Public Interest Groups Urge Congress to Hold the FCC Accountable for America’s Degrading Telephone Network

Public Knowledge joined 23 other public interest, civil rights, tribal, and rural advocacy groups (including the Benton Institute) in a letter urging the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology to require Federal Communications Commission Chairman Pai to address public safety concerns about America’s increasingly fragile and unreliable communications network. 

As the blackouts caused by wildfires in California starkly demonstrated, even some of the wealthiest and well-connected places in the United States, such as Marin County, can lose access to voice and data services when we need them most. For millions of Americans still dependent on traditional copper-line service, years of lax oversight and deregulation have made even traditional voice service unreliable on a daily basis. This degradation of our telephone network disproportionately impacts rural communities, communities of color, the elderly, the poor, and Tribal lands, all of whom remain heavily reliant on traditional copper lines. But even in areas with more modern networks, the lack of any regulatory oversight and accountability has made our communications networks unreliable, such as the multi-state outage in December 2018 on CenturyLink that knocked out broadband and voice service for over 24 hours. 

Public Knowledge contends that since the Trump FCC has repeatedly repealed pre-existing safeguards and preempted states from exercising their own oversight, Congress must require Chairman Pai to address these concerns.