On September 24th, Christopher will help lead a discussion about how the principles of the Communications Act can apply to connectivity policy today. The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society will bring together leaders from industry, government, academia, and the public-interest community for A New Compact for Connectivity: Internet Infrastructure in the Public Interest. You can join us online or in-person in Washington, D.C.

If the character Edward Cullen of the ubiquitous Twilight saga taught us anything (aside from the fact that Robert Pattinson’s hair can do no wrong), it is that being a heretic can be cool. In the series, the Volturi—the Vampiric Council—operates as an authoritative government dictating the terms of vampire life: encouraging slaughter of humans, forbidding certain romance, and eventually seeking the destruction of Edward and Bella’s baby. Cullen went against these vampire norms to protect his loved ones, doing so in a way that made many hearts flutter. In the spirit of Edward’s heresy, this article examines three broadband policies considered by many to be heretical yet legitimate policy options that warrant credence and space. Like in Edward’s case, heresy is an important act of rebellion if the system is flawed. Specifically, I write of rate regulation, overbuilding, and technology neutrality.

According to the Miriam-Webster Dictionary, heresy is “dissent or deviation from a dominant theory, opinion, or practice.” Either supporting these ideas (rate regulation and overbuilding) or opposing them (technology neutrality) is considered heretical by those who adhere to a particularly egregious form of market-based decision-making, in which the provider knows best, and consumers’ voices are muted. The myths surrounding these heresies, whether in support of technology neutrality or in opposition to rate regulation and active overbuilding, stand in the way of meaningful, affordable connectivity for all (though they do ensure healthy returns on investment for providers). It’s not that we must always agree, but rather that any mention of these policy ideas stops discussion in its tracks. It’s time we reconsider their usefulness in securing universal service; it’s time to follow the path of Edward Cullen, great hair and all.  

The Option That Cannot Be Named: Rate Regulation

Broadband providers and free market adherents have worked hard to make any mention of rate regulation “taboo”—something my colleagues, Abby Simmerman and Sydney Forde, and I have equated to the Harry Potter novels where no one was supposed to mention the name of Lord Voldemort (“He Who Shall Not Be Named”). Rate regulation is generally defined as the setting of maximum rates broadband providers can charge consumers. It is generally considered taboo because it is seen as government overreach into the workings of the free market. Bucking the trend, New York State passed the Affordable Broadband Act, which requires providers with over 20,000 customers to offer a $15/month plan for 25 Mbps download service or $20/month for 200 Mbps download. California has also entered the fray by requiring that the newly merged Charter/Cox company offer a $ 20-a-month plan.

Providers may grasp their pearls at the mention of rate regulation, but policymakers have tried the market model and the subsidy model for too long, and it hasn’t worked. It’s time to create an internet ecosystem that Americans can afford.

Broadband is too expensive in the United States. New America's Open Technology Institute compared 760 plans across 28 cities in North America, Europe, and Asia and found the highest average monthly prices in the United States. Only three U.S. cities landed in the top half of that ranking when sorted by average monthly cost.

Industry has a ready answer, and it comes from inside New America's own data: standardize for advertised speed and population density, and American prices per megabit look ordinary—Washington (DC) and Zurich differ by a penny. But cost per megabit is a metric for network engineers. No household pays per megabit. They pay a bill once a month, at a price they did not negotiate, and on that number, American consumers pay more than nearly anyone in the developed world.

What is worse, in return for exorbitant sums, U.S. consumers only get the 9th-best speeds in the world according to Ookla. The median monthly cost of broadband is $78, a price too steep for millions of families to afford. Indeed, over 50 million households qualified for the Affordable Connectivity Program, and research teaches us that many low-income families can afford maybe $10 a month. Broadband researcher John Horrigan, in partnership with EveryoneOn, found that 49% of households making less than $50,000 a year are “subscription vulnerable,” “who find the internet very difficult to fit their monthly service fee into their budgets.” This gap must be bridged if we have any chance of achieving universal service.

Providers will say that their prices provide the necessary return on their infrastructure investment, and that any form of price controls stymies network investment. The same is true for power, water, and sewage companies. The difference is that the latter are regulated public utilities, while the former—internet service providers—are subject only to the machinations of the private market. This is anathema to universal service and anathema to an open internet.

