high speed internet – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Trump Tags Brendan Carr To Dismantle What’s Left Of Broadband Consumer Protection At FCC

from the here-we-go-again dept

Surprising exactly nobody, Donald Trump has appointed Brendan Carr to lead the nation’s top telecom and media regulator. As we noted last week, there’s zero daylight between Carr’s policies and the policies of unpopular telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. Carr is as close to the dictionary definition of “regulatory capture” as you’re going to get (with a few additional wrinkles we’ll get to down below).

You might recall that Trump’s team promised it would “blacklist” any participants in Project 2025, back when it was pretending to distance itself from the unpopular policy platform. That promise is already out the window, given Carr wrote an entire Project 2025 chapter on how he planned to use the FCC to harass any tech and media companies that didn’t adequately bend the knee to Trump authoritarianism.

Carr’s top priority will be dutifully dismantling all remaining FCC broadband consumer protection efforts, whether that’s net neutrality, the FCC’s recent inquiry into shitty broadband usage caps, broadband consumer privacy protections, efforts to stop broadband “redlining” (read: racism in fiber deployment), good faith efforts to help the poor afford broadband, and efforts to stop your cable, phone, wireless, or broadband provider from ripping you off with shitty fees.

FCC’s consumer protection efforts have been on shaky ground for a while, but Trump 2.0 (read: “populism” that isn’t actually all that popular) will be the absolute death of them. The Trump-corrupted Supreme Court has already set the stage for telecoms (any U.S. company, really) to declare that absolutely any effort to protect consumers is a violation of the law. I wish I was being hyperbolic.

All fights over these sorts of issues now head to the state or local level, bogging the court system and regulatory reform down indefinitely (the entire point). If you live in a state that couldn’t care less about corporate oversight or consumer protection, you’re shit out of luck for the foreseeable future. Thank a Trump voter when the myriad impacts start to materialize. You may need to use pie charts.

Carr’s extremely likely to rubber stamp terrible media and telecom mergers, ensuring that your prices skyrocket and service quality suffers. He’ll also take a hatchet to whatever’s left of media consolidation limits, which Trumplicans only pretend to care about when they’re spreading bigoted conspiracy theories. The result of both will be higher prices, more harmful consolidation, and lower quality services.

Carr’s primary pet project on the telecom front will be to try to impose AT&T’s long-percolating plan to tax tech companies (read: you) in order to throw billions in new telecom subsidies at AT&T and Comcast. Subsidies, if his track record holds, he’ll fail utterly to ensure are spent intelligently. This will be framed as good faith reform by both Carr and gullible press outlets, starting sometime next Spring.

Mainstream media journalism is already sanewashing Carr. The Washington Post, as just one example, spends its first four opening paragraphs parroting the false Republican claim they’re being “censored,” and at no point really makes it clear to readers that the entirety of broadband consumer protection is on the chopping block. The New York Times breakdown of the appointment barely thinks Carr’s primary appointment goal — to make life easier on AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast — is worth a mention.

You’d think, were you a journalist paid to inform readers, you could work in a mention somewhere that Carr is the exact opposite of the “populist” leadership Trumpists deluded themselves into voting for. A status quo captured regulator whose primary function is to coddle telecom monopolies.

Carr does differ from traditional Republican and Libertarian mindless “deregulation” orthodoxy in a key way: he supports the Trump fascism project. That means he’s going to talk a lot about “small government” when it’s convenient to coddle and enable corporate Republican allies (AT&T, Comcast, Walmart, Oracle), then pivot on a dime to abuse government authority to harass companies authoritarians don’t like in the very next breath.

That means harassing journalists and media companies even lightly critical of Trumpism, or any tech companies that try and do the bare minimum to stop the spread of race-baiting Republican propaganda on the internet. Since their actual policies are routinely dogshit, a cornerstone of modern Republican power is the use of propaganda across old and new media to ensure that a disgruntled electorate has no idea what they’re voting for beyond the racism (I’d say that’s going pretty well, don’t you?).

Carr’s top job will be to protect that apparatus, and I suspect he’ll pursue it with the usual zeal reserved for sniveling sycophants in Donald’s orbit. I’d suspect Trump FCC 2.0 will be notably worse than the Ajit Pai era, given that Trumpism now has the backing of the Supreme Court (which can easily appear corrupted with a Winnebago), and potentially both houses of Congress, putting historically terrible legislation in play.

Again, Trump voters think they voted for status-quo disrupting populism, but you really can’t get any more unpopular status quo than Brendan Carr. He’s a water boy for the telecom industry’s least popular companies, and the end result of his tenure absolutely will not be inexpensive or subtle.

