FCC Is Trying to Stop Discrimination in Broadband Deployment. Telecoms Are Mad
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Redlining doesn't have to be because of racism or classism, but the result is the same. There are underserved populations that can't get better internet, even if they want it. Isn't fixing that a reasonable policy goal?
If we can't get it from companies, I'd be down to treat the internet the same way we treated rural electrification & phone service. That is, setting a high standard and deploying it to everyone. No more multi-billion dollar giveaways with no consequences for delivery. If we aren't getting results, fund municipal broadband and other schemes.
If we want to address “underserved populations that can't get better internet”, we can do that directly without adding racism.
It’s a lot easier to use that than to come up with completely different criteria businesses will find loopholes in or create loopholes through lobbying.
Personally I don’t like that our best option is to use protected classes to enforce better behavior. But most of the time it’s a good equivalent, and it’s a good example of those nasty compromises that allow democracies to work effectively.
It prevents a telecom from under-serving poor neighbors. It has significant historical precedence: https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service
That makes no sense.
Also, I don’t understand why it’s unreasonable to consider race in any broad societal inequality where it just so happens the inequality is concentrated on race. I consider slavery to be a form of societal tech debt of the United States where this discussion is happening: the United States literally enslaved a race of people for over a century and then fought tooth and nail in every level of government against ever giving blacks anything. Within living memory blacks weren’t allowed to vote because of their blackness in that country. Black adults now had to be sent to white schools with national guard protection because the United States populace was going to be violent to children just for going to a non-black school. In this context how the hell can anyone dissociate race from anything in that country? Race was practically in every government policy, drove their only civil war, was part of every subsidy and even in their constitution.
There should be a federal law that stops telecom companies from getting cities to give them a monopoly in exchange for service and allow cities and counties to create their own ISPs as well. Ideally there would be fiber to every home and then allow any ISPs to come in and provide service similar to DSL back in the day.
Congressional lawmaking is for the big-picture, long-term stuff. Agencies are supposed to have the ability to set rules as needed and respond quickly. This is a feature, not a bug.
And if Congress starts to see a pattern of a particular agency going way too far in some direction, then it can pass a law to further clarify the scope/limits of that agency whenever it wants. Congress hasn't given up any of its power. If it's not doing that, it's because it doesn't want to.
Experts aren't unbiased either. It is nice when the experts you like are in power but what happens when someone else comes in?
Experts may disagree, but it's still a whole lot better than non-experts disagreeing.
You'd rather this be decided by a failed football coach?
[0]: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/11/14/congress/mc...
The shape of American cities and towns makes all infrastructure very expensive: more miles of fiber per customer than basically anywhere else. More cell towers per phone too, if you are looking at 5G. This spread is also massively segregated economically and racially. I look at,say, any demographic map of St. Louis, and no matter whether we look at economic indicators, education, labor participation, wealth, race... you see the very same lines. So when a company just expands first where there will be more subscribers per mile of infrastructure built, they different racial outcomes are guaranteed. Given that deploying everywhere at once is physically impossible, every move to put someone ahead of the queue puts a different subdivision further back on the queue. Since fiber deployments will go on for decades, we might even see situations where a place becomes more desirable, and therefore makes different people try to buy it, just by giving it fiber 20 years later than it would have received it if we went just by subscribers per mile of infra. Municipal broadband might choose different winners, but with the same total build capacity, there is always winners... and I bet rich voters that would really use the broadband would get really mad if they are near the end of the 20+ years timeline, instead of year 3. Everyone wants a more equitable distribution of resources when it's not them losing massively
The low density suburb is what makes this malaise so bad. Americans do not want to tackle this though, because its costs are so well hidden, and often distributed to other people. The richer your neighbors, the more likely you get more attention for purely political reasons anyway. See how many rich and progressive neighborhoods, suddenly turn to NIMBY land when they think they have topay high costs.
The problem forces people to choose, and, as usual, those with less political clout will be last, just because everyone else pushes to be further ahead than the average, and someone has to be in the back. If the deployment was cheaper, and therefore faster, this would be far less of a problem, but the easiest time to fix it was 90 years ago.
Typically core reticulated infrastructure is socialized: roads down to city level are typically funded at a high level (fed/state/county etc), mail delivery pricing is not destination-dependent et al. This makes sense as there are two parties and both benefit if the infrastructure is there. The local details (actual roads in the towns) are then a local matter.