Providers will not lower their prices without either carrots or sticks (a third option—sermons—seems totally lost on them). The carrot was the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which subsidized providers for their low-income customers until Congress let its funding run out on June 1, 2024. The stick was the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program's low-cost service option. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) requires every BEAD subgrantee to offer at least one low-cost broadband service option to eligible subscribers, and NTIA's original rules let each state define what "low-cost" meant. In June 2025, NTIA's BEAD Restructuring Policy Notice barred states from setting that price—explicitly or implicitly—and left providers to propose their own qualifying offers. Both carrot and stick are gone.

Look closely at what made the stick so easy to snap. The same statute that requires a low-cost option also provides that "[n]othing in this title may be construed to authorize the Assistant Secretary or the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to regulate the rates charged for broadband service." Congress asked for affordable service and, in the same statute, forbade the agency from defining what "affordable" means. This is the heresy operating in statutory text rather than in rhetoric: the goal is permitted; the tool is not.

A more radical option, which will happen only with a change in Congress, is to revive the net neutrality debate and congressionally mandate broadband providers fall under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (or some future equivalent). Title II is the section of the act that governs “telecommunications services,” notably common carriers like landline telephony. Companies, technologies, and services that fall under Title II are subject to greater Federal Communications Commission (FCC) oversight because they are crucial to the public interest. A bold FCC could use its legal authority under that title to impose rate regulations. “Bold” is the operative word here, as even when broadband fell under Title II, the FCC forbore its rate regulation authority. We need an FCC that takes its cue from Hogwarts’ Professor Minerva McGonagall, who in the movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, staunchly says to another professor who uttered “you-know-who”: “His name is Voldemort, Filius. You might as well use it, he’s going to try and kill you either way.” Let’s also remember that Section 706 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act recognizes “price cap regulation” as a tool in the FCC’s regulatory toolkit to ensure the reasonable and timely deployment of broadband. Tejas Narechania’s brilliant writing rings true here:

One Network to Rule Them All: Overbuilding

Like rate regulation, the term “overbuilding” has become a dog whistle for many incumbent broadband providers. As much as they fight to deny rate regulation, they fight equally hard to prohibit overbuilding, or more specifically, public funding of overbuilding.

According to the Newton’s Telecom Dictionary, “Overbuilding” refers to “the installation of a new network on top of and/or alongside of an existing network, without ripping-and-replacing the existing network.”

The idea of overbuilding raises the longstanding question of whether telecommunication networks are “natural monopolies,” built and controlled by a single provider. The argument is that, it some areas, competition does not make economic sense because of the cost in building the infrastructure. In practice, the argument is extended to mean that the government should not fund a network that builds over—“overbuilds”—a competing network. Some view it to be especially scandalous to fund two competing networks in the same market. So, if a broadband network exists in a community, regardless of its reliability, a prospective competitor cannot receive government assistance through a grant or loan. This has been notably irksome for municipal providers, which are often overbuilders offering faster speeds and lower prices, but are nevertheless banned in 16 states because their existence apparently “distorts” the free market.

We all know that rural broadband network deployment is expensive; the Fiber Broadband Association places the amount at upwards of $18/foot for underground fiber. That is a huge amount of capital outlay, and government assistance through programs like the Department of Agriculture’s ReConnect, the FCC’s Alternative Connect America Cost Model (A-CAM) and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), and BEAD, are essential for both initial capital expenditures and ongoing operating expenses, especially for small providers. While overbuilding seems gluttonous—why should a community get two funded providers? —denying overbuilding is also a de facto way to protect local monopolies. Local monopolies, in turn, have no incentive to keep pricing reasonable or network innovation current. Overbuilding brings connotations of government ineptitude and inefficiency rather than what happens most of the time: incumbent protection from necessary competition. A lack of competition, a lack of overbuilding, breeds high prices. Let’s put it another way, as John Sallet did for the Benton Institute a few years ago: “what some call ‘overbuilding’ should be called by a more familiar term: ‘competition.’ I think it’s worth quoting Sallet at length here to get his full argument:

Invoking “overbuilding” in policy debates is the same as invoking “rate regulation:” it stops honest, productive conversations from happening and limits the consideration of legitimate alternatives. The conversation stops because policymakers are so tethered to market practices that they cannot see when the market has failed. Like Jean Grey, in the X-Men, whose full mutant powers are kept in line by Professor X, the fear of overbuilding—the fear of competition—depresses the full potential of broadband competition. In developing a new digital communications law for the 21^st century, reforming universal service, or creating a national digital strategy, all options should be on the table to ensure digital equity and inclusion. 

