high speed internet – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Ted Cruz’s Dumb Plan To Punish States That Regulate AI By Withholding Broadband Grants Falls Apart

from the failed-extortion-plan dept

While the GOP budget bill continues to include no limit of corrupt garbage that will kill millions of Americans (the cuts to Medicaid and rural hospitals being particularly brutal), one key component of the GOP agenda didn’t quite make the cut. Ted Cruz had proposed withholding billions of dollars in federal broadband grants for states that attempt any oversight of AI.

The proposal was one of several cut to try and get the hugely unpopular GOP bill across the finish line. As it turns out, Cruz had a tough time getting enough support for his ignorant plan, and ultimately joined 98 other Senators in a 99-1 vote shooting down the amendment (Sen. Thom Tillis was the one dissenting vote):

“Facing overwhelming opposition from both Democrats and Republicans, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accepted defeat and joined a 99-1 vote against his own plan to punish states that regulate artificial intelligence.”

States are poised to get more than $42.5 billion dollars in broadband deployment subsidies as part of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD), a key component of the bill, had taken years of collaborative work between state and federal governments. In part because we needed to remap broadband access across every county in the United States.

A lot of this money is poised (as usual) to get dumped in the laps of telecom giants, which is a major reason Cruz’s gambit failed (AT&T drove heavy opposition by longtime AT&T ally Marsha Blackburn, who initially worked with Cruz on a “compromise” offering, before that collapsed entirely). But much of this money is also poised to go to really useful fiber upgrade proposals via efforts like regional cooperatives or community-owned broadband networks.

If the bill had passed states would have been faced with choosing between funding rural broadband, or avoiding oversight of increasingly reckless AI giants keen on ignoring what’s left of U.S. labor and environmental standards. They would have definitely taken the broadband money.

Cruz and the GOP have also been busy “helping” American broadband connectivity in other ways, like his recent successful effort to kill an FCC program that helped give poor rural schoolkids access to free Wi-Fi. As well as killing a program that made broadband more affordable for low-income Americans. And the illegal dismantling of the Digital Equity Act and its protections against broadband discrimination.

So while it’s nice Ted Cruz’s latest dumb effort failed, it’s hard to be celebratory. Republicans have been taking an absolute hatchet to every last federal effort to ensure our monopoly-dominated broadband networks are affordable. They’ve also effectively killed all federal consumer protection; policies that will reverberate in negative ways for decades to come.

The budget battle followed the fairly typical Republican playbook: make your initial offer so extremist and awful that any concessions are disguised to feel like a victory. But the final GOP budget bill remains a giant and unpopular piece of shit, and one of the most corrupt and disgusting attacks on vulnerable Americans in the history of modern politics.

Filed Under: ai, bead, broadband, high speed internet, infrastructure, moratorium, regulation, ted cruz, telecom, texas
Companies: at&t

from the unavoidable-slowdowns dept

Tue, Jul 1st 2025 05:27am - Karl Bode

Republicans are rewriting an infrastructure bill grant program to redirect billions of dollars to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband service. The claim is that this is necessary because Starlink is the perfect solution for the country’s rural broadband users and deserves this money. The reality is that Starlink continues to show that it lacks the capacity or affordability to actually accomplish the job.

Low-Earth Orbit satellite broadband services like Starlink have their uses, but will always be dealing with capacity constraints. That means higher prices, weird restrictions, and, as of November 2024, a $100 “congestion charge” for a service that’s already too expensive for many of the rural Americans who could most benefit.

It didn’t take long for that “congestion charge” to soar to 500insomeareas.Nowit’s[alreadyrisenashighas500 in some areas. Now it’s [already risen as high as 500insomeareas.Nowit’salreadyrisenashighas750 in states like Washington as Starlink is forced to try and deter users in some markets from using the increasingly congested network:

“The change can crank up the starting price simply to own the Starlink dish on a residential plan to $1,099.”

Other parts of the country see no congestion charge, but there’s no guarantee that they won’t see one down the line as the network subscribership grows. It’s also very likely the company will increasingly have to resort to doing things like throttling higher definition videos, or engaging in other network management tricks to try and keep the service semi-reliable.

You might recall that Republicans and Elon Musk threw a hissy fit a few years ago when the Biden FCC prioritized “future-proof” fiber and higher-capacity 5G services over Starlink in previous government subsidy programs, (correctly) expressing concerns that the service lacked the capacity to provide consistently reliable speeds on the taxpayer dime.

Ever since then Republicans and Musk have been working tirelessly to “correct” this oversight, to the point where they’re now rewriting a major $45 billion infrastructure bill broadband grant program to ensure Starlink gets a massive portion of taxpayer subsidies. Many right wingers, like c-tier comedian turned podcaster and fashy-apologist Joe Rogan, act as if Starlink is akin to magic.