Conversely some decisions are not socialized: if you live remotely your insurance rate reflects your distance from a fire station or even hydrant, or your proximity to forest fires etc; an urban dweller is likely to pay less as the expected loss is lower.
Anyway, telecom seems like an important universal service, as a human right; for the same reason roads are; and because it's in everybody's interest if people who want to vote have an opportunity to learn, both about "the issues" and be educated in other ways.
Sure. Yet, looking at problems as if they are single-variable cause-effect issues is to reduce complex multivariate issues (they all are) to ridiculous fantasy models.
The government should not force businesses to make unprofitable decisions or contort their decisions into bullshit racism implications.
The solution is very simple: If the FCC thinks these communities are not served well enough, they are free to trench the streets, install fiber to every home and provide them with amazing government run service at low cost or zero cost.
And yet, that would be a terrible solution. We need to pull back from the micro level and look at it from a broader perspective.
The federal government is burning $1.7 billion PER YEAR maintaining empty buildings for decades:
"The 132-year-old brick structure is sitting on prime real estate six blocks from the White House. It was once a school, but it's been vacant for almost three decades."
https://www.npr.org/2014/03/12/287349831/governments-empty-b...
That money is being burned...every year.
What would happen if they just got rid of those properties and shifted just one third of that budget to subsidize such things as internet access to various underserved areas? That's over $500 billion PER YEAR.
Charter Communications, one of the largest companies in the sector, has a gross annual revenue of approximately $50 billion per year. Give them $50 billion of the money being wasted and stipulate that money has to go towards delivering outstanding internet connectivity in designated areas. Heck, with $50 billion of free money they could probably get 1 Gigabit fiber to every single one of our homes, including less profitable areas.
Do that with nine other companies. The result would be unbelievable. And here's the best part: It's a one-time cost. We would be saving $1.7 billion per year and spending $500 billion one time. Even if the actual cost is double that, it's still a deal.
The point is that it is easy to get lost in the feelings and outrage of our sad victim society while ignoring the absolute fact that we could be doing a lot better for everyone if we demanded better results from our government.
Here we are, discussing the financially-microscopic problem of relatively few underserved communities while not making the connection with government waste and incompetence --in the trillions-- that could do magical things for every single person in this nation if brought under control.
A trillion dollars is a massive amount of money. If put to good use most of the problems in this country would evaporate, from housing to healthcare and internet access so everyone can be on Tik Tok all day.
Perspective is important.
We have already done enough damage to our industrial and commercial business sectors. Before we achieve total internal destruction, we might just want to consider that getting our government under financial control (at all levels) would have the effect of injecting trillions of dollars into the economy, which would be nothing less than magical.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/18/heres-how-the-federal-govern...
No, it’s not 500B per year. Just as a sanity check we aren’t spending more than twice as much on empty buildings than the Air Force.
Also, the US government has heavily subsidized broadband rollouts, arguing about profits while ignoring subsidies is silly. If we’ve learned anything over the last 30 years of broadband subsidies is handing them more money won’t solve the problem.
Just for sanity check, why don't you do a modicum of research before posting nonsense? What a concept!
Here, I'll help you. Read this report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office:
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-106200.pdf
From the document:
"the 24 FRPC agencies spend about $2 billion a year to operate and maintain owned federal office buildings. In addition, agencies may postpone maintenance and repairs to assets in their portfolios for various reasons, which over time can create a backlog of costly deferred maintenance and repairs."
"In addition, allowing unneeded leases to expire would directly reduce costs. Federal agencies spend about $5 billion annually to lease office space from the private and government sector"
And here's the "Oh, shit!" realization:
"GAO and others have reported on issues with managing repairs and maintenance in federally owned facilities, which are costly to the federal government. Federal agency financial reports have reported $76 billion in deferred maintenance and repair costs in 2021, an increase of about 50 percent since 2017."
$76 BILLION in deferred maintenance and repairs just two years ago. What do you want to bet this number doesn't go down any time soon and will absolutely explode into hundreds of billions if not dealt with in some form within a decade?
In other words, it is worse than the $1.7 billion per year being quoted, massively worse.
Here's another article on the subject:
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-jeff-denham-gover...
How about we look at other issues? Here's a simple one:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/18/heres-how-the-federal-govern...
"Improper payments, which refer to payments that are made incorrectly by the government, cost the U.S. $247 billion in 2022, according to the Government Accountability Office. The U.S. government has lost almost $2.4 trillion in simple payment errors over the last two decades, by GAO estimates."
