I'm really surprised at the number of people on the side of the telecoms here. I think it's reasonable to want consistent pricing and quality of service, particularly in cities.
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.
This is all basically what was intended by the establishment of the USPS. The only reason why the internet isn't mentioned in the US constitution is because the technology wasn't available, wasn't even something they could envision. But if it had been they would have included it.
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:
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.
> Having a narrow mandate to physical mail is sort of holding the US Constitution to an arbitrary limit based on year or era.
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.
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.
I don't think it's a matter of telcos or not, but about how the problem, as is, makes discrimination a natural result one has to actively fight against, in ways that are often economically detrimental to everyone.
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.
Well we discriminate (as in pick and choose, not in the sense of redlining) as to where we want the cost to lie.
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.
Regulations adds costs because of added operations and red tape and the costs could only come from consumers in the long term. This would mean a proportion of poor can't afford them and become offline.
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 really confused by arguing this is “adding racism”. If I just so happen not to build a ramp into my building aren’t I de facto discriminating against the disabled? It might be economically beneficial to me to save on the cost of ramp building, and I may not be like “fuck wheelchairs”, but I’m still discriminating against the disabled.
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.
“Protected classes” already exist and have been tested in courts.
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.
There's a big difference between banning discrimination against protected classes and mandating discrimination in their favor, which is what this basically does, see the comment and discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304639
> What are you on about? How is this adding _racism_?
It is mandating that race be a factor in decisions. Declining to build out faster service in a particular poor area would be either allowed or not allowed based on what race the people there happen to be.
Most stuff is best done by agencies staffed by experts that are set up by Congress in the first place -- not by Congress full of non-experts micromanaging things.
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.
I disagree. Ask a panel of expert JS developers how something should be done and you'll get as many opinions as their are seats on the panel. In regulation it's the same but the decisions affect human lives and businesses that employ people.
Experts aren't unbiased either. It is nice when the experts you like are in power but what happens when someone else comes in?
So to continue the analogy, you'd rather have the board of the company, consisting of MBA CEO's, making decisions about a company's JavaScript standards?
Experts may disagree, but it's still a whole lot better than non-experts disagreeing.
As funny as your comment is, I believe you're both correct. If we actually had a functioning Congress, and not the clown circus we currently do, they could actually be getting things done. But the people that actually understand these problems aren't normally morally bankrupt enough to make it into Congress.
I don't. I want decision-making delegated to professionals with lifelong expertise in that topic, not the troop of howler monkeys that is Congress. Did you hear that now they're kidney-punching each other and then going "NUH-UH! I didn't touch him!" like four-year-olds [0]? That's who you want to be making life-or-death decisions on e.g. how far apart to space landing aircraft? Get real.
This ruling is the direct outcome of congress passing a law to accomplish exactly this. You could contest the scope or specificity but this is about as far from changing rules on a whim as it could possibly get.
I'm on the telecoms side because I believe it's yet another power grab disguised as a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and no one has convinced me otherwise.
> There are underserved populations that can't get better internet, even if they want it. Isn't fixing that a reasonable policy goal?
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
"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.
> I'm really surprised at the number of people on the side of the telecoms here.
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.
The FCC admits they could not identify any intentional discrimination.[1] So they went further and adopted a "disparate impact" standard which means you don't even need to intend to discriminate. And unlike disparate impact in other areas of law, where having a "legitimate non-discriminatory interest" is a defense, the only defense here will be "economic or technical infeasibility," and they explicitly rejected profit maximization as a way to satisfy that standard. So say you're an ISP deciding whether to invest the same money into building fiber out to one of two areas, one where you'll make 1 million dollars a year and one where you'll take 2 million a year, and you make the rational decision to build out to the more profitable area. The FCC can fine you for that because it turns out the less profitable area was more black and the more profitable area more white, and it was economically feasible for you to make less profit, even though racial factors had nothing to do with your decision. If you think through the implications of this, it's a requirement to engage in discrimination/affirmative action in every single business decision you make. And even then, it's impossible to know whether you're ever in compliance. How much profit do you have to sacrifice in pursuit of racial equity? A quarter? Half? Two-thirds?
[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
If broadband was a real marketplace, companies could step in and service areas ignored by Big Telecom even if they might be slightly less profitable than rich areas. But as I'm quite sure everyone here knows, it's not.