But the technology has been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to permanently meet real-world demand is expensive and not guaranteed.

These are all things Republican Elon Musk ass kissers either don’t know, or don’t care about as they work to reward their billionaire benefactor. It will be up to their constituents to figure it out later. But money redirected to Starlink is money redirected to cheaper and better broadband alternatives, including super cheap gigabit fiber access and community-owned and operated broadband networks.

So again, Starlink is a nice step up if you’re in the middle of nowhere, lack any other connectivity options, can afford it, and don’t care about its potential environmental impact. But it shouldn’t be taking priority in terms of taxpayer subsidies. Unless, of course, you only care about kissing Elon Musk’s ass and don’t actually care about the constituents you claim to serve.

Filed Under: broadband, congestion, elon musk, fcc, fiber, high speed internet, low earth orbit satellite, subsidies, taxpayers, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink

Telecoms Beg Trump Admin To Kill State Laws Requiring They Provide Affordable Broadband To Poor People

from the who-needs-corporate-oversight-anyway dept

Thu, Jun 5th 2025 05:24am - Karl Bode

During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn’t a huge ask. It costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without success: the Supreme Court recently refused to hear their complaint.

So the law took effect, even though there’s no actual evidence that New York state is actually bothering to enforce it. Still, big ISPs like AT&T and Comcast are terrified that other states might follow suit and start forcing them to make broadband affordable. Some states, like California, are considering it.

They (justifiably) see this as a slippery slope toward the U.S. government actually doing something about the fact that these companies have spent a generation carving out lucrative regional monopolies they use to overcharge Americans for shitty, sluggish, substandard broadband access.

So telecoms have spent much of the last year absolutely begging the Supreme Court to declare such laws “illegal rate regulation.” AT&T even went so far at one point as to pretend it was going to stop doing business in New York State to try and pretend that such laws — which again don’t ask much and probably wouldn’t even be enforced by lazy states — are some kind of onerous demand on the company.

The Supreme Court, too busy destroying all corporate oversight and making Donald Trump a king, so far has refused to hear their case. The court refused to hear telecom lobbyists’ challenge in December 2024 and rejected a follow-up request by the ISPs last February.

So they’re trying again with a new filing to the DOJ that trots out some old, familiar arguments. Namely that state or federal governments doing anything to protect consumers from harmful monopolies is illegal. And somehow harms competition (which largely doesn’t exist in fixed-line U.S. telecom):

“State laws that seek to roll back the clock and impose utility-style, 1930s-era regulatory schemes that dictate the exact prices and terms at which broadband providers must offer their services threaten competition and are inconsistent with federal law.”

The thing is, contrary to a lot of industry pretense, there really is no more “federal law.” Telecom lobbyists and the U.S. right wing have had incredible recent success in completely dismantling whatever is left of U.S. consumer protection, regulatory independence, and corporate oversight. Usually under the pretense that this would result in bold, miraculous new Utopian outcomes for all.

Spoiler: that didn’t happen. Instead we get expensive, shitty, sluggish, outage-prone Comcast service.

With federal power crippled, companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are now shifting their attention to the handful of remaining states that care about this sort of stuff. Usually by claiming that any state efforts to protect consumers from telecom monopoly predation is (or should be) somehow illegal.

Thanks to corruption and a rightward-lurching court system, they’ve won many of their arguments so far, so it makes sense that, sooner or later, they’ll win this one too with the help of the Supreme Court. We’ve basically built an absolute corporatocracy while a lot of people in the press and policy circles were taking a fucking nap. The end result won’t be a pleasant one.

Filed Under: affordability, broadband, doj, federalism, high speed internet, state's rights, supreme court
Companies: at&t, comcast, verizon

Big Telecom Covertly Funded Smear Campaign To Derail Affordable Fiber Broadband Deployments In Utah

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

Wed, Jun 4th 2025 05:31am - Karl Bode

We’ve noted for years how U.S. regional telecom monopolies have effectively crushed competition in many U.S. markets and utterly defanged our regulators. This one-two punch of muted competition and no oversight routinely results in expensive, slow, spotty broadband access.

Frustrated by this, communities all over the U.S. have responded to this market and regulatory failure by building their own, more affordable, fiber networks. At last count there were somewhere around 400 such networks providing cheap fiber to 700 communities nationwide. There was a big boom during COVID born out of frustration from home telecommuting and education broadband problems.

