like 83 percent of U.S. households lived under a broadband monopoly).

Because AT&T is so tethered to both our first responder and domestic intelligence gathering apparatus, regulators are genuinely afraid to hold the politically powerful company accountable for much of anything. Needless to say, you can’t fix a problem you refuse to acknowledge.

Yeah, the USF needs updating. Yeah, having tech companies throw some of their untold billions at rural broadband deployment isn’t the worst idea (they routinely set piles of money on fire for far dumber ventures). That said, none of those efforts will fix U.S. broadband if policymakers don’t first take direct aim at concentrated monopoly power, and reform existing subsidy programs that have spent decades throwing billions at companies for AT&T, often in exchange for bupkis.

Filed Under: big tech, broadband, digital divide, high speed internet, telecom tax, usf
Companies: at&t, google, meta

Critics Say Rules Affixed To Biden’s Massive Broadband Subsidy Program Boxes Out Small ISPs And Community Broadband

Broadband

from the history-repeats-itself dept

We’ve already noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill aims to spend a whopping $42 billion on broadband deployments via the Broadband Equity and Deployment program (BEAD). We’ve also noted how big regional monopolies are doing everything in their power to ensure the lion’s share of that money goes to them, and not smaller ISPs or a number of popular, community-owned broadband networks.

The funding is an historic opportunity to address patchy U.S. broadband. Throwing the lion’s share of that money at giant regional monopolies like AT&T (with long, detailed histories of taking taxpayer money then delivering either fraud or half-completed networks) would undermine the whole point of the program. Especially given that data shows community-owned ISPs provide better, faster, cheaper service.

So last week, a massive coalition of more than 300 smaller ISPs and broadband policy experts wrote a letter to the NTIA (the agency in charge of BEAD), pointing out that rules affixed to the program are unfairly boxing out many smaller and community-owned ISPs.

Under program rules, grant winners not only must obtain a letter of credit (LOC) from a bank to receive the grant, they have to pony up “matching funds of not less than 25 percent of project costs.” According to the coalition of experts, this requirement to set aside huge swaths of cash (that can’t be used for actual project builds) just to get a grant that unfairly benefits giant, regional monopolies:

“Awardees will have to lock away vast sums of capital for the full duration of the build, likely several years. With the additional 25% match requirement, recipients will have a capital hurdle of more than 60% of their grant. We estimate a provider seeking a $7.5 million grant for a $10 million project will need at least $4.6 million of their own capital up-front.”

Money set aside to ensure a grant applicant qualifies under these guidelines is money that’s not being used to actually build broadband networks. That’s not a big deal for AT&T or Comcast, but it’s a big deal for a local, community-owned broadband ISP dealing not only with tight budgets, but lawsuits from giant providers looking to undermine them:

“by establishing capital barriers too steep for all but the best-funded ISPs, the LOC shuts out the vast majority of entities the program claims to prioritize: small and community-centered ISPs, minority and women-owned ISPs, nonprofits, and municipalities. Rather than demonstrating a provider’s ability to construct a broadband network and provide high-speed broadband services to unserved and underserved Americans, the LOC is a measure of whether they can lock up valuable working capital over multiple years.”

Many community broadband networks can’t even obtain LOCs due to local rules, which often include shitty state laws lobbied for by regional monopolies with an eye on undermining competition.

The coalition suggested the NTIA either eliminate the restrictions, or add a few practical alternatives, including delayed reimbursement (where a state and provider releases grant funding as set goals are met), or performance bonds (commonly used in construction projects), which provide a financial guarantee for project delivery without requiring providers to set aside such a large amount of capital.

When asked for comment, the NTIA basically gave a non-answer, so it’s not clear if rule changes are coming anytime soon:

“We have received the letter and appreciate these advocates raising their concerns and suggestions. Our goal is to connect everyone in America with affordable, reliable high-speed Internet service while being good stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

The NTIA is likely trying to avoid the problems seen with the Trump-era FCC RDOF program, which failed due to a lack of agency scrutiny over whether ISPs could actually build the networks they promised (it’s a major reason why the NTIA was put in charge of BEAD). But the LOC restrictions pretty clearly run contrary to the whole program’s stated goals.

