U.S. Broadband Is Racist

At the tail end of 2023 I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring how the U.S. government, for the first time ever, had openly acknowledged that U.S. broadband had a rich history of race and class discrimination.

Data had shown for decades how giant regional phone and cable monopolies had not only refused to upgrade poor and minority communities to better broadband (despite untold billions in taxpayer subsidies), reporters found they actually charged poor minority people higher prices for shittier service.

Why? One, because broadband deployment discrimination mirrors structural discrimination in other sectors (like electrical power). And because a generation of unchecked corruption and corporate consolidation had hollowed out U.S. regulators like a cheap Dollar Store fake chocolate Easter bunny.

Things changed a little with two bits of 2021 legislation born out of pandemic lockdowns (and the white hot public rage at shitty broadband).

One was the American Rescue Plan Act, which set aside $20 billion for broadband deployments, and billions more for stuff like local community centers, affordable housing, sewer improvements, and other infrastructure upgrades. The kind of stuff that bored our ad-engagement-based press so badly they didn't bother covering it.

The other was the 2021 infrastructure bill, which set aside $42.5 billion for broadband expansion into unserved communities. While ARPA quickly deployed a whole bunch of super cheap ($60 a month) next-gen fiber, the second took longer to develop, making Ezra Klein and the "abundance" people very sad.

Part of the reason it took a little longer was because the infrastructure bill tasked the FCC with creating “rules to facilitate equal access to broadband internet access service” that would prevent “digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.”

So, as my Verge piece explored, the FCC, prompted by Congress, created a basic framework that formally acknowledged "digital discrimination" existed, as well as a complaint process for consumers who felt they'd been discriminated against. If we're going to spend this money, they figured, it should be somewhat equitable.

The important bit: the rules allowed the FCC to penalize Internet Service Providers (ISPs) whose policies resulted in “disparate impact,” even if the agency couldn’t prove deliberate discriminatory intent. Big telecom monopolies, used to being coddled by the federal government, obviously didn't like that.

An example would be the 45-day internet outage a minority Detroit neighborhood saw at the height of the pandemic lockdowns. You can't directly prove that the ISP in this case (AT&T) actively and consciously discriminated, but there's ample data still indicating that systemic digital discrimination played a role.

As the civil rights and digital equity activists I spoke with at the time noted, the proposal wasn't without its faults. It lacked the courage to name and shame the biggest and worst offenders (AT&T). It also had ample loopholes ensuring that the U.S. government wasn't particularly likely to meaningfully enforce anything.

As part of the piece I spoke to Joshua Edmonds, an amazing local Cleveland activist and CEO of DigitalC, who told me that while he had misgivings about whether the FCC's new anti-discrimination program would actually be enforced, the formal acknowledgement of reality was important all the same:

“It’s one thing for an activist group to say that, or even a local equity champion, but for the FCC to acknowledge that digital discrimination has persisted, that’s moving in the right direction. But what does it mean to be penalized? Is it a public facing walk of shame? What actually is it? I think this FCC has big ambitions, and I laud them. I think the question that I have is: with big ambitions, do you guys have teeth? And I don’t know if they do or not.”

Yeah, well, about that.

In the three years since, the Trump administration has hijacked and redirected billions in infrastructure bill subsidies intended for minority community fiber builds, and instead funneled it into the pockets of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. In exchange for slower satellite broadband they had already planned to deploy, most Americans can't afford, and comes saddled with some problematic environmental issues (like oh, the re-destruction of the ozone layer).

Trump has also taken a hatchet to all of the language in the program attempting to curtail race and class discrimination. They've even illegally threatened states, saying that they won't receive hundreds of millions of already-awarded dollars if they attempt to ensure taxpayer-subsidized broadband is affordable, or try to regulate the environmental impact of AI data centers.

Real psychopath shit.

This obviously hurts Trump constituents too, but race-baiting right wing propaganda (a cornerstone of Republican power) helps divide and disorient the electorate so they don't form a consensus and unilaterally take aim at the fact that abject corruption and unchecked corporate power have destroyed the government.

At the same time, the Republican stacked-courts recently destroyed the entire FCC anti-discrimination program before it could even be enforced.

The 8th Circuit insisted that the FCC had overstepped its authority in its construction of the rules. Much like the 5th Circuit did recently when it declared that the FCC didn't have the authority to fine AT&T for spying on your every movement then selling that data to any random asshole.

To be clear: telecom monopolies, corrupt Republican lawmakers, and "free market Libertarian" types don't believe the FCC has any authority to do anything. They'll construct all manner of very serious pseudo-legalistic framing with their furrowed-brows, but the foundational argument is that regulators have no authority over corporate power when it comes to protecting consumers.