One of the biggest and most popular such networks in the U.S. is UTOPIA Fiber, which is an open access fiber network serving 23 markets, mostly across Utah. UTOPIA offers fiber speeds up to 10 Gbps across 19 different partner ISPs, all competing on price and customer service. Such open access fiber deployments are a useful, local, and popular way to dismantle the monopoly logjam on internet access.

Recently, UTOPIA (now operating in the green after years of heavy fiber investment) began expanding broadband access into the town of Bountiful, Utah, population 46,000. Big broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast didn’t much like that. But because they have such terrible reputations, and UTOPIA is so popular, they didn’t feel they could attack the project directly.

So they did what they always do: they funded a dodgy proxy group to try and scare locals away from supporting the project. In this case it was called the “Utah Taxpayer Association,” and it’s a nonprofit funded by telecoms, pretending to be an objective third party simply concerned about the potential impact of the project on local taxpayers.

Except when the group went door to door to try and tell false and scary stories about how community broadband is dangerous to taxpayers, it failed completely because locals quickly sniffed out that the group wasn’t actually local:

“A dark money group called Utah Taxpayers Association financed a petition effort to force a vote on project funding. It hired signature collectors to try to persuade registered voters to oppose the project.

Timmerman said the signature campaign failed because residents would ask, “Who do you work for?” and the signature gatherers didn’t even know who was behind the campaign. And when residents asked, “Are you a resident of Bountiful?” the signature gatherers said, “No.”

Although these dark money groups don’t disclose their donors, one can only assume that they were funded by the incumbent providers in Bountiful, which include Comcast and CenturyLink. However, there is no verification of exactly who was behind the campaigns.”

You don’t have to assume, it’s on record. Such campaigns don’t cost these providers much. AT&T gave this particular group $1,163 during a six month span last year according to financial disclosure records. Comcast and Centurylink also sponsor the group’s annual conference. All entirely coincidental, I’m sure.

Telecom giants like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter have spent much of the last few years trying to derail these kinds of community-owned networks. Either by spreading lies about them, or trying to sue them out of existence. UTOPIA’s creation years ago was immediately met with a lawsuit from Qwest (now Centurylink/Lumen) which saddled the effort with extra legal costs right out of the gates.

Big telecom has also employed the help of Republicans, who have, at several different points (including during peak COVID lockdowns when affordable fiber was essential) tried to impose a federal ban on such popular networks. Loyal Republican puppets can often be found making up absurd claims about municipal broadband, like lies that they somehow “harm the First Amendment.”

The great irony is that telecom giants could derail such efforts by providing better, cheaper, and faster broadband access. But it’s generally cheaper to fund a few dodgy proxy groups, or bribe a senator, than it is push fiber out into neighborhoods they don’t care about because the ROI is two years longer than some bean counter would like. So here we are.

In this case it failed, spectacularly. As a result, Bountiful residents have access to a UTOPIA network, being paid for via bond, that’s offering gigabit fiber for as little as $50 a month. You can see why executives at companies like Comcast are afraid of this sort of model, the benefits of which we outlined in a Techdirt/Copia paper three years ago.

Filed Under: affordable, astroturfing, community broadband, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, municipal, utah
Companies: at&t, centurylink, comcast, utah taxpayers association, utopia

Republicans Rewrite Infrastructure Broadband Grant Program To Give Elon Musk Billions, Potentially Delaying Deployments By Years

from the fixing-things-by-breaking-them dept

Fri, May 30th 2025 05:37am - Karl Bode

So you might recall that Republicans recently have been making a gigantic stink about how the $42.5 billion in broadband grants included in the infrastructure bill hadn’t actually connected anybody yet. I pointed out in detail why things have been admittedly slow; a big reason being that we had to completely remap broadband access after decades of corruption and incompetence.

After whining endlessly about the slow cadence of this particular broadband grant program (the Broadband Equity, Deployment, and Access program, or BEAD), Republicans, earlier this year, began making changes to it that largely helped giant telecoms and Elon Musk.

They’re eliminating requirements that resulting broadband be affordable for poor people. They’re eliminating already fairly decorative labor and climate build requirements. And most importantly, they’re rewriting the language so less money goes to local, high-capacity fiber ISPs, and more money goes to Elon Musk’s congested, expensive, Ozone-layer-depleting Starlink satellite broadband service.

The changes are, ironically enough, likely to cause some major additional delays in people actually getting broadband as states are forced to retool their compliance strategies after years of planning. One organization, the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, estimates that the changes could result in up to a two year additional delay in people getting broadband:

“Mandated changes—if they come from either Congress or the U.S. Department of Commerce—could force states to rerun their entire BEAD sub-grantee selection processes. The resulting delays will cost ISPs across the country hundreds of millions of dollars in time and resources to plan for the new program guidelines and reapply for awards.”

