Biden vs Broadband

[ancianita]

This bears repeating. Most Americans aren't aware that lack of access to Internet services has long been by corporate design.

One of the most insidious divide and conquer tactics in the corporate agenda to demolish democracy has been to deny telecom & broadband infrastructure to Americans -- block local attempts to establish their own ISP's -- then sit back as yokel radio fills the vacuum with immigration and abortion fear/hate; or narrates socialist commie Democrats' latest attempts to bring down freedoms; or as TV calms them down, reminds them of their 'remedies' for politics and culture wars.

U.S. telecom monopolies have often refused to deploy broadband into low ROI areas, despite billions in subsidization.

from Vice:

A new study by the Institute For Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) took a closer look at the data ISPs submit to the FCC, and found that carriers routinely over-state broadband availability. And because US broadband mapping is comically and historically terrible, it’s often impossible to accurately identify the areas most in need of subsidized network expansion.

The study notes that broadband mapping is so bad, the FCC declares an entire census tract served if just one home in that area can receive broadband. Since more accurate availability and pricing data would clearly illustrate broadband market failures, the broadband industry routinely lobbies against efforts to shore up data collection and publication.

The nation’s six biggest providers (Comcast, CenturyLink, Frontier, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter) have “invested the bare minimum to comply with requirements"

With modern technology, it should be trivial to develop a process that is easy for ISPs to use and less likely for monopoly ISPs to game, but we have not found a single person with deep knowledge of the FCC that believes it will happen in the near future,” notes the group.

Monopoly ISPs then use this inaccurate data to pretend that US broadband is faster and more widely-deployed than it actually is. They also work tirelessly to keep broadband pricing data out of the hands of the public, lest American consumers begin to understand just how soundly they’re being screwed by a broken market.

from Techdirt:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211129/07151348021/charter-spectrum-funds-front-group-to-try-kill-small-maine-towns-plan-better-broadband.shtml

As we've long illustrated, there are two reasons U.S. broadband is expensive, spotty, and slow: regional monopolies and the state and federal corruption that protects them. As we've also noted, community broadband is an organic response to decades of obvious market failure. If ISPs truly wanted to thwart community broadband, they could offer better, faster, more widely available service. Instead, they resort to dodgy games and scare mongering through bogus proxy organizations, all in a bid to protect the broken status quo. And, thanks to their massive budgets, it often works.

Yet there is affordable and fast broadband for local budgets. I hope this is the kind of infrastructure help that Biden's $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill is giving for local governments to use. It's hard to unite a big country, but as climate disasters bear down, the Biden-Harris team must fight to get Americans out of the dark that corporations have put them in.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200616/08241944721/fastest-isp-america-is-community-owned-operated.shtml

[elleng]

1. Thanks.

Reminds me of rail carrier 'competition' fights.

See Targeted Rail Investments Enable Efficient Transportation.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/111691930

[ancianita]

4. Most welcome, elleng!

And yep, there's another. It's as if corporate PR creates its own market theater and writes political scripts, right?

[House of Roberts]

2. We have multiple options for internet here

in Huntsville. Concast exists, but there's WOW cable, Google Fiber, and our provider, AT&T.

[Scrivener7]

3. It should not be under the control of private companies, no matter how many there are.

[ancianita]

5. Agree. Telecoms, like electrictity, should be publicly owned utilities.

Good or bad times, as government gets control, management misbehaves and tells the public it's government's fault. Only under private management it's worse, as we've seen with the USPS.

During climate troubles, the use of the Defense Production Act shouldn't have to be at the whim of a president, or applied only where s/he politically wants. Corporations have never existed to make American lives better; one or two outliers of local control are always used to justify the denial utilities to the rest.

All this cost of astroturfed opposition is higher than simply providing the service. Which makes one think there's some other kind of "management" of the publics going on here.

[Septua]

6. I never thought about it being...

..intentional corporate design, just bottom-line mentality on the part of AT&T not replacing the damned ancient cable. I can't even get decent phone service.

[hunter]

7. My very rural great grandparents got electricity and phone service thanks to FDR and the New Deal.

The same needs to happen with Broadband.

[ancianita]

8. Mine, too. Very rural must not be left out of telecom and broadband, which

should have public utility status by now. Not to mention how the rest of us and our current networks need upgrades and maintenance.

It's in Democrats' enlightened self interest to push for this, because no matter their tax payer status, 26,800,000 need access to information about climate, public health, improvements that can benefit them, so our GOTV might lean them to blue in 2022.