"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."
Even if you are right, the solution is not to mandate racial discrimination.
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.
>Requiring that a utility provide equal service to everyone within a reasonable standard of feasibility is not racial discrimination.
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.
First, let's be real here: it's not a mandate that every business decision be made with a racialized lens. It's a mandate that business decisions consider their potential impact on systemically disenfranchised groups that we no longer wish to have systemically disenfranchised.
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.
The FCC rule mentions several attributes, race being only one:
> 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.
That's not how this works. It's not about income any more than it is about race. Racial disparate impact is enough for the FCC to fine you to oblivion. The fact that it's listed after "income" does not change that.
I don't see the problem with this kind of affirmative action, but reasonable people could vote out the US administration that supports this if it's important to them.
FWIW, the article doesn't mention race at all, and the paper you linked to mentions race as one of several factors, the leading factor apparently being income level.
The word "roughly" is doing some heavy lifting here.
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.
It sounds a bit to me like they're just trying to get a baseline level of coverage everywhere (none of this 400kbps, 2000ms ping nonsense you see in some poorer neighborhoods), and race is a decent way to gain the political traction necessary to make it happen.
The focus on race seems to be mostly coming from commenters here. The definition of digital discrimination in the rule reads "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."
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.
This sounds fine to me. If you're going to be granted natural monopoly status, then you should not be allowed to use profit notice as a reason to do (or not do) anything. Regardless of anyone's race, why are people in one region more deserving of faster Internet than in another?
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.)
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.
The DMV's service standards have improved dramatically in recent years, at least in my state. It's also important to note that the DMV is customer service, not customer acquisition. When compared to customer service from businesses, the DMV looks quite reasonable, and the service is getting better, whereas nearly every customer service experience I get from a business is getting worse.
Recent experience with the DMV in my state, was that to transfer my license and registration into that state (which is a customer acquisition problem, BTW) required me to book a month ahead of time in their online system, which even then resulted in me having to drive to an office that was the fourth-nearest to my residence.
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.
And the FCC is completely correct in this, for two reasons:
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.
Red-lining is based on the inherently-racist premise that Black people moving into an area were likely to result in decrease of property value.
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.
The difference is that modern broadband internet is more akin so a necessary utility like water or electricity than it is to luxury goods. Further that telecomms have received billions in subsidies to build out infrastructure to these communities and have lobbied against municipal competition.
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.
The government is not allowed to mandate racial discrimination/affirmative action in the United States. There is fairly clear caselaw on this, including the recent decision prohibiting even remedial discrimination (i.e. affirmative action).
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.
Yes, they'd be totally in their rights to tell ISPs exactly where to spend the money, but that's not what's happening here. Here, they're telling the ISPs they have to set up an affirmative action regime or else they'll be punished.
You're mad they're being given more freedom on resource distribution? They can either tell the ISPs _exactly_ where to spend the money, or they can tell the ISPs to do some more due diligence about disparate impact and more equitably distribute the money. The FCC is doing the 2nd.
Yes, the ISPs HAVE ACCEPTED MONEY to set up an affirmative action regime. If they don’t deliver on something they have promised to do in exchange for taxpayer money already received they should be heavily, heavily punished.
That's blatantly and objectively wrong. The government isn't "mandating racial discrimination". They're fighting actual and de facto racial (and other) discrimination. For example:
- Housing discrimination through the Fair Housing Act [1]; and
- Racial discrimination in redistricting, affirmed by even this current Supreme Court [2].
The Commissioner Simington dissent at https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-398477A5.pdf covers this issue fairly well. The Fair Housing Act disparate impact rule has several constitutional safeguards, the only reason why the Supreme Court upheld it in the Inclusive Communities case, that this one does not. Most importantly, it has a defense for "legitimate, nondiscriminatory" business decisions, such that disparate impact protects people only from "artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers." So you can comply by just making rational business decisions. Here, you can't, you have to take into account race because the only defense is "economic or technical infeasibility."
1. The issue is that the government gave away a ton of money without clear goals and deadlines. Private companies aren't an arm of the government that will do it's job for it. Retroactively adding these restrictions seems bad, as you've now changed the terms of the deal. The government got scammed and they should take the loss and do better next time.
