If you're the type of person who only upgrades their PC once in a blue moon, you're not alone. So, it might seem logical to spend some extra cash now to build a top-tier PC that can last longer. However, that isn't a good approach to PC building. Allow me to explain.
This is going to be interesting.
It’s a video of someone trying on a variety of printed full-face masks. They won’t fool anyone for long, but will survive casual scrutiny. And they’re cheap and easy to swap.
The FCC has long run an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called the Universal Service Fund. The historically bipartisan program has long been funded by a fee on traditional phone lines. But with traditional phone lines dying, there’s been a long, ongoing discussion about how to best continue to fund the program.
The program has certainly seen fraud and abuse (much, much improved in more recent years). But it’s also done a mammoth amount of good getting neglected communities connected to the internet. A lot of folks like to singularly focus on the former to support the belief that government is always inherently bad.
The program is definitely in need of reform. Enter Republicans, who aren’t so much interested in how to fix the program, as they are redirecting taxpayer funds to their friends at companies like AT&T. Republicans insist they have the fix: to impose a massive new tax on “woke” tech companies and services (read: you), then give it to telecom giants like AT&T with a long, proud history of subsidy fraud.
The Trumplican-stacked Fifth Circuit court of appeals has proposed a novel solution to the USF problem: they’ve simply ruled the entire program unconstitutional (pdf), throwing efforts to actually fix it into chaos. The ruling, which ignored past Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent, effectively declared the USF an unconstitutional, illegal tax, something seven court dissenters said was a preposterous leap.
Now the Supreme Court has stated they’ll hear the case, which will ultimately determine whether federal efforts to expand broadband access to poor, rural neglected communities is effectively illegal or not:
“The last time the Supreme Court invoked what is known as the non-delegation doctrine to strike down a federal law was in 1935. But several conservative justices have suggested they are open to breathing new life into the legal doctrine.”
The disruption to the USF and E-Rate — which focuses on connecting school and library broadband — could be massive.
Trump 2.0 will be a corruption-fueled effort to dismantle the federal regulatory state, something the press refuses to cover with any sense of urgency or alarm. All dressed up as “populist” reform despite being decidedly unpopular among those who’ll field the brunt of the harm. This fight over the USF is just one of countless cases trying to dismantle everything from federal consumer protection to labor rights.
This particular effort to “reform the USF” is framed by Republicans as a serious, good faith effort at saving taxpayer money and helping rural Americans. But the lawsuit at the heart of this was spearheaded by a Republican fake consumer group named Consumers’ Research, whose website encourages people to report “woke” companies for making bare-bone efforts at empathy and inclusivity.
Don’t worry about the USF though! Republicans have a “fix” they’ll be pushing heavily in the new year. It involves imposing steep new taxes on “woke” tech companies and their services (passed directly on to you in the form of higher bills for Netflix or YouTube), then throwing it into the lap of giant telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast. And away from more popular alternatives like community broadband, cooperatives, or city-owned utilities.
AT&T and friends have been priming the pump on this plan for several years with the help of the FCC’s Brendan Carr, who will now be in charge of the FCC under Trump. Again, his plan to offload billions from Big Tech to Big Telecom to “fix rural broadband” will be framed by the press as a good faith effort to repair a broken program, but the Republican animosity toward the poor is palpable, and the last time Carr and Trump were in charge of a government broadband subsidy program it went… extremely poorly.
With control of the Presidency, both Houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, I suspect we’ll see more than a few of these “telecom reform” efforts that are more about creating giant new slush funds for AT&T than any serious reform. And, as per tradition, a lot of corrupt Democrats, and a feckless U.S. journalism industry, will be extremely eager to help prop up the façade.
Lobby groups for Internet service providers claim that ISPs' customer service is so good already that the government shouldn't consider any new regulations to mandate improvements. They also claim ISPs face so much competition that market forces require providers to treat their customers well or lose them to competitors.
Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association told the Federal Communications Commission in a filing that "providing high-quality products and services and a positive customer experience is a competitive necessity in today's robust communications marketplace. To attract and retain customers, NCTA's cable operator members continuously strive to ensure that the customer support they provide is effective and user-friendly. Given these strong marketplace imperatives, new regulations that would micromanage providers’ customer service operations are unnecessary."
Lobby groups filed comments in response to an FCC review of customer service that was announced last month, before the presidential election. While the FCC's current Democratic leadership is interested in regulating customer service practices, the Republicans who will soon take over opposed the inquiry.
Amazon has been working on integrating AI with Alexa, the popular voice assistant, along with some interesting features. It will be called Alexa Plus and is rumored to cost $10 a month. The new features sound perfect for tech lovers and everyday users alike.
For years we’ve noted how U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That’s resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband.
Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, or AT&T could have responded to this organic trend by offering better, cheaper, faster service. But ultimately they found it far cheaper to undermine these efforts via regulatory capture, congressional lobbying, lawsuits, protectionist state laws, and misleading disinformation.
Currently sixteen states have laws — usually ghost written by regional telecom monopolies — restrict or outright ban community broadband. Some of these laws are outright bans on community broadband, basically letting Comcast or AT&T veto your local infrastructure voting rights. Others erect elaborate, cumbersome restrictions on the financing and expansion of such networks and pretend that’s not a ban.
The good news: The Institute For Local Self Reliance (where I study and write about broadband access) notes that these sixteen laws are a notable reduction from the 21 state laws we had in 2020. What caused the change? The pandemic home education and telecommuting boom highlighted the essential nature of broadband (or more accurately, the expensive, sluggish, terrible nature of monopoly options).
As a result, several states voted to roll back the efforts and take a more serious look at community owned and operated broadband networks:
“In 2021, Arkansas and Washington passed legislation significantly rolling back legislative barriers on publicly owned broadband networks. In 2023, Colorado rolled back a law that required communities to hold a referendum vote to opt out of a state ban on municipal broadband. That law was repealed after over 120 communities across the state overwhelmingly voted to opt out of the state preemption law, fueled no doubt by the success of the municipal networks in Estes Park, Fort Collins, and Loveland. In May of 2024, Minnesota followed suit, rolling back its preemptions laws.”
There are numerous funding and deployment models when it comes to community broadband. Some municipalities build open access fiber networks themselves (see: Utah’s UTOPIA), allowing for numerous competitors. Others are built off the back of city-owned electric utilities (see: Chattanooga’s EPB). Some are fiber cooperatives (see the success had in North Dakota). Some are public private partnerships.
Data routinely shows these networks provide faster, better, cheaper service than regional cable and phone giants. Staffed and backed by locals, they tend to be more in tune with the needs of locals. They’re extremely unlikely to engage in predatory pricing, privacy, or net neutrality violations. You’ll usually enjoy local customer service. They incentivize regional monopolies to actually try.
There’s $42.5 billion in infrastructure bill subsidies that should start reaching the states early next year. A lot of this money will land in the laps of the usual regional monopolies. But a lot of it is going to wind up in the hands of local community-owned networks, which is a dramatic policy shift from years past. As a result, companies like Charter, AT&T, and Comcast have ramped up the use of fake consumer groups built specifically to mislead locals.
Community broadband isn’t some magic panacea. Like any other business model, it requires competent planning, intelligent financing, and stellar leadership. But it should be the democratic choice of a community whether to pursue such options. Not the decision of a Comcast executive living half a world away.
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