Giant regional monopolies dominate every last part of U.S. broadband policy, from determining what defines “broadband” and terms like “underserved,” to mapping access and the grant approval process. Putting predatory monopolies with a history of taking taxpayer funds in exchange for bupkis in the driver’s seat of an historic subsidy program isn’t going to end well. It never does.

Filed Under: bead program, broadband, community broadband, digital divide, high speed internet, ntia, telecom

Palo Alto Embraces A Community-Owned Multi-Gigabit Broadband Network After Decades Of Talk

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For all of the hype Silicon Valley gets as the birthplace of American technological innovation, the broadband networks in cities like Palo Alto have never kept pace. Like most towns and cities across the U.S., Palo Alto residents have long complained about the slow speeds, high prices, and comically terrible customer service they get from their regional broadband monopolies: Comcast and AT&T.

For twenty years, Palo Alto officials had talked about potentially building a city-owned fiber network with an eye on improving speeds, expanding service, and lowering prices. And after a lot of ups and downs and dead ends, the city is finally moving forward on the plan, which will involve delivering cheap, multi-gigabit fiber access via the city’s existing electrical utility:

Palo Alto officials tell ILSR that the project will be spearheaded by the city-utility, and deployed in coordination with a major upgrade of the city’s electrical systems. Phase One of the city’s planned fiber deployment should begin later this year, delivering fiber access to around 20 percent of the city–or 6,500 homes and businesses.

Phase One will be funded entirely from the utility’s existing cash reserves. Profits from that deployment will then be used to expand affordable, multi-gigabit fiber access to all of the city’s 63,210 residents.

Anger at America’s shitty telecom monopolies long ago birthed a grassroots, movement toward locally-owned and operated broadband networks, which take on a range of forms including city-owned municipal networks, cooperatives, or broadband delivered via the city utility. Over 800 such networks now exist, and contrary to federal narratives, have broad bipartisan support.

The COVID home education and telecommuting boom added fuel to the fire and painfully showcased the downsides of monopolized broadband access. Like when a photo of two kids in Salinas, California forced to huddle in the dirt outside of a Taco Bell just to attend online class went viral.

With federal policymakers in both Congress and the FCC lobbied into a feckless stupor by telecom giants, communities are increasingly taking matters into their own hands, which often means treating affordable broadband like the essential utility it clearly always was. The one bit of federal help they have received has come courtesy of the billions now flowing their direction via the infrastructure bill.

Data consistently shows that community-owned and operated broadband networks provide better, faster, cheaper service. Numerous community-owned ISPs, like Chattanooga’s EPB (delivered via the city’s electrical utility) have one repeatedly won awards for both speed and popularity. Owned and operated by locals, such networks are generally more directly accountable to locals.

Palo Alto still faces numerous hurdles. To complete the network, they’ll need access to many of the utility poles the city co-owns with AT&T, a would-be direct competitor. AT&T has a history of exploiting its control over utility poles to slow down any attempt to disrupt the monopoly status quo (Google Fiber ran into this very problem when they tried to expand fiber into Nashville).

While ISPs (and the consultants, think tankers, and lobbyists paid to love them) like to whine incessantly about how such networks interfere in the operation of the “free market,” it’s important to remember U.S. broadband was never really a free market. It’s a government pampered, hugely taxpayer subsidized coagulation of duopolies that long ago gave up on innovation or consumer welfare.

Instead of battling community broadband by offering better, cheaper, more uniformly available broadband, companies like AT&T turned to a corrupt government to protect them. That resulted in 16 states passing laws banning or hamstringing community-owned broadband networks. The GOP even attempted to ban such networks nationwide during a pandemic.