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.
> 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.
You might feel bad for ISPs, but imagine having to operate under these conditions for decades. Think of all the banks who have had to give out loans in neighbourhoods where they knew the default rate would be higher.
If a company puts itself in a position as gatekeeper between people and essential services, it behooves them to put in the effort to equalize access. Intention doesn't have much if anything to do with it, it's a plainly obvious outcome that focusing purely on market economics will disadvantage people in systematic ways, especially if those disadvantages are correlated with other features of their experience and identity.
Phone and internet access should be a public good.
Right - the essential problem here is that the "economic infeasibility" standard is impossible to overcome. Most businesses are looking at impact at the margin - is opening up in this new market going to be profitable or not?
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.
> If you think through the implications of this, it's a requirement to engage in discrimination/affirmative action in every single business decision you make
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.
This is just a failure of capitalism. The most profitable areas aren't the ones that have the richest people. Otherwise, NW Austin/etc would be swimming in advanced tech because it is fairly dense, and the residents are some of the richest in the state. Which is why its hard to argue that poor people are being discriminated against.
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.
> So say you're an ISP deciding whether to invest the same money into building fiber out to one of two areas, one where you'll make 1 million dollars a year and one where you'll take 2 million a year, and you make the rational decision to build out to the more profitable area.
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.
If you wanna go down that road, compel them to build the infrastructure where it was promised. Or issue a fine for the amount they were given, plus interest.
We don't need to play silly "affirmative action" games to keep them accountable.
While I broadly agree with you at surface level, you are missing a piece of the puzzle.
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.
Even from the "underserved people" standpoint, most of the people who have shit-tier internet are people living in very rural areas (read: overwhelmingly white).
There is no valid reason to turn this into yet another performative piece of race-bait.
Yeah, honestly with how the big ISP have fucked around almost every single individual in the entire United States, it seems insane to have literally any sympathy for them when an agency makes rules to try and make things better for people. Why should we all just bend to the whims of random corporations, making billions on anticompetitive practices and exploiting us all for money. They can afford to make non profit maximizing decisions for once in their entire god-forsaken existence.
There was little more than a pinky promise. They took the money because there was no downside to them if they didn't do what the money was supposed to be for.
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.
To be clear, I'm not trying to exonerate the government here. I totally agree that the government failed to keep its promise to make sure the tax money that went to the ISPs actually got used for its intended purpose. I just also think the companies knew full well what they were supposed to do, but chose not to do it because they knew the politicians weren't going to actually hold them accountable. Both sides are at fault here.
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.
Regarding the first half of your comment, yeah, they didn't find intentional discrimination so they focused on disparate impact. That's what I said. Perhaps you're not familiar with the concept of disparate impact. And please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304973 for how this is not like other disparate impact standards in American law.
>The fact these companies have received significant subsidies and have such little to show for it gives more reason to have regulations in place such as this. No regulations only work if companies aren't greedy profit-first motivated entities. Regulations are important for shaping and limiting the inherit greed that humanity as a collective has.
This is a really broad near-truism that doesn't engage with any of the particulars. The point is that the FCC is requiring you to practice discrimination/affirmative action with regards to your build-out (and other) decisions. You have to figure out where the minorities are and make a point of building out to them, and make less money as a result (how much less? they won't tell you. better hope you guess right). Let's say this law didn't exist and you were doing just that, but in favor of white people, contrary your profit interests. That would be a slam dunk racial discrimination case. But that's exactly what the FCC is requiring here, just with good feelings attached because it's in favor of minorities. This is affirmative action, which the Supreme Court has recently said is no longer legal in the United States.
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.
> Regarding the first half of your comment, yeah, they didn't find intentional discrimination so they focused on disparate impact.
From the first paragraph of the linked article to this post:
> Groups like the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) have released studies on cities like Cleveland and Detroit, documenting how this discrimination lines up with 30s “redlining” efforts.
I am quite curious as to why TechDirt was able to find these, but a commission wasn't.
> Perhaps you're not familiar with the concept of disparate impact. And please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304973 for how this is not like other disparate impact standards in American law.
I am no legal scholar, but I have a vague idea of disparate impact. As far as I'm aware, you're correct. There really isn't a disparate impact standard for any private business. It's mostly for government entities (the one I'm mostly familiar with the is the Civil Rights Act and government election rules).