Filed Under: big tech tax, brendan carr, broadband, consumer protection, fcc, high speed internet, media consolidation, mergers, telecom

If You Like Being Ripped Off By Comcast, You’ll LOVE Trump’s Likely New FCC Boss

from the get-ready-for-pain dept

Wed, Nov 13th 2024 05:31am - Karl Bode

Current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has spent much of the last decade positioning himself to be Trump’s likely pick for the next boss of the FCC. He’s likely to get his wish; after spending a lot of time crying about TikTok to get on cable TV and kissing AT&T’s and Comcast’s asses, Carr’s widely considered the frontrunner to head the country’s top telecom and media regulator.

If you’ve tracked Carr’s policies, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that one of his top goals will be to dismantle the FCC’s already shaky consumer protection efforts.

That means the death of net neutrality, the end of the agency’s inquiry into shitty broadband usage caps, the end of broadband consumer privacy, the end of the FCC’s efforts to stop broadband “redlining” (read: racism in fiber deployment), the end of any good faith efforts to help the poor afford broadband, and an end to efforts to stop Comcast from ripping you off with shitty fees.

Carr’s policies are basically AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast’s policies, dressed up as original thought.

Carr is one of these guys who thinks that if you let giant, unpopular telecom behemoths do whatever they want; miracles and innovation start magically sprouting from the sidewalk. You’ve seen repeatedly how that turns out for the public (be they Republican or Democrat): higher prices, slower speeds, shitty customer service, and a variety of annoying problems like privacy abuses.

As a telecom beat reporter of 25 years now, I can say with absolute certainty that anybody claiming Carr has the slightest interest in a competitive broadband market and consumer welfare is lying to you. I’m writing this down now so that nobody acts surprised when this stuff comes to pass.

Consumer Protection Is Now Basically Illegal

Given the Trump Supreme Court and 5th Circuit have already primed the pump on letting companies basically declare all corporate oversight and consumer protection illegal (I’m really not exaggerating); I don’t suspect the initial assault on consumer rights will take up much of Carr’s time. He should have the agency’s consumer protection efforts fairly well lobotomized by next summer.

In telecom, I suspect no shortage of time will be spent rewarding Elon Musk with Starlink unearned subsidies where ever possible, even if taxpayer money is better spent on more reliable and affordable options not managed by a conspiratorial bigot.

I also expect Carr will follow through with his plan to impose a big new tax on tech services (read: you) to even further subsidize his friends at AT&T and Comcast (you can read more about that here). I also suspect Carr will find creative ways to undermine the exploding and hugely popular community broadband movement, and he’ll certainly rubber stamp shitty mergers (like the Verizon Frontier deal) resulting in more telecom consolidation and higher prices and worse service for everyone.

It’s after that where things should get truly interesting in terms of FCC policy under Carr.

Carr you might recall wrote an entire chapter of Project 2025. There he makes it clear that he’s hoping to leverage whatever authority the FCC has left to harass tech and media companies that try to rein in Trump’s authoritarianism, whether that’s broadcast journalists critical of Trump, or tech companies doing the absolute bare minimum to stop racists and fascists from being hateful assholes on the internet.

Carr isn’t quite as unhinged as many “thought leaders” in the Trump delusion extended infotainment universe, so I’m not entirely sure he’ll go along with Trump’s lust for pulling the broadcast licenses of critical media outlets. But Carr has proven to be such a sniveling sycophant, it would be hard to guarantee he’ll show any real backbone here — which is worrying in and of itself. Indeed, a week ago he did say he supported pulling NBC’s license for putting Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live, even though NBC absolutely followed the “equal time” rule, giving Donald Trump free ad space the next day (and even as, in other contexts, Carr has been critical of rules like the “equal time” rule).

Again Carr’s primary, most immediate goal will be in doing whatever AT&T and Comcast want: namely turning the FCC into the consumer protection and policy equivalent of a decorative seasonal gourd. That means making it easier for giant, shitty telecom monopolies to rip you and your family off. Despite all the rhetoric about “Trump populism,” none of what Carr has planned is at all popular.

Keep in mind that despite all of Carr’s bootheel licking it’s entirely possible Trump’s team picks somebody even worse as head of the FCC. In which case, all bets are off.