Again, very ironic that Republicans would spend much of the last year complaining about delays in this program, only to introduce massive new delays. And not delays that are actually beneficial to the public, but delays that mostly help their buddies at AT&T/Comcast/Verizon and Elon Musk.

Apparently under the belief he was helping matters, Ezra Klein recently jumped into the broadband debate to make the unoriginal observation that government should make big promises and deliver on them. But his analysis of broadband was simplistically puerile; most of it seemed based on Republican angst, and ignored the real progress made on affordable fiber via ARPA and other initiatives.

Klein also ignored that a major reason BEAD moved slowly was due to corruption and telecom lobbyists trying to weaken and change the bill to their direct benefit (softening speed definitions, weakening map coverage, preventing competitors from getting grants). Corruption is something Klein’s new book tends to downplay as a primary issue of concern, despite its starring role in U.S. dysfunction.

BEAD was never going to win any awards for government efficiency. The bill was passed in 2021, yet states were only just starting to finalize deployment plans. But again there were some good reasons for this; creating a vast coalition of federal and local governments tasked with completely remapping broadband access, then vetting applicants to ensure they could deliver — takes a little time.

The great irony is that most of these delays were the direct result of government not wanting to repeat mistakes in past broadband government subsidy programs. Such as the FCC’s Rural Deployment Opportunity Fund, which was a giant boondoggle under the first Trump administration because the government didn’t do its homework on broadband mapping, or grant applicant credibility.

BEAD’s slower cadence was a direct result of fighting corruption and trying (with mixed results) to do things the right way. It was on the cusp of delivering real-world affordable fiber when Republicans showed up to fix things. By, again, making the resulting, reconstituted program take longer and deliver less. Ingenious. We are truly living in the golden age of populist abundance.

Republican (and Ezra Klein’s) angst over the slow speed of the BEAD broadband grant managed to get the press all hot and bothered for months. I’d wager that this angst curiously won’t be repeated now that pointless new delays were introduced by Republicans to the direct benefit of Elon Musk.

Filed Under: abundance, bead, corruption, elon musk, ezra klein, fiber, grants, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, satellite

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Tue, May 27th 2025 05:24am - Karl Bode

Last year Trumplicans killed a popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak.

At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, of course, was that the ACP was popular with their constituents (the majority of ACP participants were in red states) and they didn’t want Dems to take credit during an election season.

A recent report by The Brattle Group actually found that the 7−7-7−8 billion annual taxpayer cost of the program generated between 28.9and28.9 and 28.9and29.5 billion in savings thanks to expanded access to affordable internet, remote work opportunities, online education tools, and remote telehealth services. In other words: the program more than paid for itself via downstream benefits (something DOGE dudebros and other Trump cultists refuse to think about).

But new data coming out of Ookla indicates that the Republican attack on the ACP had a measurable, harmful impact on the U.S. broadband digital divide. Ookla’s full data shows some progress in connecting urban residents to speeds of at least 100 Mbps, but major problems in shoring up access to rural communities, especially in rural parts of Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Missouri and New Mexico:

“We suspect that some of this [broadband divide] was attributed to the ACP ending,” Sue Marek, editorial director at Ookla and author of the report, told CNET. “We might see some more examples of that by the end of 2025.”

These are, once again, many parts of the country that tend to vote in favor of Trump. In large part because we’ve been slowly killing off critical journalism and replacing it with either corporatist infotainment or right wing propaganda that obscures the impact of their voting choices.

But the truth is, a lot of recent broadband progress has been made thanks to legislation passed in 2021 that Republicans opposed. That includes the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which included $25 billion in subsidies that have gone to a lot of community-owned or cooperative fiber expansion efforts. In many of those markets, rural users are seeing dirt cheap gigabit fiber access for the first time ever.

We’re also poised to see an infusion of fiber expansion thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill and BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) program, which is leveraging an additional $42.5 billion in subsidies flowing to the states. There’s been some fussing (by both the GOP and pundits like Ezra Klein) about the delays in getting this BEAD money to market; though a big reason for said delays was the need to completely remap U.S. broadband access after years of corruption-plagued policy failure.

BEAD money should start flowing this year, with a high discrepancy state by state based on which party is in control. Republican-controlled state BEAD money is more likely to be thrown in the lap of Elon Musk or AT&T and Comcast. Democrat-controlled state BEAD money is more likely to be leveraged to build open access middle mile networks, fund popular community owned broadband, or bolster local competition.

So U.S. state broadband data in ten years or show should tell a very interesting story.

