Telecoms Beg Trump Admin To Kill State Laws Requiring They Provide Affordable Broadband To Poor People

During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn’t a huge ask. It costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without success: the Supreme Court recently refused to hear their complaint.

So the law took effect, even though there’s no actual evidence that New York state is actually bothering to enforce it. Still, big ISPs like AT&T and Comcast are terrified that other states might follow suit and start forcing them to make broadband affordable. Some states, like California, are considering it.

They (justifiably) see this as a slippery slope toward the U.S. government actually doing something about the fact that these companies have spent a generation carving out lucrative regional monopolies they use to overcharge Americans for shitty, sluggish, substandard broadband access.

So telecoms have spent much of the last year absolutely begging the Supreme Court to declare such laws “illegal rate regulation.” AT&T even went so far at one point as to pretend it was going to stop doing business in New York State to try and pretend that such laws — which again don’t ask much and probably wouldn’t even be enforced by lazy states — are some kind of onerous demand on the company.

The Supreme Court, too busy destroying all corporate oversight and making Donald Trump a king, so far has refused to hear their case. The court refused to hear telecom lobbyists’ challenge in December 2024 and rejected a follow-up request by the ISPs last February.

So they’re trying again with a new filing to the DOJ that trots out some old, familiar arguments. Namely that state or federal governments doing anything to protect consumers from harmful monopolies is illegal. And somehow harms competition (which largely doesn’t exist in fixed-line U.S. telecom):

“State laws that seek to roll back the clock and impose utility-style, 1930s-era regulatory
schemes that dictate the exact prices and terms at which broadband providers must offer their services threaten competition and are inconsistent with federal law.”

The thing is, contrary to a lot of industry pretense, there really is no more “federal law.” Telecom lobbyists and the U.S. right wing have had incredible recent success in completely dismantling whatever is left of U.S. consumer protection, regulatory independence, and corporate oversight. Usually under the pretense that this would result in bold, miraculous new Utopian outcomes for all.

Spoiler: that didn’t happen. Instead we get expensive, shitty, sluggish, outage-prone Comcast service.

With federal power crippled, companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are now shifting their attention to the handful of remaining states that care about this sort of stuff. Usually by claiming that any state efforts to protect consumers from telecom monopoly predation is (or should be) somehow illegal.

Thanks to corruption and a rightward-lurching court system, they’ve won many of their arguments so far, so it makes sense that, sooner or later, they’ll win this one too with the help of the Supreme Court. We’ve basically built an absolute corporatocracy while a lot of people in the press and policy circles were taking a fucking nap. The end result won’t be a pleasant one.