The question for me then becomes (in telecom and elsewhere), will any of the folks who “voted for this” ever tether their coming pain (higher prices, worse service, more privacy and net neutrality violations) to their own choices? Or are Americans so saturated with propaganda, and U.S. journalism so profoundly broken, that the blame for the suffering to come is just endlessly shifted elsewhere.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, consumer protection, donald trump, fcc, high speed internet, redlining, telecom, usage caps
Companies: at&t, comcast, spacex, starlink, verizon

16 U.S. States Still Ban Community-Owned Broadband Networks Because AT&T and Comcast Told Them To

from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come dept

Thu, Nov 7th 2024 05:34am - Karl Bode

For years we’ve noted how U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That’s resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband.

Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, or AT&T could have responded to this organic trend by offering better, cheaper, faster service. But ultimately they found it far cheaper to undermine these efforts via regulatory capture, congressional lobbying, lawsuits, protectionist state laws, and misleading disinformation.

Currently sixteen states have laws — usually ghost written by regional telecom monopolies — restrict or outright ban community broadband. Some of these laws are outright bans on community broadband, basically letting Comcast or AT&T veto your local infrastructure voting rights. Others erect elaborate, cumbersome restrictions on the financing and expansion of such networks and pretend that’s not a ban.

The good news: The Institute For Local Self Reliance (where I study and write about broadband access) notes that these sixteen laws are a notable reduction from the 21 state laws we had in 2020. What caused the change? The pandemic home education and telecommuting boom highlighted the essential nature of broadband (or more accurately, the expensive, sluggish, terrible nature of monopoly options).

As a result, several states voted to roll back the efforts and take a more serious look at community owned and operated broadband networks:

“In 2021, Arkansas and Washington passed legislation significantly rolling back legislative barriers on publicly owned broadband networks. In 2023, Colorado rolled back a law that required communities to hold a referendum vote to opt out of a state ban on municipal broadband. That law was repealed after over 120 communities across the state overwhelmingly voted to opt out of the state preemption law, fueled no doubt by the success of the municipal networks in Estes Park, Fort Collins, and Loveland. In May of 2024, Minnesota followed suit, rolling back its preemptions laws.”

There are numerous funding and deployment models when it comes to community broadband. Some municipalities build open access fiber networks themselves (see: Utah’s UTOPIA), allowing for numerous competitors. Others are built off the back of city-owned electric utilities (see: Chattanooga’s EPB). Some are fiber cooperatives (see the success had in North Dakota). Some are public private partnerships.

Data routinely shows these networks provide faster, better, cheaper service than regional cable and phone giants. Staffed and backed by locals, they tend to be more in tune with the needs of locals. They’re extremely unlikely to engage in predatory pricing, privacy, or net neutrality violations. You’ll usually enjoy local customer service. They incentivize regional monopolies to actually try.

There’s $42.5 billion in infrastructure bill subsidies that should start reaching the states early next year. A lot of this money will land in the laps of the usual regional monopolies. But a lot of it is going to wind up in the hands of local community-owned networks, which is a dramatic policy shift from years past. As a result, companies like Charter, AT&T, and Comcast have ramped up the use of fake consumer groups built specifically to mislead locals.

Community broadband isn’t some magic panacea. Like any other business model, it requires competent planning, intelligent financing, and stellar leadership. But it should be the democratic choice of a community whether to pursue such options. Not the decision of a Comcast executive living half a world away.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, fiber, high speed internet, lobbying, municipal, protectionism, state laws, telecom

Net Neutrality Heads Back To Court; Corrupt Supreme Court Could Dismantle U.S. Broadband Consumer Protection

from the the-authority-to-do-nothing dept

Wed, Nov 6th 2024 05:25am - Karl Bode

Recent Supreme Court rulings have thrown most U.S. regulatory enforcement into operational and legal chaos. The dismantling of Chevron, with the Loper Bright ruling in particular, now dictates that regulators can’t implement new rules or reforms without the explicit approval of Congress.

Two problems: one, regulators ideally have very specific subject expertise Congress doesn’t have (think about Ted Cruz trying to craft new rules managing wireless spectrum). Two, Congress has been lobbied into corrupt dysfunction, ensuring these theoretical, better, clearer laws and reforms never actually arrive.

Corporations (and the various policy tendrils employed to parrot them) have dressed Chevron up as some noble rebalancing of institutional power. In reality they’ve just taken a hatchet to what’s left of U.S. corporate oversight. Corporate lawyers know they’ve effectively lobotomized Congress. Now they want to dismantle what’s left of federal regulatory oversight. When that’s done, they’ll take aim at state power.

It gets dressed up as some sort of sophisticated ethos, but the goal for corporations has always been the absolute unchecked accumulation of unlimited wealth, free of any government intervention, regardless of the market, labor, or human cost. A lot of ink gets spilled pretending otherwise.

