Earlier this month we noted how California was attempting to pass a new law ensuring that broadband would be affordable to poor people. The original law proposed that the biggest ISPs would need to make sure they offered speeds of at least 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up for $15 a month to California residents who qualify for existing low-income assistance programs. It mirrored a similar law in NY State.
Offering 100/20 Mbps service for $15 a month would only cost the state’s four largest ISPs less than 1 cent on the dollar in revenue, while providing nearly $100 million per year in savings to low-income state residents.
But the proposed law (California Affordable Home Internet Act (AB 353)) was already poised for destruction after the bill’s sponsor, Democratic California Assemblymember Tasha Boerner, introduced a whole bunch of amendments behind closed door at the behest of telecom lobbyists.
The changes not only halved the bill’s required speeds (50 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up), it ensured that ISPs really wouldn’t have to adhere to it or see any oversight whatsoever. The changes not only eliminated any requirement that the ISPs report their progress to government, it effectively eliminated the California Public Utilities Commission’s ability to regulate broadband affordability entirely.
But even if the bill had survived, the Trump administration has been taking steps to kill it anyway. Boerner (who never really addressed her own ethical collapse in the face of telecom lobbying) claims that the Trump administration is also threatening to withhold billions in already awarded infrastructure bill grant money if states try to make sure that broadband is affordable to poor people:
“But the bill was still working its way through the legislature when, according to Boerner, Trump administration officials told her office that California could lose access to $1.86 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funds if it forces ISPs to offer low-cost service to people with low incomes.”
States are about to receive $42.5 billion in broadband grants thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill (Republicans voted against). Through the NTIA, Republicans are now rewriting much of the bill to eliminate stuff like labor rights and low-income affordability requirements. The NTIA’s new boss, a former Ted Cruz staffer, has whined that affordable fiber optic broadband is “woke.”
Republicans are also ensuring that Elon Musk gets billions of dollars for his expensive, congested Starlink satellite network, money that will be taken away from faster, more reliable, and more affordable options like local, community-owned municipal fiber networks and local cooperatives.
But this California bill was a shining example of how U.S. telecom policy (and U.S. policy more broadly) has always worked. It couldn’t survive neither state nor federal corruption, effectively dying two different deaths. Both caused by the fact that a handful of telecom monopolies literally dictate the law in a country that’s increasingly becoming too corrupt to function.
In the last six months telecom monopolies and the GOP have also killed a popular program providing $30 broadband discounts for poor people, killed efforts to provide free Wi-Fi to poor rural schoolkids, eliminated net neutrality, destroyed the FCC’s ability to hold telecom giants accountable for pretty much anything, illegally killed a law addressing very obvious racism in broadband deployment, and dismantled whatever was left of U.S. broadband privacy oversight.
This stuff is framed as “cost saving” or “government efficiency” initiatives by Republicans, but when actual researchers circle back around to crunch the numbers, they always find that no, Trump Republicans are just ignorant, corrupt, cruel assholes.