Name: The FCC and States Must Ban Digital Redlining
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The FCC and States Must Ban Digital Redlining

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Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItThe rollout of fiber broadband will never make it to many communities in the US. That’s because large, national ISPs are currently laying fiber primarily focused on high-income users to the detriment of the rest of their users. The absence of regulators has created a situation where wealthy end users are getting fiber, but predominantly low-income users are not being transitioned off legacy infrastructure. The result being “digital redlining” of broadband, where wealthy broadband users are getting the benefits of cheaper and faster Internet access through fiber, and low-income broadband users are being left behind with more expensive slow access by that same carrier. We have seen this type of economic discrimination in the past in other venues such as housing, and it is happening now with 21st-century broadband access.&nbsp;It doesn’t have to be this way. Federal, state, and local governments have a clear role in promoting anti-discrimination deployment and historically have enforced rules to prevent unjust discrimination. States and local governments have power through franchise authority to prohibit unjust discrimination through build-out requirements. In fact, it is already illegal in California to discriminate based on income status, as . And cities that hold direct authority over ISPs can require non-discrimination like New York City just did when it last year to low-income users.That’s why broadband providers and restore their common carriage obligations. For the last three years, the FCC had abandoned its authority to address these systemic inequalities causing it to sit out the pandemic at a time when dependence on broadband is sky-high. It is time to treat broadband as important as water and electricity and ensure that as a matter of law everyone gets the access they deserve.A great number of people in cities that can be served fiber in a commercially feasible manner (that is, you can build it and make a profit without government subsidies) are still on copper DSL networks. Studies of major metropolitan areas such as and are showing systemic discrimination against low-income users in fiber deployment despite high population density, and because income can often serve as a proxy for race, this falls particularly hard on neighborhoods of color.Other studies conducted by the have found that this digital redlining is systemic across AT&amp;T’s footprint with only 1/3 of AT&amp;T wireline customers connected to its fiber. In fact, not only is AT&amp;T not deploying fiber to all of their customers over time; it is now in the process of preparing to and leaving them no other choice than an unreliable mobile connection.There are no good reasons for this discrimination to continue. For example, Oakland has an estimated , which is far above sufficient density to finance at least one city-wide fiber network. Tightly packed populations are ideal for broadband providers because they have to invest less in infrastructure to reach a large number of paying customers: 7,000 users per square mile is far more than a provider needs to pay for fiber. Chattanooga, which currently has its fiber deployed by the local government, has a . Since the Chattanooga government ISP , we can see its extremely rosy numbers (chart below) with a fraction of the density of Oakland and many other underserved cities. In fact, rural cooperatives are .&nbsp;EFF assembled this chart based on publicly reported data by EPB available at the following link (https://epb.com/about-epb/leadership-annual-reports)In other words, there are no good reasons for this discrimination. If governments require carriers to deploy fiber in a non-discriminatory way, they will still make a profit. The question really boils down to whether we are going to allow incrementally higher profits from discrimination to continue despite historically enforcing laws against such practices.The pandemic has shown us that broadband is not equally accessible at affordable prices even in our major cities. It wasn’t a rural part of America that had (picture below) that caught media attention, it was in Salinas, California, with a .Photo was taken at a Taco Bell in Salinas, California (https://www.ktvu.com/news/photo-of-girls-using-taco-bell-wifi-becomes-symbol-of-digital-divide)&nbsp;Those kids probably had some basic Internet access, but it was likely too expensive and too slow to handle remote education. And that should come as no surprise given that a recent comprehensive study by the Open Technology Institute has found that the United StatesThe lack of ubiquitous fiber infrastructure limits the government’s ability to support efforts to deliver access to those of limited income. When you don’t have fiber in those neighborhoods, all you can do is what . Meanwhile, . Since the fiber is already built and connected throughout the city, and because it is very cheap to add people to the fiber network once built, it only cost the city an average of $2-$3 per month per child to give 28,000 kids free fast Internet at cost (that is, without making a profit). If we want to make free fast Internet a reality, we need the infrastructure that can keep costs sufficiently low to realistically deliver.&nbsp;The massive discrepancy between fiber and non-fiber is due to the fact that the older networks are getting more expensive to run and can’t cheaply add a bunch of new users for higher speed needs. No amount of subsidy will change the physical limitations of those networks on top of the fact that they are getting more expensive to maintain due to their obsolescence.&nbsp;The future of all things wireless and wireline in broadband is running through fiber infrastructure. It is a universal medium that is unifying the 21st century Internet because it has the ability to scale up capacity far ahead of expected growth in demand in a cost-effective way. It has orders of magnitude greater potential and capacity than any other wireline or wireless medium that transmits data. Our technical analysis concluded that the 21st century Internet is one and are actively supporting and well as efforts in . But for major cities, the lack of ubiquitous fiber is not due to the lack of government spending, it is from the lack of regulatory enforcement of non-discrimination.&nbsp;Share ItIn response to the very real pressures that online news outlets are facing, Congress continues to believe the very flawed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) is a magic solution. It is not. In fact, it is actively dangerous. And there’s a available....In May, Senators Mike Lee, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Richard Blumenthal introduced the “.” The bill, also called the “Digital Advertising Act” or just “DAA” for short, is an ambitious attempt to regulate, and even break up, the biggest online advertising companies...Westlaw, the world’s largest legal research service, is very likely to face antitrust liability. A federal court has ruled that ROSS Intelligence, a tiny rival offering new research tools (which Westlaw forced out of business with a copyright infringement suit) could proceed with claims that Westlaw uses exclusionary and anticompetitive...In December, 2020, Apple did something insanely great. They changed how iOS, their mobile operating system, handled users’ privacy preferences, so that owners of iPhones and other iOS devices could indicate that they don’t want to be tracked by any of the apps on their devices. If they did, Apple...The California Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee will soon be the first to consider new and terrible amendments to Assemblymember Quirk-Silva’s A.B. 2749—which is backed by AT&amp;T and other telecommunications interests. The legislation would prohibit the state from implementing affordable broadband rules for broadband companies receiving state subsidies as...The state of California is primed to bring 21st-century fiber access at affordable rates to every Californian. Last year’s means every California community has the resources available to chart a long-term course toward building fiber networks. The Department...There is a lot to appreciate in the recently published “Notice of Funding Opportunity” (NOFO) by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA). It is arguably the first federal government proposal that seeks to promote infrastructure policies focused on the future, rather than the usual subsidizing “good enough...Imagine if your boss made up hundreds of petty rules and refused to disclose them, but every week, your pay was docked based on how many of those rules you broke. When you’re an online creator and your “boss” is a giant social media platform, that’s exactly how your compensation...The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a proposal for bringing competition and fairness back to online platform markets. It just cleared a major hurdle on the way to becoming law in the EU as the European Parliament and the Council, representing the member states, reached a ...The European Union’s (DMA) allows new messaging services to demand interoperability (the ability to exchange messages) from the internet's largest messaging services (like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage). Interoperability is an to promote competition and prevent monopolists from shutting down user-empowering innovation. But...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItThe rollout of fiber broadband will never make it to many communities in the US. That’s because large, national ISPs are currently laying fiber primarily focused on high-income users to the detriment of the rest of their users. The absence of regulators has created a situation where wealthy end users are getting fiber, but predominantly low-income users are not being transitioned off legacy infrastructure. The result being “digital redlining” of broadband, where wealthy broadband users are getting the benefits of...

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The FCC and States Must Ban Digital Redlining

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