Karl Bode

It’s unlikely that Elon Musk’s Starlink, a next-generation satellite broadband service, is the silver bullet for the country’s broadband access woes.

The Biden administration’s broadband plan has been steadily scaled back by “bipartisan compromise” and telecommunications lobbying. While Congress is finalizing a $65 billion version that contains some excellent improvements, experts say it falls well short of fixing the real problem: broadband monopolization and the high prices that result. Roughly two thousand companies and organizations have been lobbying Congress to impact the infrastructure proposal, telecommunications giants among them.

To sell regulators on their $26 billion mega merger, T-Mobile and Sprint executives told anyone who’d listen that the deal would provide near-miraculous benefits. But economists warned that US telecom merger promises are historically meaningless, and the reduction in overall competitors would — sooner or later — result in higher prices and job cuts.

In May, the government began offering Americans struggling during the pandemic a $50 discount off of their broadband bill. But some US broadband providers are already exploiting the program to drive consumers to even more expensive broadband plans. Verizon, for example, was forcing customers to sign up for more expensive plans if they wanted the benefit. Charter, which sells broadband under the Spectrum brand, has been forcing eligible customers to opt in to full-price plans at sign up.

AT&T announced it would be spinning off its TV business — including DirecTV, AT&T TV, and U-verse — in a deal it claimed would greatly benefit the company’s customers, employees, and shareholders. The deal provides AT&T with a $7.8 billion cash infusion to pay down debt and recent wireless spectrum purchases, and a 70 percent stake in the “new” DirecTV.

His trademark grin. The giant, oversized coffee mug. The time he ignored the public, killed net neutrality at the request of telecom lobbyists, then gleefully danced with a pizzagater thinking it made him look good.

We've noted repeatedly that despite a lot of breathless pearl clutching from US leaders and regulators about the "digital divide," the US doesn't actually know where broadband is (or isn't) available. Despite repeated complaints (often by FCC Commissioners themselves), the FCC just keeps doubling down on shoddy data to justify its complete and total fealty to telecom giants. The agency's latest notice of inquiry (part of its Congressional duty to report on the state of broadband once a year) even acknowledges the agency's data is bad...

Recently, 11 local broadcasters were caught airing “news” segments that were actually advertisements praising Amazon’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Experts say the ads—which featured an Amazon public relations representative pretending to be a reporter—not only violated the law, but are a shining example of how media consolidation is slowly destroying quality local journalism. The ads were part of an Amazon press release lauding the company for its “innovation” during the COVID-19 crisis.

For years, US broadband providers have taken advantage of a lack of US competition by imposing arbitrary and expensive broadband usage caps and "overage fees." With the country facing a massive surge in videoconferencing and home learning thanks to the coronavirus epidemic, experts say it’s time for broadband providers to suspend these costly, unnecessary restrictions. Thanks to limited competition, affordable broadband is just out of reach for many US residents.

On Feb 28 the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve a new order paving the way for the expanded use of “white space broadband,” a promising technology that uses the spectrum freed from the shift to digital television to beam broadband into traditionally harder to reach rural areas. In 2017, Microsoft announced an ambitious plan to bring the technology to more than 2 million rural Americans across a dozen states by July 2022.