The corruption and market failure have never been particularly subtle.

What Palo Alto and hundreds of other communities are engaged in has been a long time coming. Instead of waiting for regional monopolies to behave, or for federal policymakers to grow a backbone, they’ve increasingly been taking matters into their own hands. It’s a local, grass roots attack of a very broken status quo, and U.S. monopolies have earned every last iota of disruption headed their way.

Filed Under: broadband, digital divide, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, municipal broadband, palo alto, telecom

Telecom Activists Aren’t Impressed By The FCC’s ‘Nutrition Label’ For Broadband

Broadband

from the regulatory-theater dept

For the better part of the decade, the generally feckless FCC has been trying to require that broadband ISPs be a little more honest about broadband fees and limits at the point of sale. So they cooked up the idea of a “nutrition label for broadband,” detailing all of the little caveats and restrictions (real world speeds, caps, bizarre fees) ISPs now impose on your broadband line. Kind of like this:

But year after year the captured FCC could never quite get around to actually implementing the plan. Especially during the Trump era, where the agency was little more than a glorified rubber stamp for industry. But the infrastructure bill demanded it, so the FCC finally got around to acting.

Sort of.

Big ISPs like Comcast are already trying to weasel around the half-cooked restrictions. And at a recent industry event, broadband activists lamented that the labels the FCC are cooking up don’t go far enough in terms of detailing misleading pricing, promotional limits, or real world speeds. Or that the FCC’s program doesn’t even require that the label be placed on subscriber bills:

Joshua Stager, policy director at Free Press, said that the FCC declined to require that the label be put on the monthly bill. He warned that providers can hide the label from consumers which will result in a lack of market response simply because consumers are not aware that the label exists. 

So basically it’s a “nutrition” label that isn’t particularly transparent or useful, and consumers may never see. Very on brand for the nation’s top telecom regulator.

I’ve made the case repeatedly that the FCC often engages in regulatory theater. It’s comically terrified of doing something like directly tackling (or even acknowledging) the real cause of spotty, expensive, U.S. broadband: concentrated telecom monopoly power and the corruption that protects it.

It’s just too politically risky for agency bosses eyeing future political positions to risk pissing off big campaign contributors bone-grafted to our intelligence gathering efforts.

So instead the FCC often engages in theatrical half measures with a focus on “transparency.” In this case, policies that try (weakly) to demand more transparency from big ISPs as to how they rip you off, but that never actually thwart your local telecom monopolies’ effort to rip you off.

The FCC doesn’t gather and share broadband pricing data in any meaningful way (see our $400 million broadband map’s lack of pricing data), because it would only act to highlight market failure, limited competition, and monopolization. This failure to act is very clearly regulatory capture and corruption, as Penn State University’s Sascha Meinrath correctly observes:

Discriminatory pricing in the industry is blatantly obvious, said Sascha Meinrath, Palmer Chair in telecommunications at Penn State University. “The FCC consistently refuses to collect the kind of information that would exonerate ISPs or condemn them,” he stated.  

He warned that this lack of appropriate data collection will be to the detriment of consumers. He accused the FCC of refusing to act against discriminatory and predatory pricing, claiming that it is a prime example of “American corruption.” 

If the FCC cared about high consumer prices, it would at a minimum be willing to track and document those prices to better educate consumers, the press, and policymakers. Or feature Commissioners that can openly criticize how decades of corruption and monopolization have resulted in high prices, spotty coverage, slow speeds, and comically terrible customer service.

The kind of careerists that wind up at the FCC are literally incapable of criticizing telecom giants (find me one instance where Biden FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel has criticized monopoly power). So they’re just as incapable of implementing pro-competitive policies (like openly advocating for community-owned and operated broadband networks the data very clearly shows result in better, faster, cheaper service).

