AT&T Appears Committed To Being Comically Hypocritical On Section 230

from the not-helping dept

Telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T have spent the last three or four years pushing (quite successfully) for massive deregulation of their own monopolies, while pushing for significant new regulation of the Silicon Valley giants, whose ad revenues they've coveted for decades. As such, it wasn't surprising to see AT&T come out with an incredibly dumb blog post last August throwing its full support behind Trump's legally dubious and hugely problematic executive order targeting social media giants and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law integral to protecting speech online.

In it AT&T, a company that just got done having a ten year long toddler moment about how the FCC's attempt to apply some fairly modest oversight of telecom giants was "government run amok," pivots to support having the FCC regulate social media -- despite having no authority to actually do so. Again, AT&T isn't operating in good faith here; the company is simply looking to make life more difficult for Silicon Valley competitors whose ad revenues the telecom giant has always had a weird obsession with. Mike did a an excellent post breaking down the particulars of AT&T's inconsistent arguments.

Granted, AT&T's dodgy arguments have been (not at all coincidentally) perfectly mirrored by the painfully inconsistent arguments of FCC Commissioners like Brendan Carr, who spent the entirety of of the Trump administration acting as an AT&T rubber stamp in human form. Not long ago, Carr tried to use AT&T's bad faith commentary to suggest there was some "growing consensus" that 230 needs to be "reformed" (read: dismantled for no coherent reason):

But there was no consensus. In large part because most sensible people seem to realize the assault on 230 is being driven by a Trumpist GOP whose only real goal is to punish social media platforms for finally taking disinformation and hate speech (cornerstones of the Trump movement) seriously. With Trump's election loss and a shift in makeup at the FCC, the plan to have Trump BFFs Carr and Simington attack Section 230 at the FCC is dead as a doornail. AT&T, however, continued to offer up its two cents at this week's AT&T Policy forum, with CEO John Stankey often stumbling into what felt like satire:

Yes that's AT&T, a company that routinely and repeatedly uses any dirty tactic it can find to disadvantage competitors, giving advice on how to avoid having companies disadvantage competitors. It should be fairly clear that AT&T's motivations in supporting the attack on Section 230 aren't being conducted in good faith. Especially after AT&T got caught using astroturf to try and generate bogus "support" for the effort. Again, what AT&T wants is the Congressional focus off of its broadband monopoly, and on competitors whose video ad revenues it wants to elbow in on. By any measure, it's been a smashing success.

Granted Section 230 wasn't the only subject tackled in bad faith at AT&T's latest policy forum. The company, literally the week after it saw nationwide press attention because a 90 year old had to take out an $10,000 Wall Street Journal ad just to get his shitty AT&T DSL line upgraded, also threw out some platitudes about how its broadband ideologies are dedicated to the "social good":

That's probably going to be a surprise to the countless marginalized communities that have been complaining for years about how AT&T refuses to upgrade low-income and minority communities (aka "redlining") to fiber. AT&T's love of "social good" is also likely a surprise to California regulators, who just this week found the company has a 10 year history of neglecting its infrastructure while increasingly imposing ever skyward monopolistic rates.

There's a lot of things AT&T could chime in on that it has ample expertise in. How to cozy up to law enforcement and intelligence agencies to dodge anything resembling accountability, for example. Or perhaps how to engage in sleazy astorturfing and the use of fake and dead people to generate bogus support for bad policy. Or perhaps some nice insight on how to crush competition, monopolize a US business sector, then lobby state and federal lawmakers into pretending that's not happening? Or hey, maybe a panel on how to ghost write shitty, terrible state-level legislation?

But when it comes like stuff like healthy competition, level playing fields, integral laws like 230, or much of anything else, taking policy advice from AT&T is like turning to Jeffrey Dahmer for lessons in dinnertime etiquette.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, john stankey, section 230
Companies: at&t

Another Report Shows US Consumers Don't Get The Broadband Speeds They Pay For

from the false-advertising dept

Yet another report has shown that US consumers aren't getting the broadband speeds they're paying for.