> If we’ve learned anything over the last 30 years of broadband subsidies is handing them more money won’t solve the problem.
Duh. Any business person knows this.
Here's a concept: Establish clear objectives, milestones, accountability and supervise, supervise, supervise.
The problem isn't subsidies at all. The problem is that our government is incompetent at nearly every level.
Again, big picture instead of hyperventilating at the micro level. Fix root causes. The root cause has to do with truly incompetent and unmotivated people managing billion dollar programs. Why would these agencies be any better than the DMV? There's a fundamental need to drive for competence and results in government. Until we do that nothing else will ever be solved.
Yes, I too would have expected a non-zero number of libertarians to be here saying that any amount of regulation is bad. But the closest I see to that is a couple saying that the government forgot to include appropriate strings on previous handouts.
So regulation should be used only when required. Now if this is the case where the regulation is required is upto debate but the fact is that FCC isn't correcting any of the things ISP are doing currently but only few things that ISP could do in the future which would hurt consumers. And so this only feels like a political decision as "net neutrality" is a good sounding term and government which forces big companies to provide it is good.
I'm not, and most of the pro-telecom people here would have been equally opposed to rural electrification and phone service.
If you read the original correspondence about the Postal Clause, the point was not to establish paper mail delivery and postal roads per se, but to establish a system of information conveyance between the federal and state governments and citizens:
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/tocs/a1_8_7.html
It's always been puzzling to me that people have been so focused on paper mail as the boundaries of the USPS when it was really about information conveyance. Having a narrow mandate to physical mail is sort of holding the US Constitution to an arbitrary limit based on year or era.
All of this should be handled in the same way as mail. If people want to build out private internet, fine, but the US government should be building out a public system as well.
These issues were all discussed in the 18th century but just with different mediums as a frame of reference.
Welcome to the current Supreme Court era of Historical Jurisprudence. If the founders didn't believe it (in their American Mythological head canon), then it's unconstitutional. Disregard the fact that many of the founders perceived the Constitution as a living document that would change with the times.
[1] "As noted above, there is little or no evidence in the legislative history of the Infrastructure Act or the record of this proceeding that impediments to broadband internet access service are the result of intentional discrimination based on the criteria set forth in the statute." https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397997A1.pdf Paragraph 47
We don't need to play silly "affirmative action" games to keep them accountable.
The issue is that FCC is, correctly, treating broadband as a utility at a level comparable to electricity/sewer/drinkable water. And as such, ensuring that underserved people get access to the service is more important than punishing contractors for failing to deliver it.
I do agree that the discrimination hand-wringing is unnecessary, and a good "Deliver the service to everyone, assholes" should be plenty in theory. But if leaning on those laws is what it takes to get them to comply, then whatever. Results are what matters.
There is no valid reason to turn this into yet another performative piece of race-bait.
This would be a bizarre and circuitous way to attempt the recover from that mistake.
There weren't? How do you figure that?
Go find the bills and find me some consequences for the companies that failed to do what they were asked.
There aren't any.
I don't understand why people constantly vilify companies acting like companies instead of the corrupt government that's lying to our faces.
I agree but I also think it's not very practical to expect selfish parties to take advantage of a free lunch (frog and scorpion situation).
The companies are supposed to act in their own interest and they did. The Government is supposed to act in our interest and they didn't. Plus, they're the ones that we can hold accountable.
I'm still against this particular rule because it sets a very problematic precedent.
There are other non-problematic ways to hold them accountable. Like fining ISPs for the taxpayer dollars they were given, plus interest.
1. ISPs have been given various money to roll out to those communities in many if not most cases. Currently, noncompliance is cheaper than doing what they said they'd do and were paid to do; and
2. The "rational" thing you point to allows racism by proxy. I mean, look up redlining. Systemic discrimination (of various kinds, not just race) gets more abstract but the end goals remain the same.
But really the FCC is trying to put a bandaid on a gaping wound: national ISPs shouldn't exist. The only good broadband is municipal broadband. Any "good" broadband we have now just isn't terrible yet and/or the provider has cherrypicked coverage in much the way you suggest, leaving many under-served communities.
As for the subsidies, the way they work is, roughly, the government offers you a certain amount of money to build an area, and if you don't, they either give you an extension or fine you or take the money back or some mixture of the three. There's also been reverse auction type approaches, where the government takes bids for people to build out to an area and awards the subsidy to the lowest bidder. It's not like the government just cuts AT&T a $10 billion check and says go forth and build broadband where you see fit. If you have a problem with how the subsidies work, then redesign them.