These programs–from the ACP to ARPA and BEAD–were almost exclusively the byproduct of Democratic policy (not to suggest Democratic broadband policy hasn’t been without its own ugly problems and corruption issues). Republicans voted against all of them — yet will routinely try to take credit for the programs among their local, rural constituents.

Democrats at least make an effort. Republican telecom policy has involved either coddling monopoly power, destroying the regulatory ability to hold shitty telecoms accountable, or taking an illegal wrecking ball to Congressional-passed laws like the Digital Equity Act (which mandated that government and industry must make very basic efforts to ensure affordable broadband is deployed equitably).

Right now, a key priority for the administration is rewriting key parts of the infrastructure bill in a bid to redirect billions of subsidies away from better alternatives to Elon Musk’s expensive, congested, and environmentally harmful Starlink satellite broadband service. And lobotomizing whatever’s left of federal broadband consumer protection standards.

Official Republican policy on telecom is cronyism, corruption and making everything shittier and more expensive to the benefit of a handful of rich men and their companies (see: Ted Cruz’s latest effort to make it harder for rural school kids to get broadband). Yet when you read the vast majority of mainstream corporate journalism on telecom policy, this undeniable fact isn’t made clear to readers or the electorate.

Republicans rarely have to take agency for poor and unpopular telecom policy in most of the U.S. press, even when data repeatedly shows said policies documentably and intentionally harms their own purported constituents. It is, as they say, why we can’t have nice things.

Filed Under: access, affordability, bead, corruption, digital divide, fiber, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, maps, state broadband
Companies: ookla

States Forced To Kill Millions In Rural Broadband Investment After Trump Illegally Kills The Digital Equity Act… Simply For Having The Word ‘Equity’ In It

from the idiot-king dept

Thu, May 22nd 2025 05:23am - Karl Bode

Last week we noted how Trump illegally declared he was killing the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act. The law, passed as part of the infrastructure bill, was slated to bring millions in new broadband grants and digital literacy tools to Americans of all kinds long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The bill helped everybody (including Trump-supporting rural veterans), but because Trump’s team assumed that the word equity meant “exclusively help minorities,” the program has become the latest victim of our mad, incoherent, con man king and his army of mindless earlobe nibblers.

It hasn’t taken long for the decision to have ripple effects in the real world. South Dakota, for example, says it’s cancelling $5 million in broadband investment because of the uncertain future of the grants that were going to be funding the plan:

“In South Dakota, the funds would have helped bring accessible and affordable internet access and technology to rural, aging and low-income South Dakotans, as well as tribal communities. Infrastructure like 5G towers and fiber-optic lines needs to be added to neighborhoods.”

Uniformly helping people access the internet: how utterly, diabolically woke! And how “populist” of King Trump to illegally end a beneficial law passed by Congress.

South Dakota Rep. Erik Muckey doesn’t mince words in explaining how the Trump administration has no idea what they’re destroying:

“This crusade to eliminate any funding that has anything to do with even the word equity, even if the word equity has nothing to do with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, that it’s purely about actually helping basic infrastructure get to rural communities and native nations, it’s just a farce.”

This will be repeated across numerous states like Vermont, which is also cancelling planned broadband investment. Thanks to Trump’s incoherent zealotry, dozens of states are having to cancel plans to expand fiber access to rural communities, or kill off digital literacy programs designed to help rural locals get online in order to access employment, education, and health care opportunities.

This isn’t about “saving money,” especially coming from a country whose new king is throwing $45 million ego parades. It’s not about serving any constituents (these programs were broadly popular). It’s about a pathological need to be cruel.

It’s quite a policy coup from Republicans and Libertarian “free market” think tank guys, who repeatedly threw a hissy fit for years, falsely claiming that some modest net neutrality rules would “stifle broadband investment” (but are now quiet as little church mice for some reason).

If you read the actual Digital Equity Act, race is barely mentioned. It’s basically just a bare bones effort to try and ensure that everybody has access to decent broadband. That’s important in a country where congressional corruption has resulted in telecom market failure at the hands of shitty regional monopolies, whose lack of competition and oversight results in expensive, spotty, slow, and low-quality access.

Making U.S. broadband shittier and more expensive is a central policy platform of a Republican party that has, over the last few years, obliterated all telecom oversight, dismantled efforts to protect broadband consumer privacy, destroyed popular programs helping low-income Americans afford broadband, and even recently made it harder for poor kids to do their homework online.

When people complain about substandard access, the follow up Republican policy is to shovel them toward Elon Musk’s Starlink, ignoring that the increasingly congested satellite service lacks the capacity to scale to handle U.S. coverage gaps, is too expensive for the rural Americans who need it most, harms scientific research and the ozone layer, and is run by an erratic, conspiratorial bigot.