It’s with that backdrop that ISPs and the FCC have started squaring off in court in the latest skirmish over net neutrality. You’ll recall the Republican-stocked 6th circuit put the FCC’s restored net neutrality rules on ice last August. Last week, ISPs and the FCC started having their arguments probed by a three court panel comprised of one Trump appointee and two George W Bush appointees.

Historically, precedent has suggested that the FCC has the authority to classify/reclassify ISPs as common carriers or enact/repeal net neutrality provided they do so within the confines of the Telecom Act and use basic, supporting data. As the EFF notes, Post Loper Bright, that’s all out the window, and the goal for industry is to be able to abuse their regional telecom monopoly power without government opposition:

“These companies would love to use their oligopoly power to charge users and websites additional fees for “premium” internet access, which they can create by artificially throttling some connections and prioritizing others.”

As usual, the telecom industry is claiming that the FCC is abusing its authority to restore net neutrality. You’re to ignore that the telecom industry routinely argues that absolutely any effort by the FCC to do absolutely anything is an abuse of power. If the Sixth Court doesn’t accept the industry’s argument, it heads to the Trump-stocked Supreme Court, where they’ll likely get a sympathetic ear.

All the coverage and analysis I see focuses a bit too myopically on net neutrality. To be clear the FCC isn’t just fighting for net neutrality, it’s fighting for the right to be able to engage in consumer protection at all under current law, whether that’s the policing of unfair usage caps, trying to end racial discrimination in broadband deployment, or trying to stop your cable company from ripping you off with shoddy fees.

Post Loper Bright, telecoms are going to argue that any consumer protection effort by the FCC is an abuse of power well outside of any interpretation of the Telecom Act, and with a court system stocked with Trumpists with an active disdain for precedent, they’re likely to win their arguments more often than not. That’s going to create legal chaos, chill federal willingness to protect users, and punt most broadband consumer protection to an inconsistent platter of state consumer protection efforts.

So far the courts have repeatedly ruled that if the federal government abdicates its responsibility to protect broadband consumers, states have the legal authority to fill the void on net neutrality (or anything else). But we’ll see how long those efforts hold up once an industry (that spends $320,000 every day on lobbying) shifts the entirety of its attention to dismantling state authority.

The story playing out with net neutrality isn’t restrained to telecom. Some variant of this is going to be playing out across every consumer protection effort across every industry and issue that touches your lives.

Because consumer protection is generally deemed as boring, and the “regulatory state” has been demonized as useless for a generation, I still don’t think the public, press, or policy folks have fully fleshed out what our new reality means for everything from labor rights to public safety.

But it’s going to be anything but boring when the real-world impact of Trump’s Supreme Court Loper Bright ruling starts having cascading and potentially fatal impacts across the country over the next few years, at which point a lot of people are going to suddenly be wondering how exactly we let it get to this point, and why people didn’t speak up earlier in a bid to stop it.

Filed Under: broadband, chevron deference, consumer protection, donald trump, fcc, high speed internet, loper bright, net neutrality, telecom

AT&T (Again) Caught Cheating Federal Subsidy Program For Poor People

from the very-on-brand dept

Tue, Nov 5th 2024 05:26am - Karl Bode

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a giant U.S. telecom monopoly has been ripping off a federal program designed to help the country’s low income residents. AT&T last week quietly struck a $2.3 million consent decree with the FCC for falsely inflating the number of people it was helping under a COVID-era program designed to make broadband more affordable for poor people.

During the pandemic, the government created the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program (EBB), which provided a $50 discount off the broadband bills of low-income Americans. AT&T used several different ways to falsely inflate the amount of users actually enrolled in the program to grab extra money it didn’t deserve. Then lied about it.

When contacted by Ars Technica in a bid for comment, AT&T spokespeople would only praise the company for participating in the program:

“When the federal government acted during the COVID-19 pandemic to stand up the Emergency Broadband Benefit program, and then the Affordable Connectivity Program, we quickly implemented both programs to provide more low-cost Internet options for our customers.”

In just the last decade, AT&T has been fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired; fined $10.4 million for ripping off a different program for low-income families; fined $105 million for helping “crammers” by intentionally making such bogus charges more difficult to see on customer bills; and fined $60 million for lying to customers about the definition of “unlimited” data.

There’s also employee allegations the company has been ripping off school subsidy programs for years; allegations I’ve yet to see meaningfully investigated. And earlier this year, AT&T was fined another $23 million after executives were caught bribing Illinois officials to get favorable broadband regulation in the state.