Instead you get a lot of superficial feel good policies that let the FCC pretend it still cares about consumer protection, like empty rhetoric about the “digital divide,” or nutrition labels that don’t actually inform and consumers may never see. Contributing to broadband access that’s routinely middling on performance but leads the developed world in terms of consumer cost.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband nutrition label, digital divide, fcc, high speed internet, prices, telecom

After FCC Debacle, Gigi Sohn Shifts Focus To Challenging Comcast, AT&T With Community-Built Broadband Networks

Broadband

from the pass-go,-and-absolutely-collect-$200 dept

Last March, popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn’s appointment to the FCC fell apart, after telecom and media giants (with the GOP’s help) waged a year long lobbying and propaganda campaign falsely framing her as a radical (The Verge has a good new interview with Sohn on what happened, in case you missed it).

The campaign was highly illustrative of not just the level of corruption in Congress and the regulatory nominee confirmation process, but how terrified companies like Comcast, AT&T, and News Corporation are of regulators who actually pursue policies of interest to the public (like say lower broadband prices, net neutrality, privacy protections, or media consolidation limits).

Sohn has since shifted focus to an arena I’d argue has more of a real-world impact than the majority of what the FCC is doing: community owned and operated broadband networks. Sohn’s now the head of an organization dubbed the American Association for Public Broadband, which advocates for locally-owned and operated alternatives to the lumbering, regional telecom monopolies we long ago normalized.

Frustrated by decades of monopoly dysfunction, towns and cities all over the country have decided to build their own networks, whether it’s municipal, built on the back of city-owned power utilities, or via cooperatives. There’s a lot of very cool stuff happening in this space that was supercharged by the peak COVID frustration with unreliable broadband and home schooling.

After being railroaded by telecom monopolies, Sohn’s now working to ensure that billions in historic new broadband subsidies (made possible by COVID relief and the infrastructure bill) will be spent on direct competitive challenges to their power. Organizations custom built by locals, which see broadband as a utility, and are simply interested in connecting everyone and breaking even:

These municipal network models would be essential in closing the digital divide because they are motivated by different incentives than private companies to “go to places that incumbent won’t,” Sohn argued.

“They are not interested in return on investment,” she added. “They are interested in making sure everybody is connected.”

Politicians and regulators talk a lot about how they want to “bridge the digital divide.” But most of them lack the political courage to correctly identify why that divide still exists in 2023: regional telecom monopolies, protected by corrupt state and federal politicians, that have worked tirelessly over thirty years to consolidate power, crush all meaningful competition, and jack up the cost of service.

The result is obvious everywhere you look: half-completed networks, high prices, comically terrible customer service, slow speeds, plenty of fraud, and massive gaps in the kind of low income, minority, and rural markets Wall Street doesn’t have the patience or interest to serve.

Enter community broadband networks; smaller, locally owned and operated efforts focused on treating broadband like an essential utility. Data keeps showing these networks offer cheaper, better service than regional monopolies, and, given they’re run by locals, they’re more accountable to locals (see our recent Copia report). Sohn’s goal: to double the number of such networks within the next five years.

The parallels to America’s electrification efforts 100 years ago are everywhere. Especially as it relates to cooperatives expanding broadband to areas lazy and greedy incumbents won’t. With federal regulators and lawmakers largely corrupted (and their power increasingly being curtailed by a rightward lurching Supreme Court), the real fight in broadband access has shifted to the local level, where armies of pissed off residents are challenging monopoly power with creative new deployments, block by block.

As a reformer Sohn could have done a lot of good work at the FCC. But I’d argue that the grass roots, local, bipartisan efforts to build better, faster, and cheaper community-owned broadband networks is where all the real action currently is anyway. And there’s no greater revenge to be taken upon monopolies like AT&T and Comcast than driving popular competition right into their backyards.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, digital divide, fcc, fiber, gigi sohn, high speed internet, monopolies, net neutrality, redlining, telecom

Finally Close To Having A Voting Majority, Will The Biden FCC Actually Restore Net Neutrality?