Thats what they are doing though.
- Housing discrimination through the Fair Housing Act [1]; and
- Racial discrimination in redistricting, affirmed by even this current Supreme Court [2].
[1]: https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/f...
[2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court...
2. The result being the same does not mean the goal is the same. I doubt ISPs are rubbing their hands and laughing at the struggle of minorities. It's simply not their job to care about them. See 1.
Further, there is nothing wrong with national ISPs as long as we don't put up road blocks for municipal ISPs.
In this reality, ISPs have put up road blocks for municipal ISPs.
In North Carolina it's especially shady-- any ISP can challenge by offering their own plan to wire up the municipality that wants to do their own wireless. Doing so can end up halting the municipal plan, but that ISP doesn't have to actually deliver said plan.
Redlining was just short of being explicit. But the racial covenants on home deeds were very explicit:
https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/covenants.htm
There's even crazier shit than that in US history which has led to where we are at now.
What we're talking about here is much simpler, basic economic stuff like "poor people can't afford expensive stuff" which doesn't demand any racial assumptions.
EDIT: I don't usually ask about down-votes, but for the people who are down-voting this comment, please explain why I'm wrong. The whole basis of the discussion here is that the 'disparate impact' standard is being used to criticize business decisions that are not based on racial inputs.
If you put yourself in position of gatekeeper of an essential service then it's reasonable to put a burden on you to do due diligence to make sure that service is equally accessible.
Not to mention record profits, so it's not like these giants are hanging on by the skin of their teeth.
"Here in reality, U.S. broadband is […] a failed market, dominated by a handful of politically powerful regional mono/duopolies, who hoover up untold billions in taxpayer subsidies for networks they routinely fail to fully deploy. All protected by layers upon layers of state and federal corruption policymakers like to pretend doesn’t exist."
As for the subsidies, the way they work is, roughly, the government offers you a certain amount of money to build an area, and if you don't, they either give you an extension or fine you or take the money back or some mixture of the three. There's also been reverse auction type approaches, where the government takes bids for people to build out to an area and awards the subsidy to the lowest bidder. It's not like the government just cuts AT&T a $10 billion check and says go forth and build broadband where you see fit. If you have a problem with how the subsidies work, then redesign them.
That's not a "paper", it's the final rule that the FCC adopted. And it applies to race, ethnicity, religion, and income level equally.
That's right, but that's not what the rule says. The rule says that if your business decision, totally unbeknownst to you, has a disparate impact on a particular racial/ethnic/religious/income group, then you're in violation.
If you have enough data to reliably identify your most profitable neighborhoods, I guarantee that data tells you something about their demographics. Any ignorance of disparate impacts, whether on racial lines or wealth or anything else, is willful.
> The rules define “digital discrimination of access” as “Policies or practices, not justified by genuine issues of technical or economic feasibility, that (1) differentially impact consumers’ access to broadband internet access service based on their income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion or national origin, or (2) are intended to have such differential impact.” As the law requires, the FCC will consider arguments that legitimate business impediments preclude equal access to broadband service in particular communities.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-398477A1.txt
I doubt people would have the same reaction if they realized it was primarily about income and not race. But everyone loves to talk about race.
I think your claim that this is a path to rebuilding systemic racism and not a means to end it is a misunderstanding of the "systemic" aspect of systemic racism. Because it is systemic, the system itself will naturally reinforce the impact of the racism unless significant counter forces are applied against it.
The fact that a business making decisions to deploy resources geographically to maximize revenue (for services that ought to have nothing to do with race) might reasonably worry that they might unintentionally lead to an impact that has a discernible racial bias, is a demonstration of exactly this phenomena.
So no, you're not going to end it by making decisions ignoring systemic disenfranchisement. To end it, you are definitely going to have to be mindful of how the system might have impacts that reflect (and thereby amplify) the bias of the system, not the decision.
Racial discrimination and redlining correlating with poor access to broadband was a factor in the analysis, but they also looked at rural/urban access splits and income disparity related lack of access too.
I haven't read through the whole thing yet, it's very long, but the emphasis seems to be on forcing telecoms to build out access in areas that are historically underserved when the reason is they would make less money (different than 'at a loss') rather than serving an area with existing access that might present better margins.
The linked article starts by drawing comparisons to redlining in the very first paragraph.