AT&T is one of several companies currently trying to get out of federal obligations attached to infrastructure bill subsides designed to aid poor Americans. And they’re at the forefront of Supreme Court backed efforts to permanently defang what’s left of U.S. regulatory independence and authority. I wonder why?

Filed Under: ACP, broadband, ebb, fcc, high speed internet, subsidies, telecom
Companies: at&t

Telecoms Bankroll More Misleading Attacks On Community Broadband Networks

from the manufactured-dissent dept

Mon, Nov 4th 2024 05:29am - Karl Bode

I’ve written for years about how U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That’s resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband.

They’re big fans of creating fake consumer groups that then attack community broadband networks under the pretense of being “locally concerned citizens,” which you might recall is something Charter recently got busted for in Maine.

They also enjoy funding various “think tanks” who don’t “think” about policy issues, so much as they parrot false industry attacks. Usually under the pretense of being objective, concerned locals simply looking out for the public welfare.

Like in Idaho and Massachusetts, where telecom-financed groups like the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) and the Mountain States Policy Center have been peppering local news outlets with misleading local editorials that lie to locals, and portray community broadband as some sort of inherent government boondoggle. Like this editorial by the TPA in the Cape Cod area:

“The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) has reported on the dangers of GONs to taxpayers and electric ratepayers through such reports as “GON with the Wind: The Failed Promise of Government Owned Networks.” GONs frequently fail to achieve their coverage goals and taxpayers of the municipalities where they exist often end up paying for the revenue shortfall themselves.”

So there are countless different types of community broadband networks, including municipal networks, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, or even public-private partnerships. There’s also a broad variety of ways to fund them, many of which never touch a dime of taxpayer money. A lot of these networks have been helped greatly by the billions in subsidies included in 2021 COVID relief and infrastructure bills.

Telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast are concerned that some of the $42.5 billion in looming infrastructure bill broadband subsidies might (gasp) fund competition in their existing, stagnant markets. Or worse (double gasp) that the money might me used to help fund a broadband network actually owned by local community members with a vested interest in actual locals (shiver).

So they’ve been priming the policy pump all over the country to ensure the lion’s share of money gets dropped into their back pocket, and vilify community broadband as a waste of taxpayer money wherever and however possible.

Popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn, who you might recall was booted from an FCC nomination after the telecom industry ran a successful smear campaign against her in the media, is now the Executive Director of an organization called the American Association For Public Broadband. Her org has been busy trying to counter the disinformation telecom-backed groups are pushing to the public.

Chief among them being that community broadband networks are inherent boondoggles (surely a surprise to hugely popular networks like Longmont Colorado’s Nextlight, Utah’s UTOPIA or Chattanooga’s EPB):

“The groups roll out outdated claims, insisting that public broadband networks are failures. Yet they ignore that the vast majority of community broadband networks are thriving, including two of the oldest and most successful public networks in Idaho Falls and Ammon Idaho.”

These community owned networks usually have broad, bipartisan support. And they routinely offer locals symmetrical gigabit fiber for as little as $70 a month, without usage caps, weird fees, long-term contracts, and other misleading crap. They tend to treat broadband as an essential utility and public good, with a priority on consumers. You can see why AT&T and Comcast wouldn’t like that.

One popular trick AT&T and Comcast like to employ is to fund these groups pretending they’re just super concerned about taxpayer waste. But you might notice their attacks only attack community broadband. They never take aim at the billions upon billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies giants like AT&T and Comcast receive in exchange for fiber upgrades that are routinely half delivered. Notes Sohn:

“They also argue that it’s unfair for so-called “private networks” to compete with “government-funded” networks. This is laughable. Every single one of the largest broadband providers has taken millions and in some cases, billions of state and federal dollars. And they are all champing at the bit for a piece of the $42.5 billion in BEAD funding that the states and territories will soon distribute.”

If you’re a local monopoly like AT&T, it’s pretty trivial to throw a few thousand dollars at some dodgy proxy organizations, think tanks, and consultants in order to create a sound wall of illusory “astroturfed” opposition to what’s actually a very popular idea.

But it’s a pretty tired playbook at this point. Regional telecom giants dismantle all meaningful competition via regulatory capture, take billions in subsidies for networks they don’t consistently upgrade, raise prices endlessly, and then fund covert attacks on anybody that might dare do things differently, whether that’s reformers at key regulatory agencies, or locals trying to build their own reliable fiber network.