Broadband

from the here-we-go-again dept

Last month we noted how the country’s top telecom and media regulator has been under the bootheel of industry for the better part of seven years, and nobody much seems to care.

For four years under Trump the agency was a glorified rubber stamp to industry interests. Telecom and media giants then lobbied Congress into gridlock for two years under Biden to ensure Democrats couldn’t fill vacant commissioner seats, keeping the agency without a voting majority, unable to do pretty much anything deemed controversial by industry (like restoring net neutrality).

After the industry-backed derailing of the Gigi Sohn nomination set a new high water mark for sleazy Congressional corruption, the Biden administration last May decided to try again by nominating Anna Gomez, a former NTIA official and Sprint lobbyist widely viewed as a safer and less “controversial” (read: she historically hasn’t been much of a consumer advocate or reformer) candidate.

Not too surprisingly, Gomez’s confirmation is moving through Congress more quickly than Sohn’s. Despite some performative outrage by Ted Cruz pretending Gomez is the type of nominee who’ll embrace “regulatory overreach” (whatever that means for an agency that hasn’t shown political courage for the better part of a decade), Gomez’s nomination was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee and now heads to a full Senate vote:

Democrats hold a 14-13 majority on the Senate Commerce Committee. Gomez’s nomination was passed without a full roll call, but nine Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), asked to be recorded as a “no” on Gomez’s nomination.

Republicans are just being obstructionist here, as usual. There’s absolutely nothing controversial about Gomez. There wasn’t actually anything controversial about Sohn either; Republicans and the telecom industry just didn’t want the FCC under Biden to function, so they made up an entirely bogus narrative about how Sohn was a radical cop hater, then seeded it across right wing media with great success.

But if you’ll recall, Sohn’s nomination was scuttled not just by Republicans (who routinely vote in lockstep with the interests of AT&T and Comcast on nearly every issue), but thanks to three key Democratic Senators (Joe Manchin (WV), Mark Kelly (AZ), and Catherine Cortez Masto (NV)) who, worried about being vulnerable politically in swing state midterms, parroted industry’s false concerns that Sohn (a hugely popular reformer) was some sort of extremist.

Said Democrats are far more likely to sign off on Gomez, whose positions on key public interest issues are more of a black box. That said, the kind of nominees that can survive a corrupt congressional nomination process generally aren’t the kind of “rock the boat” types you actually need if you’re looking to implement reform on issues like broadband consumer protection or media consolidation.

The result, as you can pretty clearly see with existing FCC commissioners from both parties, are officials who talk a lot about their ambiguous dedication to “bridging the digital divide,” but generally are too worried about future career prospects to meaningfully challenge the giant telecom monopolies responsible for a large segment of the industry’s biggest problems.

Still, Gomez says she supports reverting the Trump era dismantling of net neutrality. And from my conversation with insiders, the Biden administration remains keen on restoring the rules. But with limited time left in Biden’s first term, and an agency staffed with the kind of folks not known for disrupting the status quo, a restoration of well-crafted net neutrality protections remains something I’ll have to see to believe.

Net neutrality rules were flawed but important guidelines aimed at keeping telecom monopolies from abusing their market power to harm competition and consumers. Despite a lot of misinformed people claiming that “the repeal must not have mattered because the internet still works!”, it mattered. It gutted the FCC’s already flimsy consumer protection authority generally, and the only reason big ISPs haven’t behaved worse in the years’ since is because numerous states passed their own net neutrality protections.

So restoring net neutrality, and specifically once again reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II, remains important from a general consumer protection perspective.

But at this point I think the public and policy worlds are so burned out on the net neutrality debate after 20 years, it makes sense to focus most telecom policy energy and messaging on the real underlying cause of shitty, expensive broadband: telecom monopolization and the corruption that protects it. That messaging also needs to focus on what’s actually working, namely the various community-backed alternatives directly taking aim at concentrated monopoly power.