> The point is that the FCC is requiring you to practice discrimination/affirmative action with regards to your build out decisions. You have to figure out where the minorities are and build out to them, and make less money as a result (how much less? they won't tell you. better hope you guess right).
It's quite easy to find where the minorities are. The Census data is quite accessible. It like is not wholly complete given many minorities lack of trust of government officials, but it will give one a strong idea of where they reside.
I do agree with you that the FCC is reaching a bit here. I would be perfectly fine with strong requirements to any of the $56 billion subsidy dollars allocated have strong requirements about disparate impacts and affirmative action. And that applying it to ALL business decisions is almost certainly an overreach. But I do think that something needs to be done about the unintended consequences of profit-before-all-else behavior. And this likely is not it. I have a strong feeling given this current Supreme Courts hate of stare decisis, this decision may not live much longer.
Interesting! Had never heard of that! I'll bet that the history of that is due to red lining practices originating in mortgages, if I remember my history correctly.
>It's quite easy to find where the minorities are. The Census data is quite accessible. It like is not wholly complete given many minorities lack of trust of government officials, but it will give one a strong idea of where they reside.
Nothing I said implies it's hard. The problem is that the FCC is requiring you to base your decisions on race, ethnicity, and religion.
Business that depends on localized investment of capital is, by definition, discriminatory if it is done according to sound business principles. This is why Mercedes-Benz has main dealerships in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but not in the Bronx or Queens.
Pretending otherwise is tilting at windmills.
The FCC already operates the Affordability Connectivity Program, which subsidizes internet access for poorer households: if they want those households to have gigabit FTTH, they just need to open the taps further on that program.
The truth is probably more likely that households below 200% of the poverty wage won't choose to spend money on upgrading from 50Mb/s to 1Gb/s when they can spend that on food or improved housing or whatever.
“these companies have received significant subsidies”
I think telecom got 100 billion from Biden’s stimulus package. I agree it’s too much but shouldn’t the answer be to just not give billions to the telecom industry?
I do believe the stimulus package was rushed. We can see it in the clawing back of fraudulent PPP loans. Proper restrictions to hinder fraud takes time to setup, which the Biden administration and Congress didn't seem to think they would have at the time. And they were probably right, given the massive scale of the issue.
But there should have been strong requirements for the money they received. But the Biden administration was just printing money to keep our society from imploding at the time.
I think a lot of comments are missing a crucial aspect of the situation, which is that the same law that empowered the FCC to do this also allocated $42 billion in grant money to assist Telecoms in rolling out to "high cost" areas. The government is forcing a private business to consider discrimination in decisions about where to roll out, but they simultaneously have created a scheme to compensate them for doing so.
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".
I'm currently in the process of buying a house in a major U.S. city, ideally located near a school and in the heart of the city. However, The house, despite its central location, only has access to a 4-7 Mbps max speed CenturyLink twisted pair connection, which is astonishingly slow.
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
Yep. I live in San Francisco, one block away from a major fiber trunk, and my "best" option for broadband is cable Internet from Comcast. Right now the max upload they offer is 35Mbps, even with their 1.2Gbps download tier.
It's absolute garbage. The only positive is I'm not limited to something even more useless in the download side like you are.
Starlink is probably your best bet for now, which is ~100/~20 depending on your area. I believe you can also multi-home two (or more) Starlink services and get double (or triple etc.) that.
I'm confused as to why the comments are getting so heated on this, typically I see people complaining that the USA has very inconsistent and bad broadband, with people being forced to switch to satellite services to get any kind of reasonable connectivity.
Could someone explain to me why forcing the broadband companies to provide better service isn't a net positive action please?
I think the most reasonable issue many people have is that, from a utility deployment perspective, inconsistent delivery of service is bad enough in of itself and should be fundamentally actionable without having to involve any discrimination laws.
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.
This is forcing telecoms to make business decisions with a racialized lens, ie rebuilding systemic racism.
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?
You do have to actually acknowledge that classes of people exist to know whether systematic biases exist between them. Why would you hide pieces of data with an extremely high degree of predictive power? Surely more sunlight is better? It doesn't have to come with any judgement, no one is saying look at these blatantly racist telecoms clearly they hate... checks notes the Vietnamese, but instead, "hey your policy of where you decide to roll out internet has a blind spot."