None of this is to say that community broadband networks are some kind of magic panacea. Like any business plan, they’re highly dependent on smart budgeting and savvy local leadership. But they’ve proven time and time again that not only are they a useful way to upgrade long-neglected communities, they’re a lovely motivator for entrenched regional monopolies that simply stopped trying years earlier.

Filed Under: american association for public broadband, astroturf, broadband, community broadband, digital divide, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, telecom

Study: 76% Of U.S. Residents Want Government To Do Something About Soaring Broadband Prices

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

Fri, Nov 1st 2024 05:28am - Karl Bode

A new U.S. News And World Report survey of 2,500 Americans across the five most populous U.S. states (PA, TX, NY, CA, and FL) found that U.S. broadband prices continue to soar for most users. Most of the survey’s findings aren’t surprising; broadband access costs are reaching $100 for most users, and Americans continue to pay some of the highest rates for access in the developed world.

As usual the study doesn’t bother to actually explain why (lest industry get offended): regional monopolies, protected by regulatory capture and corruption, routinely carve out uncompetitive regional fiefdoms, from where they face little real pressure to compete on price, speeds, availability, or quality. This lack of competition also incentivizes bad behavior like privacy and net neutrality abuses.

One interesting part of the survey: 76 percent of Americans want the federal government to cap the cost of broadband access. Such “rate regulation” is routinely portrayed as the most extreme sort of draconian anti-free-market overreach by U.S. telecoms and libertarian types, though I can’t recall any point in the last thirty years where it’s been seriously considered by even the more regulation-enthused Democratic party.

“Rate regulation’s” primary function in U.S. telecom policy has been a telecom lobbyist and libertarian think tank bogeyman leveraged to fend off any competent consumer protection enforcement. For example, see how telecoms are using the threat of it to suggest that the FCC’s effort to crack down on harmful and pointless broadband usage caps is somehow “radical rate regulation.”

Once they were informed what it actually is, the survey also found that 86 percent of Americans think the government should restore the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provided a $30 discount off the broadband bills of low-income Americans.

The ACP, formalized by the 2021 infrastructure bill, was killed last April when House Republicans refused to continue funding it, leaving 22 million struggling Americans suddenly facing higher broadband bills. When most press outlets explained why the program was killed, they oddly avoided making it clear it was a Republican decision (again, you wouldn’t want to upset industry by explaining causation clearly).

Now there are multiple (and probably better) ways to fix America’s expensive broadband without restoring to price caps and rate regulation, which, to be clear, are difficult to define, implement, and enforce.

Policymakers could, for example, take direct aim at the roots of consolidated monopoly power by boosting antitrust enforcement, blocking pointless mergers, broadly supporting community owned broadband networks, not letting AT&T dictate the entirety of U.S. policy, and adequately funding federal consumer protection efforts. But most U.S. policymakers can’t even admit monopoly power is a problem, much less propose a solution.

Seriously: find me the last time an FCC official even publicly acknowledged that consolidated power at the hands of AT&T and Comcast harms competition and consumer welfare. Instead, the “solutions” usually involve regulatory performances fixated on “transparency.” Such as the FCC’s new “nutrition labels” that help you clearly see you’re being ripped off, but do nothing about you actually being ripped off.

Republicans have spent the last 40 years crushing any and all consumer protection efforts and letting AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon dictate all state and federal policy, with the expected results. Democrats have spent most of that time saying all the right things about “bridging the digital divide,” yet repeatedly failing to fixate on the core source of the problem: corruption-coddled, consolidated monopoly power.

Democratic FCC regulators, worried about imperiling future political or industry think tank employment opportunities, absolutely adore politely nibbling around the fringes of the actual cause of shitty U.S. broadband. At some point I’d love to live to see an FCC that can even admit that corruption-coddled monopoly power is a serious problem, but I long ago stopped holding my breath.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, digital divide, high speed internet, monopoly, prices, regulatory capture, telecom

Your ISP Now Requires A Broadband ‘Nutrition Label’ To Clearly Show You You’re Being Ripped Off

from the transparently-terrible dept

Mon, Oct 28th 2024 05:29am - Karl Bode

After countless years pondering the idea, the FCC in 2022 announced that it would start politely asking the nation’s lumbering telecom monopolies to affix a sort of “nutrition label” on to broadband connections. The labels will clearly disclose the speed and latency (ping) of your connection, any hidden fees users will encounter, and whether the connection comes with usage caps or “overage fees.”

