Press Struggles To Explain How The GOP Killed A Popular Broadband Discount Program, Driving Millions Of Poor Americans Off The Internet

The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, provided 23+ million low-income households a $30 broadband discount every month. But the roughly 60 million Americans benefiting from the program are now facing much higher broadband bills because key Republicans — who routinely dole out billions of dollars on far dumber fare — refused to fund a $4-$7 billion extension.

There were several last ditch efforts to fund the program but none were successful, thanks largely to Trump loyalist and current House Speaker Mike Johnson, who refused to let any of those funding efforts get close to a vote.

The GOP killed this popular program. Yet in two different stories this week, both CNET and the Associated Press fail to clearly communicate that to readers. At CNET, the program simply “ran out of money”:

In May, the $14.2 billion program officially ran out of money, leaving Jackson and 23 million households like hers with internet bills that were $30 to $75 higher than the month before.

Over at the Associated Press, the program vaguely died because “Congress” didn’t fund it:

The Affordable Connectivity Program, part of a broader effort pushed by the administration to bring affordable internet to every home and business in the country, was not renewed by Congress and ran out of funding earlier this year.

The GOP killed this program. The GOP alone. The cuts heavily harm the GOP’s own constituents. Nearly half of the folks on the ACP program rolls were military families. Countless ACP participants live in Southern states where broadband access is spotty and expensive thanks to the GOP’s own policies.

Republicans killed a popular program heavily used by Republicans and only made necessary in the first place due to failed Republican telecom policies. They killed it because they didn’t want Democrats and Biden to enjoy credit for a popular program during an election season.

But neither outlet wants to make the GOP’s fault clear to readers lest they somehow offend Republican readers, sources, event sponsors, or advertisers. It’s part of a general fecklessness that has expanded across the mainstream ad-based U.S. press, and it results in feckless coverage where the GOP never has to truly own its broadly unpopular policy decisions.

The GOP insists they opposed the program because it was wasteful. But the same party has routinely overseen disastrous subsidy programs (like the FCC’s Rural Deployment Opportunity Fund) that set large piles of money on fire due to foundational incompetence. And it’s the same party that routinely slathers big telecoms with tax cuts (AT&T got an estimated $42 billion tax break from Trump for doing nothing).

U.S. broadband is so expensive in the first place because the GOP broadly supports and encourages widespread telecom monopolization at the hands of giants like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. And broadly supports the widespread defanging and defunding of state and federal oversight of telecoms. And rubber stamps endless consolidating mergers, causing widespread layoffs and reduced competition.

The one-two punch of muted competition and oversight ends badly for everyone, yet it’s context that neither outlet thought it was important for readers to understand when talking about expensive U.S. broadband. While it’s nice the two outlets deemed the story worthy of covering, they’re not really properly attributing blame for why the program died or why it was needed in the first place.

You wouldn’t need the ACP if the GOP hadn’t spent the last thirty years opposing every effort to drive competition into highly monopolized markets, whether at the hands of smaller upstarts or community owned broadband networks (which, if you forgot, the GOP tried to ban during a health emergency).

States and municipalities are now scrambling to find stopgap solutions so that millions of low income Americans don’t risk getting kicked off the Internet. Several states are trying to leverage both ARPA and BEAD infrastructure grants (both of which Republicans also opposed) to try to ensure internet access remains affordable, with mixed results.

Democrats certainly have their faults on telecom policy. Their solutions are often decorative, and corrupt Democrats like Joe Manchin help ensure that real telecom and media reformers can’t even get posts at the FCC. But substandard U.S. broadband is primarily the direct result of monopoly-coddling, mindlessly deregulatory GOP policies the party mysteriously, routinely, never has to actually take ownership of.

The press, even the well-intentioned outlets trying to cover stories like this for the right reasons, is routinely complicit. Again, the ACP was a stopgap program created to address problems caused by failed Republican telecom policies. The popular program was widely used by Republicans then killed by Republicans exclusively as an act of cruel and mindless election season politics.

You’d be hard pressed to draw those factual conclusions from any U.S. press coverage.