Experts Fear Biden Broadband Plan Won't Fix The Real Problem: Monopolization

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

We've already noted how the Biden broadband plan is good, but arguably vague. As in, the outline proclaims that the government will boost competition and lower prices, but it doesn't actually get at all specific about how it actually hopes to do that. There are some promising aspects, like a pledge to embrace the growing wave of grass roots community broadband efforts popping up around the country, but again, it's not clear how that's going to happen. For example there are 17 state laws (usually written by telecom lobbyists) prohibiting such efforts, and federal efforts to shoot down those protectionists laws haven't gone well.

The original Biden broadband plan promised to take $100 billion (from a total of $2.3 trillion in infrastructure funding) to “revitalize America’s digital infrastructure" and "bring affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband to every American." But experts like Victor Pickard and David Elliot Berman at the University of Pennsylvania argue that the plan likely doesn't really go far enough. In part because it doesn't really strike at the heart of the issue. Namely, regional telecom monopolization:

"it remains to be seen how the government will confront the broadband industry’s entrenched market power. Behemoths like Comcast and Verizon exert immense control over the Internet’s last-mile infrastructure. During the pandemic, these corporations have further tightened their grip, forcing hard-hit communities to plead with these giants for a modicum of reprieve from their exorbitant monthly subscription fees. As a recent damning Free Press report shows, these ISPs are enjoying record profits as they increase prices to their customers and reduce investments in their infrastructure. For instance, in Philadelphia—home to Comcast’s global headquarters—students living in low-income neighborhoods often lack the high-speed Internet connection they need to learn remotely. Meanwhile, Comcast’s profits are soaring."

There's no shortage of organizations and experts arguing that publicly-owned broadband is a major part of any broadband solution, and whereas past administrations demonized such concepts to a comical degree, the Biden team at least recognizes the importance of the concept. Still, while some 750 towns and cities have explored some variant of community owned broadband out of frustration with market failure, federal-level publicly-owned broadband as a concept remains a political non-starter in the US, and lobbyists are working hard to ensure any funding doesn't go to piecemeal community-based efforts either.

The primary solution for broadband gaps in the US is to throw a parade of subsidies at the problem. But such efforts don't help if that money doesn't wind up where it needs to go. And it often doesn't wind up where it needs to go thanks to intentionally terrible maps and a broken subsidization process (fixes for both seeming perpetually around the next corner). Such problems persist thanks to the rampant corruption of state and federal government officials. So if you don't fix the corruption and the monopolization, you don't fix the underlying causes of US telecom dysfunction.

For Pickard and Berman the answer, in part, lies in increasingly treating broadband like an essential public (and publicly owned) resource on a much broader scale, an argument the pandemic added a lot of fuel to:

"Public ownership and governance of the Internet—the development of which was funded by the public —is essential as we look at the Biden plan and beyond. From ordinary people posting instructional cooking videos on YouTube to volunteers updating Wikipedia entries, our collective labor is what makes the Internet valuable. The Internet is our commonwealth, not the plaything of Comcast and Verizon. It’s a public good that yields tremendous positive externalities to all of society. Yet time and again, corporate ISPs have proven to be poor stewards of this public good."

Of course getting from here to there is a pretty steep uphill climb. But even less aggressive options, like Biden's $100 billion broadband plan, is having trouble making it through the lobbying gauntlet. The plan is already slowly shrinking in scope in a bid to appease to politicians in thrall to telecom monopolies (read: a majority of Congress, and the near-entirety of the GOP). And for all of its talk about the essential nature of broadband during the pandemic, the Biden team still hasn't even gotten around to fully staffing the FCC yet, much less restoring any of the consumer protection authority stripped away by the Trump administration.

Fixing US broadband is going to require some extremely bold decision making that will almost certainly piss off AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and other entrenched regional monopolies. And despite some promising rhetoric, it remains utterly unclear if anybody in DC actually has the backbone required to do so.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband plan, competition, monopolization