Initially just a voluntary measure, bigger ISPs had to start using the labels back in April. Smaller ISPs had to start using them as of October 10. In most instances they’re supposed to look something like this:

As far as regulatory efforts go, it’s not the worst idea. Transparency is lacking in broadband land, and U.S. broadband and cable companies have a 30+ year history of ripping off consumers with an absolute cavalcade of weird restrictions, fees, surcharges, and connection limitations.

Here’s the thing though: transparently knowing you’re being ripped off doesn’t necessarily stop you from being ripped off. A huge number of Americans live under a broadband monopoly or duopoly, meaning they have no other choice in broadband access. As such, Comcast or AT&T or Verizon can rip you off, and you have absolutely no alternative options that allow you to vote with your wallet.

That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if U.S. federal regulators had any interest in reining in regional telecom monopoly power, but they don’t. In fact, members of both parties are historically incapable of even admitting monopoly harm exists. Democrats are notably better at at least trying to do something, even if that something often winds up being decorative regulatory theater.

The other problem: with the help of a corrupt Supreme Court, telecoms and their Republican and libertarian besties are currently engaged in an effort to dismantle what’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection authority under the pretense this unleashes “free market innovation.” It, of course, doesn’t; regional monopolies like Comcast just double down on all of their worst impulses, unchecked.

If successful, even fairly basic efforts like this one won’t be spared, as the FCC won’t have the authority to enforce much of anything.

It’s all very demonstrative of a U.S. telecom industry that’s been broken by monopoly power, a lack of competition, and regulatory capture. As a result, even the most basic attempts at consumer protection are constantly undermined by folks who’ve dressed up greed as some elaborate and intellectual ethos.

Filed Under: broadband, consumers, fcc, fees, high speed internet, nutrition label, telecom, usage caps

After Bleeding TV Subscribers For Years, Cable Giants Now Losing Broadband Customers To Home 5G, Community-Owned Fiber

from the a-strange-little-phenomenon-known-as-competition dept

Tue, Oct 22nd 2024 05:23am - Karl Bode

For much of the last decade, cable giants like Comcast (Xfinity) and Charter (Spectrum) have been protected from TV “cord cutting” by one simple fact: they enjoyed a monopoly over broadband access across vast swaths of the U.S. That monopoly means that if a customer ditched traditional TV, Comcast or Charter could recoup any losses simply by charging captive customers even more for broadband.

But there are signs that’s changing too, and not for the better if you’re Comcast and Charter. Growing competition from stuff like 5G home connections and community broadband fiber builds (buoyed by a historic influx of infrastructure subsidies) means that cable companies are starting to see broadband customers head for the exits as well.

SNL Kagan and Bloomberg Intelligence predict the cable sector is poised to lose 480,000 broadband customers during the third quarter, which would be the worst quarterly decline for the sector in history:

“The risk to cable is unlikely to ease anytime soon,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Geetha Ranganathan wrote in an Oct. 10 note. Verizon Communications Inc., T-Mobile US Inc. and AT&T Inc. are expected to report they added more than 900,000 broadband customers in the third quarter, including wireless home service and fiber, according to according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg.”

This Reuters breakdown mostly focuses on the popularity of residential 5G connections, which wireless companies are selling at discounted rates to slurp up customers. The growth may not last; 5G connections are inherently going to be less reliable and more congested (especially in rural markets with less fiber backhaul) as more subscribers sign up.

The Reuters article completely forgets to mention that the infrastructure bill is poised to throw $42.5 billion in new subsidies at deploying fiber. And while a lot of that will go to cable giants for expansion, a lot of it is also going to be headed to municipal fiber builds, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, and other community-owned alternatives to “big cable.”

Once customers get a taste of affordable (usually around $70 a month) gigabit fiber with no sneaky usage caps, contracts, or hidden fees — they don’t tend to be eager to head back to Comcast. Such networks saw a big explosion during the COVID lockdowns, which painfully highlighted the shortcomings of slow, spotty, expensive, and capped broadband access.

That said, Comcast and Charter still enjoy a monopoly across huge swaths of the U.S., so they’re not likely to go extinct any time soon. And they broadly enjoy a well-lobbied congress and captured regulators, eager to protect them from competition and accountability. Still, it’s lovely to see them facing some kind of meaningful competition after decades of downright apathy.

Filed Under: 5g, cable, community broadband, competition, dsl, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, monopoly, wireless
Companies: at&t, charter, comcast, t-mobile, verizon

Trump FCC Pick Thinks Broadband Caps Are Great, Likens Them To Coffee Refills(?)

from the you-see-it's-just-like-a-nespresso-machine dept

Mon, Oct 21st 2024 05:30am - Karl Bode

As we recently noted, the FCC has announced that’s finally “taking a look at” broadband usage caps. We’ve noted for decades how such limits are completely artificial, technically unnecessary constructs that exist specifically so your local telecom monopoly can rip you off. They don’t “manage congestion,” they exist exclusively to price gouge captive broadband customers trapped in markets without competition.