There is a long history of telecoms getting subsidies under terms like what you say, failing to do what they are supposed to, not being punished for it (I suspect corruption from regulatory capture), and then pushing for more subsidies for the problem. Admittedly this comes with a certain amount of showy punishments and appropriate prostration of telecom execs. However that amounts to a slap on the wrist, and then business as usual.
Given that this cycle has been going on for decades, there is every reason to believe that this is just another round.
What if you make a decision solely on the number of households, not their income? That wouldn't require taking race into consideration at all.
Pay to play has gotten more ubiquitous. I'm curious if you defend it in general.
The horror. The horror.
There's a reason why the USPS is required to deliver more or less everywhere. I admit that their service levels do vary, but I think the aspiration is a good one.
Maybe our broadband infrastructure just shouldn't be owned by for-profit corporations. They've already proven themselves poor stewards of the commons. (Ditto for utility companies, really.)
So "YMMV".
I have literally never experienced anything that even approaches that level of nonsense in the private sector.
No it isn't. You already drive, have a car, and live in the state. What are they acquiring you to? They're just integrating you into their servicing platform. That's customer service.
Eh? The idea of a "natural monopoly" is that even without any meddling or bad behavior there would still only be one company with no competitors. Thety is, it's not granted, it happens on its own.
Phone and internet access should be a public good.
Maybe those two areas should be served by two different ISPs. If an ISP is operating in such a large area that they can't afford to keep all of them reasonably up to date then maybe that's a sign that the ISP is too big.
On the other hand, it's not economically infeasible to extend FTTH to any given area I decide to point out, it's just a question of how many unprofitable areas you'd have to service before your business as a whole failed. Presumably at that point, you'd meet the economic infeasibility standard.
No-one can run a business that way; literally no-one.
No, the NW of Austin doesn't have good internet service because there isn't any competition, and the incumbents are extremely happy to do absolutely nothing and reap $120+ monthly payments for providing service on 15-year-old modulation schemes on cables that are 40 years old. Timewarner/spectrum/charter could roll out high split on docsis 3.1 (released 2013), but then they would have to invest in the network by fixing the pieces of the network that haven't died of old age over the past 10+ years. Or ATT could run fiber, but why when they have 30% market penetration using DSL technologies that are less than 10Mbit down/1Mbit up and old folks like my neighbor will happily continue to pay them $50 a month for it, and when the cable dies they swap it for a 4G modem.
So it's a duoploy where ATT gets the customers that are shopping on absolute price, and Spectrum gets the ones that aren't happy with 100Mbit/sec or data caps. Sub $50 or 100Mbits you get ATT. More than that, you get Specturm. Those of us that want more than 20Mbits up, are SOL, and everyone is getting ripped off because $60/month is what some people are paying for symmetric 1Gbit.
So, those people who live 40 miles W in little towns population 600-2000 can get fiber in town, or those areas with Google fiber can get it an/ord ATT and the rest of us are lining the pockets of some billionares.
In that light, hand wringing about the effects on Telco profits doesn't really make much sense to me. It's like a child saying that their parents aren't feeding them by citing the "you can't have ice cream" of the sentence "you can't have ice cream until you finish your dinner".
My attempts to resolve this issue have led me into a frustrating loop between ISPs. When I contacted Comcast, hoping for a better service, they informed me that it was CenturyLink's territory and they couldn't provide a connection. However, when I reached out to CenturyLink, they countered by saying it was actually Comcast’s area for broadband service.
It's bewildering to me that in 2023, in a major U.S. city, there are still areas where you can't get a decent broadband internet connection. To provide some context, this area was an old red-lined district, which has recently been gentrified, partly due to the tech boom in the city. Had to give up on a perfectly good house that my partner and i loved because of this
It's absolute garbage. The only positive is I'm not limited to something even more useless in the download side like you are.
Could someone explain to me why forcing the broadband companies to provide better service isn't a net positive action please?
People are objecting to that.
If we want to help (as another commenter put it) “underserved populations that can't get better internet” — we should do that directly, for people of all races.
How does mandating racialized thinking help that problem?
How do you know if the track you're on is inadvertently disadvantaging particular populations if you never look?
> we should do that directly, for people of all races
And this bill does that, you seem to be arguing for the exact same effect but just worded differently. If you require everything be equal then a rising tide for inner city black folks also comes with a rising tide for rural white folks. It means that a person of arbitrary demographic makeup can be sure that better internet will come to them which is all people all races.