Researchers from broadband deal portal AllConnect dug through FCC data on broadband speeds and found that about 45 million Americans aren't getting the speeds that broadband providers are advertising. Fiber and cable broadband providers appeared to have the toughest time providing the speeds they advertise, with those subscribers getting around 55% of the speeds they were promised. Satellite and DSL providers generally offer crappy speeds, but at least, the report found, those speeds were delivered more consistently.

The firm noted that consumers just aren't getting accurate data on what speed is available, or how much speed they'll get. Something that's kind of important during a pandemic in which broadband is key to education, employment, health care, human connection, and opportunity:

"Having dependable internet is crucial right now, and with so many options available, it is important to have information like this to help consumers make the right choice for their needs. Being able to compare various aspects of internet service like reliability and speed helps make those decisions a little easier,” Layton adds."

Granted this has been a problem for the better part of this decade. And it's another problem (much like patchy availability and high prices) federal regulators haven't done enough to seriously address. Speed data ISPs provide to the FCC is notoriously unreliable, and the FCC historically doesn't do enough to verify availability and speed claims. It only takes a few minutes perusing our $350 broadband availability map, which all but hallucinates competition and throughput, to realize there's a chasm between what the US government and industry claims exists, and what actually exists.

Every year, the FCC is mandated by Congress to release a report detailing the status of the U.S. broadband industry. If broadband isn't being deployed on a "timely basis," the agency is supposed to, you know, do something about that. But every year, sometimes regardless of party, the agency, swaddled in dodgy data, pretends this isn't a problem. Why? Because we've fused extremely politically powerful telecom monopolies to our government surveillance apparatus, and holding these companies accountable is bad for political careers.

Of course ISPs aren't just engaged in false advertising when it comes to speeds. They also routinely use a bevy of misleading fees and surcharges to covertly jack up their advertised rates post sale -- to the point where your advertised cable or broadband bill can be as much as 45% higher than advertised. And again, aside from the very occasional suggestion by regulators that ISPs could maybe do better or be more transparent, nobody much does anything about it. After all, who wants to risk losing Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Charter campaign contributions by doing the right thing?

Filed Under: bandwidth, broadband, promises, speeds, study, truth in advertising

Comcast Forced To Back Off Broadband Cap Expansion... Until Next Year

from the how-gracious-of-you dept

Last November, Comcast quietly announced that the company would be expanding its bullshit broadband caps into the Northeast, one of the last Comcast territories where the restrictions hadn't been imposed yet. Of course Comcast was utterly tone deaf to the fact there was a historic health and economic crisis going on, or how imposing unnecessary surcharges on consumers already struggling to make rent wasn't a great look. In some states, like Massachusetts, lawmakers stood up to the regional monopoly, going so far as to push a law that would have banned usage caps during the pandemic.

After gaining some bad press for the behavior, Comcast initially delayed the efforts a few months, hoping that would appease folks. When it didn't, Comcast last week announced that it would be suspending the caps until 2022. This, according to Comcast, was to give consumers "more time to become familiar" with the restrictions:

"The ISP’s reasoning for the delay, according to the announcement, is that the company realizes that the “data plan was new for [its] customers in the Northeast,” and it wanted to “provid[e] them with more time to become familiar with the new plan.” This isn’t a courtesy the company extended to other states when it expanded the data caps to them (apart from the one or two “free” overage months). But to be fair, there also wasn’t a global pandemic going on during those rollouts."

The problem, as we've noted repeatedly, is that these restrictions shouldn't exist in the first place. The other problem, the pause only applies to the Northeast; the majority of Comcast markets already face such arbitrary limits, and will see no reprieve, pandemic or no. As such, delaying them is more about managing PR blowback than making any serious concession. It's theater.

There's no technical reason for such restrictions to exist on a fixed line network in 2021. The restrictions don't manage network bandwidth, something that can already be done with existing hardware. Such restrictions aren't financially necessary either; Comcast's flat-rate broadband margins are significant, and any "extremely heavy users" can already be shoved toward business-class tiers. Caps only have two real purposes: (1) to impose covert price hikes on uncompetitive markets without changing your advertised rates, and (2) as an anticompetitive weapon in the streaming wars.

