American Prospect

Sold to voters as a way to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse,” a more honest assessment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is that it’s just a Big Brazen Bid to shred the social safety net. Naturally, the looming cuts to Medicaid and what they will mean for rural hospitals in particular have received the most press.

The Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law devotes $65 billion to a moon shot mission, involving all 50 states and U.S. territories, to bridge the digital divide once and for all.

Nearly two years have come and gone without a fifth commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, the agency tasked to regulate the corporate behemoths that control how Americans gather, receive, and transmit information. Almost a year into President Biden’s first term, the White House nominated Gigi Sohn [Senior Fellow and Public Advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society], a public-interest advocate who served as a top counselor to Obama FCC chair Tom Wheeler.

Most Republicans and many Democrats have framed broadband much like Ronald Reagan would: Get government out of the way, remove regulations, and let too-big-to-fail incumbent providers bridge the digital divide. A favorite target is public rights-of-way—every street plus about ten feet of land on each side where utility poles or underground utility lines are located, and where internet service providers attach or bury lines and equipment that transmit internet data.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is the only Senate Democrat not co-sponsoring the Save the Internet Act, a bill to restore net neutrality rules that were enacted by the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama administration and reversed in 2017 by President Trump’s FCC Chair, former Verizon attorney Ajit Pai. Instead, Sen Sinema has formed a working group with Sen.

It’s likely that a robust antitrust enforcement regime, in tandem with a suite of economic policies could create a market more amenable to sustaining journalism. But in the absence of that, and the uncertainty as to whether the market is fundamentally able to provide the necessary journalistic coverage to inform and serve a functioning democracy and civic life, it’s worth considering what no Democrat has dared advocate for 50-some years: a renewed and robust public investment in media. Yet the fate of (public) media has gotten surprisingly little attention in the 2020 cycle.