There’s One Last Shot To Save A Low Income Broadband Program Republicans Are Trying To Kill
The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, provided 23+ million low-income households a $30 broadband discount every month. But the roughly 60 million Americans benefiting from the program are poised to soon lose the discount because key Republicans — who routinely dole out billions of dollars on far dumber fare — refuse to fund a $4-$7 billion extension.
As a result, the FCC started informing struggling Americans in April that their broadband bills are all about to jump significantly as the program starts to wind down. There’s apparently going to be a last ditch effort to finance the program in May, but despite the support of broadband providers and a sizeable bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, the funding bill has a long-shot chance at success.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is basically slow walking the funding bill to death because a key component of MAGA types don’t want to pay for the program or give the Biden administration a policy win in an election season.
These are, it should be noted, the same Republicans that doled out trillions in tax breaks to corporations in exchange for nothing (including $42 billion to AT&T alone). They’re also the same Republicans that wanted to give Elon Musk a billion dollars so he could pretend to deliver expensive satellite broadband to some airport parking lots and a handful of traffic medians.
These same Republicans routinely throw absurd gobs of money at all sorts of ideological dipshittery and badly managed corporate handouts. The “fiscal responsibility” stuff is a performance the lazy U.S. press helps the party perpetuate. In reality, it’s just petty obstructionism.
Folks like Gigi Sohn, whose nomination to the FCC you might recall was killed by a sleazy telecom industry and GOP joint disinformation campaign, isn’t particularly impressed:
“Because of political gameplay, about 60 million Americans will have to make hard choices between paying for the internet or paying for food, rent, and other utilities, widening the digital divide in this country,” said Gigi Sohn, a former top FCC official. “It’s embarrassing that a popular, bipartisan program with support from nearly half of Congress will end because of politics, not policy.”
If you care about this sort of stuff, I suspect your lawmakers might benefit from a call.
I wasn’t in love with the ACP. It basically involves throwing billions of dollars at telecom giants so they’ll temporarily reduce high broadband prices — that wouldn’t be high in the first place if they hadn’t spent 30 years lobbying (quite successfully) to defang our regulators and crush all competition. Many of these same companies (like Verizon and Charter) exploited the program to upsell users to more expensive tiers.
But given that both Democrats and Republicans are too corrupt to tackle or even acknowledge the real problem (unchecked regional monopoly, stifled competition, and market failure), this was at least some sort of temporary solution. We actively courted low income Americans to the program, got them used to the benefits of affordable internet during a health crisis, then pulled the rug out from under their feet.