After more than a decade of ridicule and dismissal, it's no longer possible to deny that broadband is a human right, nor is it possible to deny that private monopolists suck at safeguarding this right.
pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/med…
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pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/med…
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To understand how badly broadband monopolists failed, just look at the bankruptcy docs from Frontier. The company chose not to make a $800m profit providing 100gb fiber to its customers because making long-term investments would hurt its stock price.
pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/ica…
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pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/ica…
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As these failures become more manifest, even the FCC has finally acknowledged that it has to do better in providing broadband to underserved communities, pledging $9b to this effort.
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Unfortunately, nobody knows where those underserved communities are, because the FCC has allowed monopolists to draw up deceptive and inaccurate coverage maps for years.
pluralistic.net/2020/04/16/new…
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pluralistic.net/2020/04/16/new…
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For example - as the @WSJ writes - the FCC allowed carriers to claim that they covered a whole neighborhood if they provided broadband to a single home.
news.slashdot.org/story/20/05/25…
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news.slashdot.org/story/20/05/25…
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And as if that wasn't grifty enough, the carriers were allowed to draw their own maps of what constituted a "neighborhood," ensuring that each neighborhood boundary captured one house where they could provide coverage without any capex.
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The Journal calls this "flying through a fog." The fraudulent coverage maps have left regulators and lawmakers with nothing but (ghastly) anaecdotes, and only the carriers know the true state of their coverage.
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Unfortunately, it's vanishingly unlikely that @AjitPaiFCC, the most captured FCC Chairman in a generation, will demand that they turn those accurate maps over. Instead, he'll just insist on apportioning billions in broadband subsidies without know where they're needed.
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