Democrats certainly have their failures on telecom policy (see: their corrupt inability to support the Gigi Sohn FCC nomination), but a lot of the legislation passed in 2021 (specifically ARPA) was primarily the result of Democratic initiatives, and is genuinely helping to drive affordable, super fast fiber into areas that have never seen access before.

But when the corporate U.S. press writes about broadband policy and market failures, the fact that unpopular Republican policies are specifically and cruelly designed to stall progress and make our digital divide worse (especially for their own constituents) is either downplayed or not mentioned at all.

Great stuff! Very innovative!

Filed Under: broadband, digital equity, donald trump, erik muckey, grants, high speed internet, impoundment, infrastructure, telecom

California Bill Would Require That AT&T And Comcast Make Broadband Affordable For Poor People

from the actually-helping-people dept

Thu, May 8th 2025 05:31am - Karl Bode

We’ve documented for decades how U.S. telecom is an uncompetitive mess dominated by politically powerful telecom monopolies that see no competition and effectively own Congress. As a result, the U.S. telecom and broadband market is an uncompetitive mess, with Americans still seeing higher prices, slower speeds, spottier access, and worse customer service than in many developed nations.

Generally, U.S. regulators are too captured to even acknowledge there’s a problem. When they do propose a solution, it either involves throwing money at the problem, or developing performative half-measures that don’t take aim at the real problem: monopoly power and the corruption that protects it.

With the Trump administration butchering whatever’s left of federal consumer protection and telecom oversight, states are taking a bigger role in telecom policy. That includes New York State, which, during peak COVID, passed a law mandating that big telecom companies provide low-income state residents with affordable broadband (25 Mbps broadband for 15amonth,or200Mbpsfor15 a month, or 200 Mbps for 15amonth,or200Mbpsfor25 a month).

That’s not a huge ask for regional telecom giants that routinely overbill for service.

Telecom giants didn’t much like that, though their legal efforts to kill the law fell short recently when the Supreme Court refused to hear their challenge. Now California is exploring its own, similar, law (AB353), which would require giant telecoms like Comcast and AT&T provide low-income state residents 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up broadband for $15 a month.

“Broadband affordability is not an urban versus rural issue, nor does it have to be a partisan issue. We all should agree that broadband is an essential service that must be affordable for all,” California Assemblymember Tasha Boerner said of the law.

The proposal comes after Republicans killed a federal FCC program that provided a $30 discount off the broadband bills of low-income Americans. The Republicans in question claimed they killed the popular program to save money, but a follow up study showed that the program more than paid for itself (by a factor of four) because it helped expand access to remote healthcare, employment, and education.

This is, to be clear, a nightmare if you’re a lumbering giant like AT&T and Comcast, which have carved out lucrative regional monopolies, then glommed onto the federal tit as unaccountable domestic surveillance buddies. They’ve long insisted that any oversight of their business practices is “radical extremism,” and I suspect their lobbyists are extremely hard at work trying to scuttle California’s plan.

But this is, again, a byproduct of these companies’ own making. They’ve worked relentlessly for decades to not only crush regional broadband competition, but to lobotomize federal government oversight. They’re finally on the cusp of achieving this generational victory thanks to Donald Trump, whose government believes that affordable, equitably-deployed fiber optic broadband is “woke.”

Now the only thing that stands between them and unchecked broadband price gouging and predation are a handful of states that occasionally try (with various degrees of success) to do the right thing. And the hundreds of local municipalities that are building their own (usually better, faster, and cheaper) community-owned fiber networks.

I think you’ll find this theme of localism becoming a steady constant drumbeat in the months and years to come. As the corrupt federal kakistocracy fails around us, state and local fights become exponentially more important and heated.

California, despite its well documented flaws on policy, has actually been doing a lot of interesting stuff on broadband. Like using billions in ARPA (COVID relief) bill funding to effectively build a massive new middle-mile fiber network, and fuel a whole bunch of new fiber broadband deployments to neighborhoods long neglected by shitty regional monopolies.

They’re actually targeting the real problem: consolidated monopoly power. That’s being layered with AB353, which just passed the state’s Assembly Communications and Conveyance Committee by a vote of 7 to 2. Combined with a huge looming infusion of federal infrastructure bill broadband grants (assuming they don’t all get siphoned off by Elon Musk, AT&T, and Comcast), and there’s some actual potential for reform here, despite the insanity and ignorance going on at the federal level.