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.
I have now read the PDF and struggle to understand how you've come to that conclusion. Could you point me at where in the PDF it mandates that ISPs make their decisions based on only the race of the customers?
You see the same sort of resistance re: societies that recently emerged from more than a generation of government oppression. People have said with a straight face "why hasn't Haiti improved its lot? Its been more than 10 years since the US military forced them to finally pay off the debt[0] they owed France!"
I think if you're not already thinking about generational trauma, I'm really not sure how to convince you its a thing.
0. a debt for "stealing" slaves - that is freeing themselves - from the french. The debt demanded was, adjusted for inflation, more than the war debt demanded of Germany following WWI.
This https://youtu.be/wCl33v5969M helped me get a better understanding of the topic. If you are sincere about wanting to discuss this topic I kindly ask you to give it a chance.
Because investment resources in broadband aren't unlimited and go to the areas with the highest return on investment first. The government wants to use its power to change this, so there will be demographic quotas that determine where investment goes. If one particular demographic groups has lesser access to broadband than another demographic group, under threat of government penalty, investments must be made to equalize the demographic groups.
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 one particular demographic groups has lesser access to broadband than another demographic group, under threat of government penalty, investments must be made to equalize the demographic groups.
If only the government had thought of that and created a $42 billion grant allocation to fund deployments to less profitable areas.
This sounds like it's saying that ISPs aren't following existing universal access rules where it's not profitable, so those rules are being restructured to look at things through the lens of race and "disparate impact" to see if maybe that'll help?
Side note, but let's all take the time to appreciate that the FCC publishes plain-text versions alongside DOCX and PDF. I really appreciated the ability to get right to the text.
The biggest politician on the side of the telecoms is Ted Cruz, who has this to say on the matter:
> 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
Here's more about Ted Cruz from Karl Bode on Techdirt.
> 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.
Up here in Saskatchewan, Canada, we have a crown corporation that provides broadband access to the entire province. The legislature has mandated that they provide access to a very large portion (90? , 95?) of the population. They are treated as a utility, so maximizing profits is not the benchmark, but rather providing a reasonable level of access and ability at the lowest cost.
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.
The article mischaracterizes the FCC's position. The Biden Administration is pushing this agenda, not the agency. In fact, the Commissioner of the FCC is ardently against it [0].
Ah yes, THE commissioner. The one single commissioner that the FCC has. Anyone who says there are 5 commissioners, three of whom are democrats, are just trying to deny Mr. Carr's supreme authority.
>>> 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.
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...
I don't follow. The federal government has effectively always forced businesses to do things, such as paying taxes. Furthermore, the businesses in question agreed to build this infrastructure in exchange for funding and government protection, an obligation that they have failed to uphold their end of the deal on.
If you're running a utility, it is your responsibility to serve all customers. The water company can't refuse to build pipes in a poor neighborhood. Private ownership of that utility doesn't remove that responsibility.
If they don't like it, I'm sure we would be happy to nationalize them.
And its not even just subsidies and tax breaks. They also often own the utility poles or conduits and can often restrict/delay attachments preventing any competition from actually rolling out in the area. And that's assuming they don't have a monopoly franchise agreement for the area!
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.
they took $42billion to do the thing and then just did not do the thing. They are thieves who steal from you and me and should indeed be forced to do what they agreed to.
It still bamboozles me that tech journalism is acting as the PR arm of the government and failing a basic "misleading name" test. I can't wait for them to do apologetic retrospectives on the Patriot Act informing me that mass surveillance is, in fact, patriotic.
They think they'll get a job in a future regime ... I suspect press/communications czar is a title alot of tech "journalists" have dreamed about since they were on the high school paper. You don't get that job being critical of the government. You think Seymour Hersh would take a gig with George W, Trump, or Obama?
That might be their way of thinking but sometimes things go in the other direction. The most critical voice against the city government where I lived in the early 2010s got hired by the mayor to become a "special advisor". That shut her up completely. Instead of scathing columns about government corruption, she put out the occasional press release for the mayor over his two terms. IIRC, there was a similar storyline in the tv show 'Spin City', which makes me think it is a somewhat common thing to happen.
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.