As such, it's not entirely clear what Comcast wants these users to "get familiar with." Familiar with getting ripped off by a massive telecom monopoly that not only faces no real competition, but fairly feckless federal regulatory oversight? 83 million Americans have only the choice of one ISP. Federal regulators could either work tirelessly to drive more fiber-based competition to market (and no, neither 5G nor next-gen satellite are magic bullets), or they could step in to hold monopolies accountable in the absence of that competition. Here in the United States, we do neither. At least not consistently.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband cap, competition, data cap
Companies: comcast

FCC Pressured To Let Libraries Bridge Broadband Access During The Pandemic

from the little-things dept

An estimated 42 million Americans lack access to broadband, nearly double official FCC estimates. That's kind of a problem during a pandemic when your education, employment, family connection, healthcare and very survival depend on being tethered to the internet. And it's a particular problem for the tens of millions more Americans who can't afford access because we've happily allowed the US telecom sector to become monopolized by a handful of providers.

Last year, the nation's schools and libraries came to the Trump FCC with a novel idea to bridge the gap during the crisis: why not let libraries and schools temporarily provide broadband access to their communities? The FCC's E-Rate program already helps bridge the digital divide by financing a portion of school and library broadband access. But the rules don't clearly allow them to offer service beyond property lines. So, the American Library Association, which represents the country's 16,557 public libraries, wrote a letter (pdf) to the Ajit Pai FCC, asking if they could provide emergency access without the FCC punishing them for it.

And the Ajit Pai FCC simply... didn't answer their question. The FCC made it clear schools and libraries could leave on existing WiFi hotspots so folks on the wrong side of the digital divide could huddle together in school and library parking lots, but it simply ignored their request to be able to deliver more creative solutions, be it letting students have temporary access to mobile hotspots at home, or the creation of things like mobile WiFi-capable bookmobiles. The FCC Chair has the emergency authority to make this happen, Ajit Pai just... didn't want to.

With new leadership at the FCC, some lawmakers are pressuring the agency to revisit the idea so that kids don't have to huddle outside of Taco Bell just to attend class in the wealthiest country in the history of the planet:

The estimate is that around 12 million kids can't get online, though given the FCC's data collection and broadband mapping efforts tend more toward fantasy than reality, you can be fairly sure that number is notably higher. The catch: existing E-Rate funding would require a boost from Congress. The same Congress that thought nothing of giving AT&T billions in wasted subsidies, regulatory favors, and a $42 billion tax cut in exchange for absolutely nothing, but will hem and haw endlessly over whether we should finance emergency broadband access to poor kids during an unprecedented crisis.

Filed Under: ajit pai, broadband, e-rate, ed markey, fcc, libraries, pandemic

New Bill Tries To Ban Community Broadband. During A Pandemic.

from the you're-not-helping dept

Having covered telecom for twenty years, I've found there's a good shortcut to determining if somebody's really serious about fixing US broadband issues: can they admit that (1) monopolies exist, and (2) that this results in a lack of competition. The data is indisputable on this point. US broadband is heavily monopolized, and as a result is mediocre on nearly every metric that matters, whether we're talking about availability, speed, price, or customer service.

And yet, there's a parade of lawmakers, regulators (like former FCC boss Ajit Pai), think tankers and others who are, for either financial or rigid ideological reasons, still incapable of acknowledging that reality. As a result, they can't really fix the problem.

Take the lion's share of the GOP, for example. The party just spent four years gutting most meaningful oversight of America's broken broadband sector under the completely false claim that this would somehow result in monopolies like AT&T and Comcast doing a better job, expanding access, and boosting overall network investment. That simply never happened, and anybody claiming otherwise is lying to you.

Now, with Covid shining a bright light on the essential nature of broadband, the GOP has been forced to at least pretend they care about the problem. As a result, they've ushered forth a series of bills professing to "bridge the digital divide." Not too surprisingly, not a single bill acknowledges that private sector monopolization, limited competition, or high prices are even a problem.

Instead, the focus of all of the GOP's bills are focused exclusively on placing the blame entirely on the back of local governments. And while governments can sometimes be a pain in the ass to work with (not that working with Verizon, AT&T or Comcast is any real treat for governments either), the problem at this point isn't really local government. We've spent twenty years hamstringing local government authority and giving all the power to incumbent private players through a litany of policy. And the result has been: precisely the shitty, Comcast-dominated market we all know and love. "More of that," is not a serious solution.