They've sloppily arranged some lipstick on it, but their foundational policy approach to broadband is to coddle giant regional monopolies like Comcast and AT&T, throw billions at them for expensive and half completed networks, then lobotomize regulators so they can't do anything about the impact the lack of competition has on consumers (especially minority consumers), which is usually spotty service, high prices, slow speeds, and nightmarish customer service.

This is, you may have noticed, something that is mirrored across countless U.S. business sectors in a country genuinely now too corrupt to function.

Up Is Down, War Is Peace

As a nice example of the Trump administration's endless projection propaganda, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr issued a statement saying that the Republican destruction of FCC anti-discrimination protections by the 8th Circuit was somehow a victory against discrimination.

This is a common (and very fucking stupid) projection game they play where they pretend that efforts to end U.S. systemic racism are somehow discriminatory against white dudes. Carr, a sycophantic Trump earlobe nibbler of the highest order, tries to dress this up as a serious adult argument:

"Today’s appellate court decision is another common-sense win for nondiscrimination. Back in 2023, I dissented from the Biden FCC’s decision to adopt sweeping and unlawful ‘digital equity’ rules. Those regulations would have required broadband providers and many other businesses to discriminate against people based on their race, gender, or other protected characteristics.

Now, the FCC is focused on advancing our Build America Agenda and ensuring that regulated entities do not discriminate, including through our efforts to end invidious forms of DEI discrimination."

Republicans, I should note, overwhelmingly voted against both ARPA and the infrastructure bill, but will routinely take credit for the improvements anyway.

Carr's illogical, inversion dipshittery has also been central to his efforts to threaten companies if they don't eliminate basic equity and diversity initiatives, or refuse to fire comedians that make the President sad. It's also been the centerpiece of Republican efforts to strip voting rights away from U.S. minorities entirely.

Again, real psychopath shit. Normalized by our shitty corporate press, which refuses to objectively call things racist (or corrupt) for fear of losing access, upsetting advertisers, seeing right wing reader cancellations, or annoying the owner of the company (almost uniformly a rich white racist old man).

The 8th Circuit was polite enough to state that the FCC could try to recraft the anti-discrimination rules with slightly different language, but if the FCC actually did so, it would be shot down again thanks to a series of Trump Supreme Court rulings that have completely defanged regulatory autonomy.

In short, the corrupt and racist federal government hijacked billions in taxpayer dollars, redirected it to their billionaire friends, illegally dismantled any effort to ensure that money was spent in the best interest of the public, and simultaneously destroyed federal regulatory oversight of corporate power.

Super curious how this isn't a bigger story in our consolidated corporate press. Most of the major outlets didn't even think the 8th Circuit's destruction of FCC anti-discrimination program was worth covering. And the ones that did took a very "both sides" approach that painfully buried the lede.

Granted there's a lot going on, but it somehow doesn't get talked about enough (by the press, activists, or anyone else) that the Trump administration has lobotomized federal regulatory oversight of corporate power across every sector that touches every aspect of your lives, something that's going to cause mass suffering and fatalities for decades to come (I am available for childrens' parties, to steal an old Bill Hicks joke).

Republicans have been consumed by greed, racism, and authoritarian demagoguery. Democrats have exposed themselves as an entirely decorative opposition party incapable of any structural load bearing demands, requiring a total rebuild. The federal government has, truly and utterly, failed the public.

On the plus side, the concussive, corruption-fueled collapse of a lot of systems people historically took for granted will create unprecedented public anger and some real potential for reform. The billionaires are, if you haven't noticed, increasingly aware of, and terrified by, this potential pendulum shift.

This corruption-fueled collapse of what was left of the U.S. federal government is also driving new connection pathways within and between local municipalities, which are increasingly taking matters into their own hands and forging highly localized, sustainable solutions to longstanding problems.

I'm seeing every day (through my work for the Institute For Local Self Reliance and Techdirt) how local communities used American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money to deploy truly affordable next-generation gigabit fiber (often as cheap as $50 to $60) to everybody in town, often starting with marginalized locals.

These local organizations and governments – from UTOPIA in Utah to Longmont, Colorado's city-owned Nextlight network – didn't wait for the corrupt federal government to get its shit together. They didn't ask for corporate permission. They simply decided to build a better, more equitable future themselves.

And this isn't just happening in "blue states." One of the most popular community-owned municipal broadband networks is in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 2023 I talked to officials in Fort Pierce, Florida, who were building a gigabit fiber network starting first in historically marginalized, black communities.

Most of these networks being built with an eye on equity, privacy, open competition, net neutrality, and other concepts the federal government, awash in telecom monopoly campaign contributions, abandoned long ago.

This is "just broadband," but I've found that many of its lessons apply everywhere.

The federal government may currently be too corrupt to function, but there remains great potential in block by block, highly-localized revolution and reform. A bunch of corrupt, incompetent bigots want you to believe that they have the power to stop the entirety of public interest progress, but they're delusional dipshits, drunk on their own propaganda, incapable of fighting us all at once.