But the devil is always in the details. Beyond the danger of causing reductions in the total investment available for broadband, there's the problem of government defined demographic groups not being homogenous. If a wealthy area of a minority racial group gets high level of investment because it will make a better return on investment than an impoverished area of that same racial group, have things been made better? Or has the inequality simply been moved from racial to financial?
And of course, there's the fact that government equality almost always means some groups are more equal than others for various reasons, including the desire to "makeup" for past inequalities or simply one group having more clout with the government agency than others. Additionally, the government gets to decide the groupings for demographics, so some demographic groups get lots of attention and resources while others are considered invalid groupings and ignored.
If only the government had thought of that and created a $42 billion grant allocation to fund deployments to less profitable areas.
Who cares why ISPs are failing to provide a basic service to a chunk of the population? The government should be in a position to force their hand based on the fact that it's happening at all.
And I can see both sides of the argument here. One one hand, yeah, it sucks to be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, government agencies' capacity at putting pressure on private enterprise has been severely neutered, and if this is what it takes to get essential services delivered, then whatever, I'll take it.
> Despite admitting there's 'little to no evidence' of discrimination by telecommunications companies, Democrats are hoping to convince the American people that broadband Internet is so racist they need to plow ahead with government-mandated affirmative action and race-based pricing. The only beneficiaries of this Orwellian 'equity' plan are overzealous government regulators who want to control the Internet
> We’ve also noted how Republicans voted against the infrastructure bill, then have turned immediately around to take credit for the broadband deployments it enables among local constituents. Texas Senator Ted Cruz has been no exception; he’s repeatedly tried to take credit for highway projects only made possible by the infrastructure bill, while simultaneously criticizing the bill’s very existence.
...
> If there’s a real problem with BEAD and other federal subsidy programs, it’s that giants like AT&T and Comcast — with long histories of taking taxpayer money for projects they half-complete — will almost certainly nab a disproportionate amount of funding using unreliable maps whose improvement they’ve long opposed. But Cruz doesn’t mention — or care about — that.
> Cruz is silent when a Texas-based company like AT&T gets a $42 billion tax break for doing absolutely nothing. He’ll routinely have nothing to say if AT&T is accused of ripping off taxpayers and the nation’s school system.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/19/senator-ted-cruz-pretend...
There's no mention made of race, wealth, or any other demographic. They simply need to make sure everybody* has broadband Internet access.
This simple metric works wonders. Whether rich urban areas or tiny rural communities, nearly everyone has adequate broadband access. The speeds aren't equal everywhere, but the minimum levels of service are enough for video streaming, so the minimum standard is plenty to give everyone an ability to participate in our online society.
Part of providing this access also includes reasonable pricing. Again, less dense areas aren't always as cheap as the most dense areas, but the difference isn't much. Even in poor, remote communities, you can afford to use a mobile phone with adequate broadband capability.
This price equality despite cost inequality does mean that technically the more dense areas are partially subsidizing the less dense areas, but again, the differences aren't that large. We still have private broadband providers in the dense urban areas and their rates aren't much cheaper. What they could save on costs, they continue to charge anyway to increase their profits.
This is all to say that you can have equal access throughout a huge area with widely different densities - it's entirely practical and feasible. The only reason it doesn't happen in most places is because it's left up to private corporations whose primary concern is profit. This means they fight over the low hanging fruit of high profit dense urban areas and don't bother to invest in the less profitable, less dense areas. Regulations or other mandates that put availability above profits fix this.
You can still run a profitable business while serving everyone equally, but if you only care about maximizing profits, then you will inherently prioritize dense areas over sparse areas. And while that may not be intentionally discriminatory in any legally protected way, there are strong correlations between race, wealth, and population density, which leads to the kind of incidental discrimination that the FCC is trying to address here.
We need a repeat of the rural electrification act, but with regulatory teeth.
That title could be more neutral.
[0] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-398244A1.pdf
Crappy time to be alive in the USA, where a private business can be forced by the federal government to do something against their will.
Like fulfill their side of the bargain in exchange for already-received subsidies and tax breaks...?
If they don't want to serve everyone in the community, they need to give up rights to have any say over utility corridors and any franchise agreements.
If they don't like it, I'm sure we would be happy to nationalize them.
That's an ironic statement, considering 13 hours ago you were begging the federal government to force RealPage and Apartment owners to stop colluding on rental pricing...