Yes, there's the occasional example where cumbersome regulatory underbrush could still be cleared out, or common sense policies to speed up deployment could be enacted (like "dig once" legislation requiring fiber or conduit be run alongside any new highway bill). But again, the real problem isn't local government when it comes to US broadband. The real problem is regional monopolists so politically powerful that nobody on the state or federal level, often from either party, has the backbone to stand up to them. The result is a mish-mash of ass kissing dressed up as real policy.

In fact, one of the bills, Missouri Rep. Billy Long's Communities Over regulating Networks Need Economic Competition Today 6 Act, (pdf) actively tries to ban communities from building their own networks. As we've noted, such networks are an organic, grass roots reaction to obvious market failure, and they've proven to be invaluable during the pandemic. Not only do they deliver some of the fastest speeds in the country, they're a novel way to force lazy incumbent monopolists to try harder.

The Act title makes no coherent sense, as the bill would hinder, not encourage, competition. There are, of course, already twenty odd state laws, literally written by AT&T or Comcast, that hamstring community broadband. The industry has spent years trying to push for a federal ban on such local networks, for no other reason than they would harm AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, or Charter's bloated revenues.

Usually, these bans are piggybacked on the false claim that such community networks are an inevitable taxpayer boondoggle. Yet, not coincidentally, you'll never see these folks complain when AT&T is given a $42 billion tax cut in exchange for absolutely nothing. They similarly have nothing to say when billions are doled out to regional monopolies that repeatedly fail to deliver those networks. Not a peep.

One sad and frustrating aspect of America is how little it costs a company like AT&T to buy proposed legislation. For telecom giants, it's easier to give somebody like Billy Long $60,000 in PAC donations than to upgrade their networks in lower ROI areas (despite billions in tax breaks and subsidies to that end).

Real solutions for US broadband problems start with the understanding that monopolization and corruption are the reasons US broadband sucks. If you can't do that, you're not actually interested in solving the problem, you're engaged in performative fluff and nonsense. Either because you don't actively understand the market you're talking about, or you're working, indirectly or not, to help entrenched monopolists preserve the status quo.

Filed Under: billy long, broadband, community broadband, competition, municipal broadband

Chattanooga Built Its Own Broadband Network. Now It's The Top Ranked 'Work From Home' City In The US

from the build-it-and-they-will-come dept

PC Magazine recently unveiled their list of the best cities to work at home from. To make the list, the magazine examined affordable housing, the availability of fast gigabit broadband, reasonably priced internet connections in general, and the presence of employers with friendly work from home policies. At the top of the list? Chattanooga, Tennessee:

"Our number-one remote-working town in the US is Chattanooga, known as "Gig City," which rolled out a citywide fiber network in 2010. As we recounted in a 2018 story, Chattanooga has been pushing hard to attract tech workers and companies based on its affordable real estate, business-friendly administrations, and widely available broadband internet. In 2019, according to the Census, 6.8% of Hamilton County, TN residents worked from home, compared with 5.7% of all Americans."

One of the city's primary policies was to embrace community-run broadband, offering locals ultra-fast and affordable fiber via the local city's utility. It's an effort that incumbent broadband providers like Comcast first tried to strangle via state law, then attempted to destroy via lawsuit. Neither worked, and now Chattanooga residents have access to some of the fastest and most affordable broadband in the United States (the ISP won Consumer Reports' top ISP award in 2018), which has in turn helped drive business growth and employment in the city.

This is, it should be made clear, the kind of innovation and growth we've crippled by letting incumbent telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast not only carve out geographical monopolies, but also literally write state and federal telecom law. Both companies are predominately responsible for the 20 some odd state laws that hamstring (or ban outright) towns and cities looking to get into the broadband business. They've also spent the better part of twenty years funding a coalition of dollar-per-holler think tankers and academics who try (usually poorly) to smear such efforts.