But I don’t get any real sense the Rosenworcel FCC, Gomez or not, actually has the political courage to meaningfully wage that particular fight. And with a corrupt Congress built to ensure that popular reformers can’t survive the regulatory nomination process, it’s doubtful it’s going to anytime soon.

Filed Under: anna gomez, broadband, consumer protection, digital divide, fcc, geoffrey starks, gigi sohn, high speed internet, jessica rosenworcel, monopolies, net neutrality, telecom

Congratulations! The US Is 32nd Worldwide On Broadband Affordability

Broadband

from the nice-job-everybody dept

I’ve spent the better part of two decades writing about how telecom monopolization (and the corruption that protects it) results in expensive, spotty, sluggish, broadband and historically terrible customer service. The cause of our substandard broadband isn’t much of a mystery, but because of these companies’ political influence, state and federal policymakers often lack the courage to do much about it.

So the problem persists. One recent study found that the U.S. was currently ranked somewhere around 32nd globally, behind countries like Russia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria (you can find the full breakdown here):

“The United States and Canada both have one of the highest internet costs,” Alex Tofts, the Broadband Expert for Broadband Genie, said in a summary. “It’s driven by a lack of competition and bigger distances to connect, with lower population density than other developed countries. However, both have average wages in the top fifteen in the world, compensating for the high cost of internet.”

For decades, people (mostly the industry) tried to suggest the problem was because America was just so gosh darn big. But you’ll notice that China and Russia, (ranked 25th and 17th, respectively) still perform better. Data routinely shows that affordability is the key obstacle to access, yet it’s only been in the last few years that you’ve started to see this reality reflected in U.S. policymaking.

Usually after a study like this appears, telecom monopoly lobbyists and think tankers will subsequently try to claim that U.S. broadband is actually super affordable if you stand on your head, squint, and only look at the metrics in some bizarrely specific way, like only looking at relative value in cost-per-Megabits per second in some markets at certain times of day. I wish I was kidding.

But again, the cause of this problem is very clear: monopolization and consolidation, protected by corruption. Few U.S. markets have the choice of more than one broadband provider at next-generation speeds. And that’s because federal and state lawmakers are so comically corrupt, they routinely let AT&T, Comcast, Charter, or Verizon lobbyists endlessly merge, crush all competition, then literally write state or federal legislation and policy over several decades.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Decades of federal policy corruption and dysfunction have created an extremely strong, local, bipartisan grassroots movement for better broadband access. In countless towns and cities, municipalities, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, and creative new partnerships are building new, open access fiber networks with an eye on competition and cost.

The federal government hasn’t proven to be entirely useless. Both COVID relief and infrastructure bill legislation are delivering more than $60 billion to fix the problem. And yes, while a big chunk of this money will be dumped in the back pocket of telecom monopolies responsible for spotty access and high costs in the first place, a big chunk will also be headed to these community-built alternatives.

Still, it’s comical and grotesque that it’s 2023 and a country that fancies itself a technology giant still can’t meaningfully tackle equitable broadband access and affordability. And that telecom and media policy has basically become a boring afterthought in the era of “Big Tech.” Ensuring equitable access to an essential utility is just too boring for most 2023 policy circles, much less the modern attention economy.

The FCC has made it very clear it’s an agency staffed by careerists who don’t really care about monopoly power or broadband consumer protection. Most of the agency’s Democratic policy proposals are (sometimes) well intentioned regulatory theater. Most GOP proposals don’t even bother with the illusion that consumers matter (see: Ajit Pai). When anybody tries to disrupt that dynamic, you generally get treated the way Gigi Sohn was when her nomination was scuttled earlier this year by industry.

As a result, all the interesting telecom policy is happening locally, block by block by communities pissed off by decades of neglect and overbilling. And the entrenched monopolies they’re taking aim at deserve every last bit of the long-overdue disruption headed their way.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband costs, digital divide, high speed internet, tech, telecom