Biden Re-Announces $42 billion Investment In Broadband, Because Apparently People Didn’t Notice The First Time (original) (raw)

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