Digital Discrimination

The Federal Communications Commission recently opened a docket, at the prompting of federal legislation, that asks for examples of digital discrimination. The big cable companies and telecoms are all going to swear they don’t discriminate against anybody for any reason, and every argument they make will be pure bosh. If people decide to respond to this FCC docket, we’ll see more evidence of discrimination based on income. We might even get some smoking gun evidence that some of the discrimination comes from corporate bias based on race and other factors. But discrimination based on income levels is so baked into the ways that corporations act that I can’t imagine that anybody thinks this docket is going to uncover anything we don’t already know. I can’t imagine that this investigation is going to change anything. The FCC is not going to make big ISPs spend billions to clean up broadband networks in low-income neighborhoods. While Congress is throwing billions at trying to close the rural broadband gap, I think we all understand that anywhere that the big corporations take the rural grant funding that the infrastructure is not going to be maintained properly and that in twenty years we’ll be having this same conversation all over again. We know what is needed to fix this – which is regulation that forces ISPs to do the right thing. But I doubt we’ll ever have the political or regulatory will to force the big ISPs to act responsibly.