Filed Under: affordability, broadband, california, fiber, high speed internet, low-income, minority, monopoly, telecom

ARPA Is Delivering The ‘Abundance’ Ezra Klein Claims To Be Looking For

from the you're-not-helping dept

Fri, Apr 11th 2025 12:09pm - Karl Bode

So you may have noticed that the media red carpet has been rolled out for Ezra Klein’s new book, “Abundance.” I don’t think the premise of the book is particularly original or challenging: that government should promise and efficiently deliver big things that genuinely help the public.

But as we noted last week, I had some issues with Klein’s simplistic description of government broadband subsidy programs like BEAD, the Broadband Equity, Access, And Deployment program poised to deliver $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill.

Klein singled out BEAD as example of almost absurdist government waste, noting the program has taken longer than it should to deliver any broadband (correct), and that the program has a lot of cumbersome restrictions for providers looking to participate (also correct).

But Klein’s framing of the program was superficial, implying that the program (which was poised to start funding projects this year) was so loaded with restrictions as to be an irredeemable waste. Klein also failed to note why this program program took so long and had so many restrictions.

One being that as part of BEAD, Congress had the FCC completely remap broadband access across every county in the United States. This is a good thing, and was necessary because, for decades, the GOP and telecom giants fought tooth and nail against accurate maps that might outline market failure.

Another reason BEAD had more restrictions (and was run by the NTIA) is that government was trying to avoid the taxpayer-funded fraud that had occurred with a different, recent Trump first term FCC programs (RDOF). This was also a good thing.

BEAD isn’t any poster child for government efficiency, but many of its restrictions exist for good reasons. Many of them involve trying to combat past corporate fraud and government dysfunction. It isn’t, as Klein tries to claim, just government trying to impose annoying bureaucracy because everyone really loves bureaucracy for some ambiguous reason:

“This is how liberal government works now.”

Klein’s portrayal of BEAD as an abject and pointless bureaucratic failure (which it most decidedly isn’t), actually works against “abundance.” The GOP has been trying to frame this program as a pointless bureaucratic nightmare for several years (current FCC boss Brendan Carr got mad at us last year when we pointed this out). I’d wager those false claims are how it got on Klein’s radar in the first place.

Abundance Right Under Your Nose

More damning to me is that Klein also failed to mention that other programs launched the same year are doing exactly what Klein claims to be looking for. Like the 350billion,2021AmericanRescuePlanAct(ARPA),whichiscurrentlydolingout350 billion, 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which is currently doling out 350billion,2021AmericanRescuePlanAct(ARPA),whichiscurrentlydolingout25 billion in broadband grants to help deploy affordable fiber to countless U.S. communities that, in many cases, have never been connected to the internet before.

I speak constantly with the people all over this country deploying this particular “abundance.” Every single week as part of my research on U.S. broadband I talk to a different municipality, utility, cooperative, or small rural provider rolling out fiber thanks to ARPA grants. Fiber broadband access that’s usually cheaper and much faster than anything available in major metro areas.

In many areas, cooperatives, leveraging experience from 100 years earlier when they were forced to address electrical market failure, are pushing out $60 per month symmetrical gigabit fiber to people who’d been neglected by the private sector and government for a generation. A lot of these ARPA deployments are being helped by the broadband mapping improvements mandated by BEAD.

And, unlike a lot of past government subsidy programs (where the entirety of funds are thrown in the lap of giant regional telecom monopolies), a lot of this money is going to small, local, rural ISPs. A lot of it is going to communities that are building their own popular, community-owned local broadband infrastructure. This seems like something somebody interested in abundance might want to mention in any of the countless book promotion podcast interviews?

ARPA (which had far fewer of the restrictions Klein laments) is, of course, funding countless other essential improvements and infrastructure. There’s a brand new community center and affordable housing center being built here in South Seattle that’s a stone’s throw from my backdoor.

Klein doesn’t mention ARPA’s broadband successes because he either didn’t do enough research into broadband to understand it, or the example contradicted the implication of his book (that Democrats love bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake). I genuinely get the sense he didn’t actually do research when it came time to talk about broadband. He saw Republican complaints and riffed off them.

Now Democrats do suck at messaging. Nobody knows this community center near my house is thanks to ARPA because there’s absolutely no signs saying so. Democrats suck at taking public credit for a lot of this stuff. And the ad engagement based press usually doesn’t cover it because “boring” infrastructure stories don’t get clicks, and they’re afraid to appear biased to Democrats.

I don’t say any of this as some sort of apologist for government bureaucracy. I’ve genuinely spilled more ink on U.S. broadband policy dysfunction more than anybody alive. But if Klein wants to portray himself as a policy expert and his book as the final word on infrastructure, these are all weird omissions, and stuff any broadband policy expert would have told him in a half hour conversation.