This farmed opposition to community broadband is usually built on the flimsy premise that it's "unfair" for governments to compete with the private sector. Or that these efforts are inevitable "taxpayer boondoggles" (you're to ignore the billions we throw at giants like AT&T for absolutely nothing). Both arguments are intentionally false and misleading.

Cities like Chattanooga aren't getting into the costly business of building broadband networks because it's fun, they really want to spend the money, or they want to make Comcast and AT&T executives cry. They're doing it because of market failure. They're building their own networks because incumbent providers have heavily monopolized the sector, resulting in spotty upgrades, slow speeds, high prices, privacy violations, and dodgy customer service. And when cities have tried to buck this status quo, they're usually sued, misrepresented, bizarrely demonized, or legislatively hammered by state and federal governments in mindless thrall to monopolist campaign contributions.

That's not to say that community broadband is some mystical panacea that fixes every city's ills. Nor is it to suggest that every city has the financial and technical skills or resources to pull off a successful business plan. But community broadband is a useful tool in the toolbox, particularly when it comes to nudging government-pampered regional telecom monopolies out of their comfort zones. Community-owned ISPs also tend to be more responsive to the complaints of locals, because they are locals. It's ignorant and counterproductive to ban such options in a country where 42 million have no access to broadband and another 83 million only have the choice of one ISP. Yet it's still happening.

In Chattanooga, the city has been blocked from expanding its award-winning network because of a Comcast-backed law passed decades ago. A law that served no function outside of protecting entrenched monopoly revenues from disruption. Historically, efforts to get states to dismantle such dumb, protectionist restrictions have been glacial, but as the COVID pandemic illustrates how truly counterproductive such restrictions are in a world were broadband is utterly essential, you can feel awareness and consensus start to shift.

Filed Under: broadband, chattanooga, competition, fiber, gig city, municipal broadband, tennessee, work from hom

Texas Power, Phone Outages Again Highlight How Infrastructure Underinvestment Will Be Fatal Moving Forward

from the things-will-need-to-change,-quickly dept

If you hadn't noticed, the United States isn't really prepared for climate change. In part because corporations and disinformation mills have convinced countless Americans a destabilizing climate isn't actually happening. But also because we were already perpetually underinvesting in our core infrastructure before the symptoms of an unstable climate began to manifest. It's a massive problem that, as John Oliver highlighted six years ago, doesn't get the same attention as other pressing issues of the day. You know, like the latest influencer drama or mortal threat posed by TikTok.

Infrastructure policy is treated as annoying and boring... until a crisis hits and suddenly everybody cares. As millions of Texans found out this week when the state's energy infrastructure crumbled like a rotten old house under the weight of heating energy demands, leaving millions without power during a major cold snap. While outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News quickly tried to weaponize the crisis by blaming the renewable energy sector for the problems, deeper, more technical dives seem to indicate a lack of wind power output wasn't the underlying problem:

"While some early reports indicated that frozen wind turbines were causing significant shortfalls, 30GW is roughly equal to the entire state's wind capacity if every turbine is producing all the power it's rated for. Since wind in Texas generally tends to produce less during winter, there's no way that the grid operators would have planned for getting 30GW from wind generation; in fact, a chart at ERCOT indicates that wind is producing significantly more than forecast."

While it will obviously require a deeper investigation to flesh out the failure points, the real culprit appears to be entirely predictable and notably more banal. Namely, inconsistent regulatory oversight and a systemic underinvestment in essential infrastructure:

"Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the state’s deregulated power system, which doesn’t provide power generators with the returns needed to invest in maintaining and improving power plants.

“The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” said Hirs. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances."

Texas' issues are somewhat unique by nature of the way the Texas utility grid is structured. It's isolated in part because of the state's unwillingness to be regulated by the federal government. And while deregulation efforts in the late nineties and early aughts were supposed to fix the state's power monopoly problems, the policy wound up being a bit of a mixed bag:

"from 2002 to 2013, the average household in deregulated areas paid a total of about $4,800 more than residents of cities — like Austin and San Antonio — served by just one municipal utility, or those served by electric cooperatives, the analysis said."