It’s embarrassing (and a clear sign of corruption) that U.S. regulators haven’t taken aim earlier.

To be clear: the Biden FCC only says they’re going to take a look at the problem. That doesn’t mean the inquiry will result in any substantive action. That still was enough to set off the FCC’s two Trump-approved Republican commissioners, Brendan (TikTok is the Devil) Carr, and Nathan Simington.

Simington’s complaint about the FCC’s inquiry into broadband caps is particularly entertaining, because he tries to trot out coffee shops as a weird metaphor to explain why government should let monopolies rip customers off, and it just makes no coherent sense:

“Suppose we were a different FCC, the Federal Coffee Commission, and rather than regulating the price of coffee (which we have vowed not to do), we instead implement a regulation whereby consumers are entitled to free refills on their coffees. What effects might follow? Well, I predict three things could happen: either cafés stop serving small coffees, or cafés charge a lot more for small coffees, or cafés charge a little more for all coffees.”

Just…no. Broadband is not coffee. The telecom industry is not, you’ll be surprised to learn, remotely like coffee retail operations. Bandwidth capacity doesn’t function like coffee beans, and this weird comparison only goes to illustrate why some folks thought that Trump’s appointment to the FCC, a guy with no telecom experience, might have been a poor choice as it pertains to the public interest.

We’ve talked with telecom CEOs like Dane Jasper who’ve made it clear that broadband usage caps are about leveraging monopoly power to exploit captive customers. Worse, these artificial limits and surcharges give telecom monopolies additional power to prioritize their own services, harming internet services competition. It’s the entire reason the whole net neutrality fight took root.

Broadband caps exist specifically so regional monopolies can charge captive customers (who already overpay for service due to regulatory capture and market failure) even more money for absolutely no technical reason. That’s not my opinion. Comcast’s own leaked documents say this.

If there’s a stupid metaphor at play, it would be as if a coffee chain implemented a coffee lid on top of its cups that only let you take sips of coffee you already probably overpaid for at allotted intervals if you paid extra per sip. Usage caps are stupid. This metaphor is stupid. Regulatory capture is stupid.

What are Simington and Carr actually upset about? They’re concerned that if the FCC outlaws usage caps, it will then just be a hop, skip, and a jump toward “rate regulation,” which among telecom executives (and the politicians and think tanks paid to love them) is the worst horror imaginable.

But a layer beneath that is the real worry: that the FCC might take aim at concentrated monopoly power and prevent companies like AT&T and Comcast from extracting monopoly rents on captive customers. Either by directly limiting how much these monopolies can charge, stopping pointless mergers, or by driving new competition to market. Make no mistake: Carr and Simington represent the interests of the biggest telecoms here, not the actual public or broader market interests. It’s not really subtle.

The thing is: it’s a baseless worry. I’d be surprised if the Biden FCC actually ends with a successful ban on usage caps. To be clear, the Democratic FCC is far better on consumer broadband issues than Republicans. But they’re still too afraid to even acknowledge that monopoly exists or causes harm in public-facing statements, much less propose any solutions that get to the heart of the matter.

There’s many reasons why. One, the obvious: telecoms spend an estimated $320,000 every single day lobbying the government for favorable policy. That’s a lopsided battle even before you get to the policy drafting table. Two, companies like AT&T and Comcast are bone-grafted to our domestic surveillance apparatus, making real accountability for predatory behavior extremely hard to come by.

The idea that the Biden FCC is going to suddenly engage in rampant “rate regulation” is a scare-mongering fiction. It keeps libertarians up late in their soggy bedclothes, but it’s not real. Here in the real world, we’re looking at a very real possibility that a corrupt Supreme Court just effectively made federal broadband consumer protection all but illegal. Any effort to ban caps will be buried in lawsuits.

It’s always this way in U.S. telecom. Predatory, government-coddled monopolies dominate most communities nationwide, resulting in high prices, spotty access, slow speeds and annoying restrictions. And pretty much any effort to do anything about it is portrayed as some kind of radical over-reach by regulators, even if the action in question (like banning harmful usage caps) is common sense and would have happened twenty years earlier in a functioning and competently regulated democracy.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, broadband caps, caps, fcc, high speed internet, nathan simington, telecom