GOP Holds Show Hearing To Complain About Providing Affordable Broadband To Poor People
Over the next six months, states are poised to receive more than $42.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies to help fund broadband rollouts around the country. A lot of this money is getting dumped into the laps of big telecom monopolies with a lousy track record of follow through. But a lot of it is also going to transformative efforts by cooperatives, municipalities, and community-owned networks.
Republicans voted against COVID relief legislation (ARPA) and the infrastructure bill (IIJA), but they still like taking credit for both bills’ broadband funding efforts with local constituents (who’s going to correct locals’ perceptions, Sinclair broadcasting?).
At the same time, Republicans are holding a series of hearings because they’re very upset about a small component of the infrastructure bill’s BEAD (Broadband Equity And Deployment) program: namely that it (gasp!) requires ISPs to try and provide a basic, affordable broadband tier for low-income Americans.
Regional telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast are always worried that any government effort to force them to actually try or compete on price could snowball into more such efforts to fix our broken telecom markets (it never does due to widespread corruption, but this is their persistent worry).
So they’ve convinced Republican House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chair Bob Latta to hold a series of silly hearings this week that will focus on attacking the low-income provision of the infrastructure bill.
The first such hearing is slated for this week, and the witness list doesn’t include anybody from the Biden Administration. Its underlying claim will be that requiring that states ensure poor people can afford the broadband access (they’re funding with their own taxpayer dollars) is akin to “rate regulation”:
“The [Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021] prohibits the NTIA from regulating the rates charged for broadband service. At the same time, NTIA requires states receiving BEAD funds to define a low-cost broadband service option. NTIA is responsible for reviewing and approving these low-cost options and has used this requirement as a way to regulate rates,” the staff memo said. “The Committee considers these rate regulated approvals to be a violation of the IIJA’s rate regulation prohibition.”
Telecoms have always vehemently opposed any effort to address the high prices and spotty access caused by two major things: unchecked telecom consolidation and monopolization, and the corruption that protects it. It doesn’t matter that our regulators are generally too cowed to actually do that; any effort to address runaway costs is portrayed as radical extremism, and “rate regulation” is always thrown around as this menacing bogeyman that never actually comes to town in any real way.
The law in question, IIJA, delegates fund management to the states, which should start receiving money this fall. It also requires that providers that take taxpayer money provide at least one “low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers.” But the law also says the NTIA may not “regulate the rates charged for broadband service.” At a hearing last May, NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson put it this way:
“The statute requires that there be a low-cost service option. We do not believe the states are regulating rates here. We believe that this is a condition to get a federal grant. Nobody’s requiring a service provider to follow these rates, people do not have to participate in the program.”
AT&T and friends want to hoover up billions in taxpayer dollars with no meaningful conditions on how those funds are utilized. So Republicans are poised to put on a show this week (with the press’ help, I’m sure) about how unfair it is that AT&T and Comcast have to offer a $20, 25 Mbps service tier (which costs them virtually nothing to provide) to families that qualify for low-income lunch programs.
I suspect that whether Republicans succeed or not at stripping away the low-cost provisions (which were never going to be enforced with any zeal anyway), you can absolutely be certain they’ll take singular credit for the bill’s broadband deployments, despite fighting the program every step of the way.