Either way, these problems could have been avoided. In fact, a decade-old report pointed out precisely how to avoid them via weatherization, investment, and greater emergency natural gas reserves. Many Texas utilities talked about how they were doing these things, but didn't actually follow through, the 2011 report politely noted:

"Although generators and gas producers reported having winterization procedures and practices in place, responses were generally reactive in their approach to winterization and preparedness."

And of course because gutting state and federal regulatory oversight is treated as a panacea on many fronts, government didn't do enough to ensure these companies were disaster-proofing their network. Going this extra mile also requires spending money on preparing for climate change, something that's hard to do when you've got millions of folks running around -- especially in Ted Cruz' state of Texas -- who don't believe in climate change. In fact as the crisis has become more and more pronounced, many political leaders did the exact opposite of responsible leadership, by turning infrastructure investment and competent regulatory oversight into another idiotic political trolling opportunity:

In addition to the power outages, millions of Texans lost access to voice services. While old copper phone lines still work, cable voice or VOIP services quickly fell apart -- in part because we stopped mandating back up batteries in many internet-based phone services. Meanwhile, cell phones don't work if there's no power going to your local tower, and a lack of backup power options at those sites:

After Hurricane Katrina, in 2008, the FCC passed rules mandating that cellular towers be upgraded to include battery backups or generators capable of delivering at least 8 hours of backup power, if not 24 or more. But the US cellular industry, you know, the one whose rates are some of the highest in the developed world, cried like a petulant child about the requirement and sued to scuttle the rules.

Backed by the then Bush White House, cellular carriers told anybody who'd listen that the requirement would create "a huge economic and bureaucratic burden" for the industry. A better approach, the industry proclaimed, would be to let the industry self-regulate and adhere to entirely voluntary guidelines, leaving it with the "flexibility" to adapt to problems as the industry saw fit. It didn't work, and as a result outages were equally dire during Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Irma. And now again in Texas.

Infrastructure policy is often dismissed as droll wonkery and largely ignored... until a crisis. But these problems are made all the more frustrating because experts know what to do to prevent disruption and save lives... we just refuse to do it. Regardless, it's increasingly clear that letting powerful regional companies (be they in energy or telecom) self-regulate, while underinvesting all the while, is going to prove increasingly fatal as the climate increasingly destabilizes. The real question is: how many people are going to die before we actually learn something from the experience?

Filed Under: broadband, electricity, infrastructure, power, storms, texas, voip

State Laws Restricting Community Broadband Are Hurting US Communities During The Pandemic

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

We've talked for years about how telecom monopolies like Comcast and AT&T have ghost written laws in more than twenty states, banning or hamstringing towns and cities looking to build their own broadband networks. We've also noted with COVID clearly illustrating how broadband is essential for education, opportunity, employment, and healthcare, such restrictions are looking dumber than ever. Voters should have every right to make local infrastructure decisions for themselves, and if big ISPs and armchair free market policy wonks don't want that to happen, incumbent ISPs should provide faster, cheaper, better service.

As the pandemic continues, some cities have found ways around such restrictions -- by focusing more specifically on serving struggling, low income Americans. Texas is one such state that long ago passed municipal restrictions, courtesy of Dallas-based AT&T. AT&T doesn't want to upgrade or repair many of its DSL lines, but it also doesn't want communities upgrading or building networks either lest it become a larger trend (too late). As a result, in San Antonio, an amazing 38% of homes still don't have residential broadband.

The city's existing network can't really expand commercial service thanks to a law written by AT&T. But that law doesn't prohibit the city from servicing the poor by offering free service, something made possible by the recent CARES Act:

"This year in a number of cities, the pandemic has inspired some narrower versions of municipal broadband that get around these restrictions, focused on creating “affordable networks” that specifically target low-income households. Several of these were born out of the immediate need to bridge the homework gap.

“Pre-Covid there were at most a handful of networks being built to address affordability; now, we’ve started informally keeping a list and we’re over 30,” Siefer says. “The phenomena of setting up a network for that reason, in that way, is new."

In San Antonio's case, the city used $27 million in CARES Act funding to expand its existing network to 20,000 students across the city’s 50 most vulnerable neighborhoods. Entrenched monopolies (and the law makers, policy wonks, think tankers, and academics paid to love them) love to insist that such networks are an inevitable taxpayer boondoggle. Yet those same folks never make a solitary peep as we throw massive tax breaks at companies like AT&T for literally doing absolutely nothing. Or billions more at a rotating crop of companies for networks they, time and time and time again, fail to deliver.

