Republicans Are Angry The FCC Admitted Broadband Deployment Discrimination Exists

Last December I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s long overdue effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve provably charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantly more money for worse service.

To be clear the FCC’s plan doesn’t actually stop such discrimination. Regulators didn’t even have the moral courage to call out big telecoms with a history of such practices (see: AT&T’s “digital redlining” in cities like Cleveland and Detroit). The FCC simply acknowledged that this discrimination clearly exists and imposed some loophole-filled rules stating that big ISPs shouldn’t discriminate moving forward.

As with the FCC’s restored net neutrality rules, I highly suspect the historically feckless and captured FCC ever actually enforces the guidelines with any zeal. But the effort to acknowledge that such discrimination exists (as it has been documented in both electrical utility deployments and highway location selection) was viewed as progress by civil rights groups. And also enough to send the GOP into a multi-month tizzy.

Last February, 65 US House Republications submitted a resolution of disapproval claiming, falsely, that the Biden administration was using the pretense of “equity” to “expand the federal government’s control of all Internet services and infrastructure.” And last week, the Federalist Society hosted a function at which GOP officials (including Trump appointed FCC Commission Nathan Simington) gathered to make up claims the rules were already having a “chilling effect across the broadband industry“:

“Out of fear of running afoul of the rules, companies will certainly avoid otherwise planned investments,” said Erin Boone, chief of staff and wireless advisor for Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington.”

As you might recall, this was the same claim Republicans made about some modest net neutrality rules. For a decade the GOP proclaimed that modest and largely unenforced FCC net neutrality rules would have a devastating impact on broadband investment. But if you looked at earnings reports, public data, and even CEO statements, it was patently obvious the claim was absolute bullshit.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is also positively flummoxed that a telecom regulator acknowledged that digital broadband discrimination exists, penning a lengthy missive falsely stating that the FCC’s half-assed effort would most assuredly harm poor Americans:

“These rules undermine public and private sector efforts to build modern broadband networks—jeopardizing connectivity for all Americans.”

This is the perpetual doom cycle U.S. telecom policy has inhabited for 30 odd years.

Democrats weakly propose long overdue but meekly enforced rules to address a problem they’ve ignored for the better part of thirty years. Republicans pop up to proclaim these bare-minimum efforts are somehow a “radical socialist takeover of the internet” (or some variant), which “both sides” news outlets parrot without much in the way of skepticism, giving the GOP unearned credibility on telecom policy.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s broadband privacy, net neutrality, racial discrimination, or even very basic efforts to stop your cable company from ripping you off with bullshit fees. It doesn’t matter how basic the proposal is or if it ever even sees enforcement.

The pretense is always the same: that the government doing the absolute bare minimum is, in reality, a “radical government running amok” and “chilling all investment in the broadband industry.”

It makes me wonder how the AT&T earlobe-nibbling politicians of today would respond to a Democratic party and regulators with an actual antitrust enforcement backbone. In lock step with GOP whining, major telecom policy and lobbying groups have also sued to block the modest digital discrimination rules in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis, claiming falsely it’s akin to “rate regulation.”

The goal of most Republicans (and a not insubstantial number of Democrats) is a market in which regional, highly consolidated monopolies like AT&T and Comcast are allowed to freely run amok, taking bottomless advantage of the one-two punch of feckless oversight and limited competition while being slathered with subsidies. All dressed up as some kind of noble defense of free markets and the little guy.

I’ve been seeing some variation of this for the better part of 25 years of covering the broadband industry, and it’s utterly remarkable how utterly impervious the whole corruption-fueled dynamic is to both reason and meaningful change.