I also take issue with the way Klein downplays consolidated corporate power and corruption.

Most of our burdensome U.S. regulation wasn’t created by well-intentioned reformers or caricatured avocado-toast gobbling Millennials living in Pasadena. It was primarily built by those with the most influence on government policy and those most usually inclined to benefit: consolidated corporate power. The lion’s share of government function persists because it benefits America’s biggest companies.

Our tax filing processes aren’t convoluted because being convoluted is fun, they’re convoluted to coddle the rich, confuse the poor, and benefit tax prep companies. Our broadband policies aren’t bureaucratic for bureaucracy’s sake; they’ve convoluted messes because dominant regional monopolies have made a complicated mess of markets to their own benefit, and routinely muddy up good faith reform and want to deter anybody looking to change things.

The primary culprit of bad regulation isn’t progressive reform. It’s corruption and regulatory capture. It’s careerist revolving door regulators who stopped caring about the public interest a decade earlier, assuming they ever did. It’s a Congress so heavily lobbied by corporate interests it’s literally too corrupt to function or pass even the most basic reforms (see: our lack of internet privacy laws).

As somebody who has studied and written about telecom policy for several decades, corruption is at the very heart of that sector’s bureaucratic dysfunction. If you’re talking about abundance and you think corruption and consolidated corporate power is some kind of afterthought in the conversation of why the government consistently fails to deliver, I’m going to have a hard time taking you seriously.

The conversation “Abundance” wants to have is also just weirdly crafted for a different time (read: pre-fascism). Trump authoritarianism is dismantling what little corporate oversight and consumer/labor power remains, ushering in a golden age for corruption. We can obviously still debate policy; but this particular conversation at this particular moment feels like bickering about drape colors while an arsonist sets the house on fire.

Filed Under: abundance, arpa, bead, broadband, corruption, grants, high speed internet, infrastructure, ntia

from the maybe-don't-give-the-giant-racist-more-money dept

Thu, Apr 10th 2025 08:04pm - Karl Bode

SpaceX’s Starlink service can be a big improvement for those completely out of range of broadband access. But contrary to what many Republicans and c-tier comedians turned fascism apologist podcasters imply, Starlink is not magic. And it comes with a growing list of caveats. Including the increasingly unhinged behavior and far right political alliances of its conspiratorial, pudding-brained CEO.

Elon Musk’s growing power over the fledgling LEO (low Earth orbit) satellite sector has long been worrying global military leaders, especially after one incident a few years ago where Musk restricted Ukraine’s access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine’s military aims (defending itself from unprovoked invasion).

And while it took a while, there’s evidence Europe and Ukraine are finally starting the necessary migration off of Elon Musk’s satellite communications platform. Last week Reuters reported that Berlin has been paying for Ukraine’s access to France’s Eutelsat for much of the last year. Initial numbers are low, but they’re hoping to ramp up quickly:

“[Eutelsat’s chief executive Eva] Berneke said there were fewer than a thousand terminals connecting users in Ukraine to Eutelsat’s network, which is a small fraction of the roughly 50,000 Starlink terminals Ukraine says it has, but she said she expected the figure would rise.

“Now we’re looking to get between 5,000 and 10,000 there relatively fast,” she said, adding it could be “within weeks”.

Eutelsat’s OneWeb division is Starlink’s primary rival in the low-Earth orbit satellite space. The company has around 650 LEO satellites in orbit at approximately 1,200 km (750 mi) altitude, while Starlink has a notable early advantage with over 7100 LEO satellites in orbit. Other companies, like Bezos’ Project Kuiper, are poised to enter the historically challenging market with high operational costs.

Elon Musk’s increasingly unhinged behavior continues to be a wonderful marketing opportunity for companies that want to provide alternatives to people who prefer their companies with a skosh less racism and fascism. Trump’s annoying tariffs have also been driving foreign governments (like Canada) away from Starlink, though it’s all happening slower than many would like.

Don’t feel bad for Elon Musk though. Potentially unsecured Starlink terminals were recently attached to the White House roof, creating major new potential cybersecurity risks. U.S. Republicans are also trying to hijack the $42.5 billion U.S. infrastructure bill broadband grant program and redirect as much of the money as possible to Musk.

The problem: Starlink here in the States is expensive, increasingly congested, ruins astronomical research, harms the ozone layer, and lacks the capacity to fully address rural American broadband problems. And federal grant money directed toward Musk is money directed away from more popular, local, affordable alternatives like cooperative fiber or locally run fixed wireless options not run by conspiratorial bigots.

Filed Under: alternatives, broadband, competition, elon musk, high speed internet, low earth orbit, satellite, ukraine