The problem is that these community funding solutions are temporary, and lack funding to continue for more than a year or two, despite our very obvious broadband coverage gaps (42 million without service, 83 million locked under a monopoly). The other problem, of course, is that overpriced, slow, and spotty US broadband is the direct result of corruption and monopolization, problems we often refuse to even acknowledge, much less do anything about.

The solutions here aren't complicated, we just don't want to do them. We could easily ask voters if they want to discard the 20+ protectionist laws written by monopolies, letting local citizens decide local infrastructure issues themselves. We could beef up antitrust enforcement, and refuse to rubber stamp mindless telecom mergers that inevitably lead to more consolidation, less competition, and higher prices. We could embrace policies that upset incumbent monopolies by driving additional competition to market. We could reform campaign finance laws so AT&T and Comcast don't all but own countless state legislatures.

But we don't do that. Instead, we let monopolies write state and federal policy and laws with an eye on protecting the status quo. Laws that make disruption by smaller players expensive, cumbersome, and often impossible. We then throw billions of dollars at said monopolies for networks they routinely only half deploy. We rubber stamp harmful mergers and fail to hold monopolies accountable for much of anything. Once that's done, we then stand around with a dumb look on our collective faces wondering why US broadband is utterly mediocre in nearly every single metric that matters.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, covid, municipal broadband, pandemic, state's rights

16 States Ask The FCC What The Hell Is The Point Of The Verizon Tracfone Merger

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

Late last year, Verizon announced it would be acquiring Tracfone for around $6.2 billion. As we noted when the deal was first announced, it was yet another example of the "growth for growth's sake" mindset that has long infected US industry, particularly the telecom sector. There are really no real benefits to be gleaned from further consolidation in the space (especially in the wake of a T-Mobile Sprint merger that immediately resulted in layoffs and reduced US wireless competition by around 25%). Yet we really adore pretending otherwise as the government rubber stamps deal after deal.

In a letter (pdf) to the FCC, attorneys general from 16 states and the District of Columbia urged the agency to actually, you know, do its job and ask more questions about the deal. TracFone is among the biggest providers of Lifeline, the FCC program that provides services for about 1.7 million low-income subscribers in 43 states. Verizon is a lumbering media and telecom monopoly that views such programs (and the regulators that oversee them) as largely an irritant. Putting the TracFone contributions at risk during an historic economic and health crisis isn't particularly bright.

As such, the states are wondering if the FCC might be able to take a few moments to make sure the deal doesn't harm those relying on the program:

"The potential for Verizon to pursue additional profits by reducing the access and/or quality of Lifeline services could shut out millions of low-income Americans from adequate communications services,” they wrote. “Considering the fundamental role that cellular telephones play in accessing modern society and the modern economy, it is imperative that Lifeline services be protected and maintained if this transaction is approved."

The states also are quick to point out that maybe more consolidation in a telecom sector filled with problems caused by mindless consolidation might not be a great idea:

"Furthermore, a vertical merger of the leading Mobile Network Operator (MNO), and the leading Mobile Virtual Network Operator in an already concentrated mobile wireless market would see the last significant MVNO integrated into a national facilities-based provider. If this resulted in a decrease in the number or quality of Lifeline offerings, that could be contrary to the public interest and could have an adverse impact on consumers and the communications industry."

Notice, however, how even the minority of US states that could be bothered to care about these problems can't be bothered to recommend simply blocking a deal that will benefit nobody other than Verizon executives and shareholders. It's not even something that enters their minds.

Instead such mergers are eagerly rubber stamped, conditions are affixed that are usually largely feckless (or volunteered by the companies themselves), then regulators fail to meaningfully enforce them. Monopolies like Verizon then just double down on the same behavior they've engaged in for the better part of the last forty years. We then stand around with a dumb look on our collective faces wondering why Americans pay some of the highest prices in the world for some of the most mediocre telecom speeds and services in the developed world. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, mvno, wireless
Companies: tracfone, verizon