Technology Neutrality: "Move it, move it! ... Slow down just a little bit! ... Make it close!"

On the surface, technology neutrality seems entirely reasonable: the government should not be in the habit of picking and choosing technological winners. In the case of broadband, the government should not fund one technology over another, as that would pigeonhole communities into a single technology when a better one could come along.

This would be great if broadband technologies were equal. Spoiler alert: broadband technologies are not equal. Like the character Dash in the movie The Incredibles being told to limit his superhuman speed on the track for the sake of an artificial party, the practice of technological neutrality is not fair to technologies like fiber, which are, quite frankly, just better than everything else.

Instead, technology neutrality is often invoked to protect incumbent providers or encourage problematic new entrants. Starting or replacing broadband networks is expensive, and so there is a natural inclination to want to protect these investments. Claiming technology neutrality gives providers a regulatory pathway to protect their investments, even if they are no longer meeting the needs of consumers. As I wrote about in my 2021 book Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity, the claim of technology neutrality has been used as a powerful rhetorical way to equalize all broadband technologies. But there are major differences between coaxial cable, fixed wireless, 5G to the home, satellite, and fiber. I love this line from a 2019 National Rural Electric Cooperative Association filing at the FCC: policymakers can be “technology neutral, but not technology blind.”

The FCC has long hidden behind technology neutrality to shield certain technologies from competition. Back in the days of the Connect America Fund Phase II (a nine-billion-dollar investment program in broadband infrastructure that ran from 2015-2020), technology neutrality was used to protect investments in DSL rather than force incumbents to switch to fiber. It is part and parcel of a larger philosophy of what I call “the politics of good enough,” where policymakers decide what is “good enough” broadband for rural, remote, and low-income households, which is often the cheapest and easiest rather than the best. Back in 2015, it was DSL. Today, technology neutrality was invoked by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in its BEAD restructuring notice to privilege the cheapest, over the best, broadband infrastructure. More recently, the FCC invoked technology neutrality to justify its decision to eliminate the 1000 Mbps/500 Mbps future-looking broadband goal: “A long-term goal… could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner,” the FCC writes. It claims that the setting of long-term goals exceeds its mandate within Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act. It failed to add that the term “technology neutrality” doesn’t appear either. The 1000/500 goal would invite innovation by all providers to match the capacity that fiber can deliver today.

Ultimately, adherence to technology neutrality allows the FCC to give itself a passing grade in its latest 706 Report on broadband deployment, noting that 99.7% of the population has access to broadband when satellite service is included. Researchers and public-interest advocates know that too many locations lack access to fast, reliable, and affordable internet service.

Conclusion

“I'm not technically breaking any of his rules. He did say I couldn’t take a step inside the door. I came in through the window.” In the second Twilight movie, New Moon, Edward rebels against the families keeping him and Bella apart. As these rules have failed Edward and Bella, broadband ‘solutions’ have failed to serve the needs of communities. The conventional ideas—the doors—are not working.

We are at a crossroads in broadband policy in the country. Agencies like the NTIA and FCC are quick to claim a near-victory in closing the digital divide, while others take a more holistic view of the problem, seeing it as one of infrastructure, affordability, and access, among many other factors.

As big as the digital divide is, its solutions must be that much bigger. This means exploring all alternatives with no stone unturned. In other words, it means we must embrace what was once heretical.

There is precedent here too. New York has its Affordable Broadband Act, Virginia and Louisiana both managed to prioritize fiber in their revised BEAD awards, and the push for municipal broadband options has been energized by the presence of the American Association for Public Broadband and the Community Broadband Action Network (full disclosure, I sit on the board of directors of CBAN).

Heresies challenge convention, and our conventional broadband policy ‘solutions’ need to be challenged. The three policy proposals I discussed in this article—rate regulation to address affordability, competition through overbuilding, and ensuring technology neutrality is not artificial parity—represent the exact alternatives policymakers should be discussing.

As the great pop culture intellectual George Bernard Shaw noted, “Every great new truth begins as blasphemy.” Heretics have a way of becoming heroes. Let’s embrace Team Edward and start thinking about coming in through the window.

Christopher Ali, PhD, is the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State University. He is the author of the book Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021) and the forthcoming book Where the Wires End: Stories from the Digital Divide (University of Chicago Press, 2027).​

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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