It's The Corruption, Stupid

This week my colleague Sean Gonsalves and I wrote a feature for The Verge about how billionaires have hijacked billions of taxpayer dollars intended for better internet access, and instead shoveled that money into the pockets of openly technofascist billionaires in exchange for doing nothing differently.

It's a real hoot; we explore how the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, included in the 2021 infrastructure bill, was a generational opportunity to improve internet access – especially for poor, minority, and long-neglected rural communities.

Now it's mostly just a crony capitalist slush fund for terrible rich men.

Last election season Republicans made a gargantuan stink about how the BEAD program was taking too long to provide access; resulting in a massive media cycle featuring folks like the New York Times' Ezra Klein lamenting how Democrats were drunk on regulation and had simply forgotten how to build stuff.

(While Democrats have ample faults they were, for the record, building cool stuff via the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), passed that same year – Klein just didn't notice or care to mention it).

I read Klein's Abundance book, and as somebody who has written about equitable internet access policy for a quarter century now (😐), I could tell he hadn't actually talked to any actual experts. His presentation of the BEAD program, including on Jon Stewart's podcast, was based entirely on Republican bad faith attacks.

Klein's book struck me because it curiously tries to downplay the biggest reason nothing in America functions in the public interest: rampant corruption. Your broadband isn't shitty and expensive because we love bureaucracy and are allergic to building abundance, it's because the government is too corrupt to function.

Anyway, Klein's lazy oversimplification of BEAD fueled new right wing media attacks, which created a sort of ouroborus of bullshit – cementing the idea that the BEAD program was a giant and completely pointless boondoggle.

Yeah, about that.

The Trump administration got into power and immediately got to work stripping all of the program's oversight; especially language requiring that billions in taxpayer-funded internet access be deployed equitably to poor and minority neighborhoods, or actually be affordable for those most in need.

Originally, a lot of this money was intended to fund fiber deployments in places where there's widespread market failure, whether it's inner-city Detroit or rural Trumplandia. That includes a lot of community-owned fiber networks that provide super fast, very inexpensive access to locals as a public utility good.

Instead, Republicans are forcing states to throw the lion's share of their money at Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for their slower, more expensive, ozone-layer killing, astronomical research harming, low-Earth orbit satellite services. Which, again, they had already planned to deploy without the sort of subsidies both billionaires routinely insist they're opposed to receiving.

Downgrading to inferior satellite service purportedly "saved" the government about $20 billion dollars, which states and the Trump administration are now fighting over how to redirect elsewhere. Congress said this money had to be used for internet access. But obviously the law is only a suggestion for Trumpism.

At the same time, the high cost of deployments due to senseless tariffs and pointless wars may cause many of the original, remaining fiber deployments to be scrapped, resulting in even more taxpayer money falling into the hands of Bezos and Musk for "good enough" satellite broadband access.

Republicans, it's worth noting, largely voted against both the infrastructure bill and ARPA, but can routinely be found taking credit for the improvements among their constituents. Who's going to correct these voters' misconceptions. Sinclair broadcasting? Elon Musk's X?

The Republican hijacking of BEAD is just one of numerous attacks on equitable internet access. I've been busy trying to keep pace.

In just the last year or two the Trump GOP has:

• Rewritten the infrastructure Act at the behest of telecom giants, ensuring that they can take $42.5 billion in taxpayer money without worrying about making sure the resulting broadband is affordable or evenly deployed.
• Illegally threatened to withhold broadband grants from states that try to hold telecom monopolies accountable for overbilling or anti-competitive behavior.
• Destroyed a popular program that provided free broadband to low-income rural school children.
• Destroyed a popular program that gave low-income families a $35 discount off their broadband bills. Republicans claimed the program had to die to "save money"; subsequent studies show it generated four to six times more in financial benefits than it cost.
• Tried relentlessly to destroy an FCC program that provides cheaper broadband to schools and rural communities (many of which voted for Trump).
• Dismantled the FCC’s ability to stop telecom giants from ripping you off with hidden fees and usage caps.
• Illegally destroyed The Digital Equity Act, a law passed by Congress mandating the fair deployment of broadband to poor people and minority communities.

I would guarantee I've missed a few.

This stuff is framed as "saving money," but it's almost always either motivated by lobbying (AT&T doesn't like poor people getting free broadband, Elon Musk wants a bigger share of the pie) or just abject, racist disdain for poor and minority populations (even if its their own constituents).

A functional opposition party, keen on keeping the country from falling into permanent kakistocracy, would be well served by relentlessly and hyperbolically hammering on precisely this sort of corruption from now until election day.

A functional press, keen on keeping the electorate informed, would highlight how Republican policy is often indistinguishable from testicular cancer, and the party should never receive unearned credibility on issues like "affordability."

But these attacks on BEAD are a particularly hot mess, creating all sorts of additional delays and fraud, resulting in just a literal handful of people seeing any connectivity whatsoever. As of this writing just a few hundred homes in Nebraska and Louisiana received some costly and slower fixed-wireless access.

The Republican solution to a boondoggle was our biggest boondoggle yet.

And guess what: despite last election season's broad and breathless coverage of BEAD, Ezra Klein and the mainstream corporate press are suddenly nowhere to be found. I don't think any major media outlet had bothered to even explore the scope of the fuckery to date. So Sean and I did, and I hope you give it a read.