- cross-posted to:
- politicus@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- politicus@kbin.social
President Joe Biden recently traveled to North Carolina to promote his goal of affordable internet access for all Americans, but the promise for 23 million families across the U.S. is on shaky ground.
That’s because a subsidy that helps people with limited resources afford internet access is set to expire this spring.
The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provides $30 a month for qualifying families in most places and $75 on tribal lands, will run out of money by the end of April if Congress doesn’t extend it further.
“I think this should be high priority for Congress,” North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who has worked with a bipartisan group of governors to promote the program, said in a phone interview. “To many families, $30 a month is a big deal.”
Alternately, they could introduce more pricing regulations and antitrust crackdowns on internet providers, introduce legislation to explicitly allow municipal internet access, etc.
We have the 6th most expensive internet in the world; if we had cheaper internet (on par with what other first world countries offer), we wouldn’t need these subsidies because it’d be cheap enough anyway.
Municipal broadband is illegal in North Carolina. In the early 2000s one small city pushed forward with municipal broadband, and the North Carolina Telecommunication Association, an industry lobby group, lobbied the North Carolina General Assembly for a state bill to make it nearly impossible for a city to run its own internet service. Over the course of six years, the telecommunication industry gave $1.6 million to state candidates and political parties. AT&T gave over $520,000 and Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) and CenturyLink each gave over $300,000. Then, in 2011, both chambers of the North Carolina General Assembly were won by Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction. The bill passed and was signed into law.
Proving once again that until Republicans are voted out of office en masse, only an infinitesimal fraction of the programs and initiatives that real people want will ever see the light of day. Unfortunately there’s only so much Democrats in the White House and Congress can do as long as people keep voting against their own self interest.
edit to add:
Oh, and how’s this for an interesting timeline:
2006: City of Wilson begins municipal broadband program
2011: Thom Tillis (Speaker of the House) helps pass S.L. 2011-84 to effectively ban municipal broadband
2015: The FCC stepped in to green light Wilson’s program and preempt S.L. 2011-84, and Tillis was elected to the US Senate
2016: A federal appeals court ruled that the FCC overstepped its authority in preempting NC’s ban, and Tillis cheered
2020: Tillis re-elected
2023: Tillis brags about Biden’s BIL, which sent $1.53 billion to NC via the BEAD Program, and NC DIT’s own BEAD 5-Year Plan had this to say:
Officials sold out for $1.6 million? It’s legit depressing how little the rights of their constituents are worth to them. Telcos making billions and these nobs hand everything away for a pittance.
This is the exact case I was referring to there. Having a public option for internet access, even if it was relatively slow compared to the big name brands, would be a huge step forward in terms of guaranteeing internet access for everyone. So of course the big players are going to go to whatever lengths they can to avoid it ever seeing the light of day. :(