The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23 million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount. While it didn’t get much hype, that’s a big deal in a country where broadband affordability is a massive obstacle due to muted competition.
But those 23 million Americans are poised to soon lose the discount because Republicans — who routinely dole out billions of dollars on far dumber fare (like a $42 billion Trump era tax break for AT&T in exchange for doing absolutely nothing) — are refusing to fund a $4-$7 billion extension.
Jessica Rosenworcel has written to Congress, informing them that poor Americans are going to see a significant spike in their broadband bills — and that they may lose access to broadband altogether in some instances — as the agency winds down the program:
“If Congress does not provide additional funding for the ACP in the near future, millions of households will lose the ACP benefit that they use to afford Internet service,” Rosenworcel wrote. “This also means that roughly 1,700 Internet service providers will be affected by the termination of the ACP and may cut off service to households no longer supported by the program.”
Republicans, and the press that often parrots them, claim their resistance to funding the program is because of cost. But as we’ve long noted, Republicans have historically had no problem throwing untold billions in regulatory favors, tax breaks, merger approvals, and wasteful subsidies at regional telecom monopolies like Comcast and AT&T, in exchange for network upgrades that mysteriously never fully materialize. I’ve spend 20+ years documenting this waste and fraud in great detail.
In reality, Republicans oppose the ACP program because it’s popular among constituents, and you wouldn’t want said constituents thanking Democrats for cheaper broadband during an election season. Republicans, of course, can’t admit this, so instead you get a sort of idiot theater, where a party that slathers corporations in cash for doing nothing pretends to be concerned about wasteful spending.
That’s not to say that there aren’t better ways to bring down broadband prices, of course. The ACP gives money to regional telecom monopolies to temporarily lower prices that wouldn’t be high in the first place if companies like Comcast, Charter, Verizon, and AT&T hadn’t spent 30 years waging an all out war on healthy competition.
The problem is that Republicans (and Manchin-esque Democrats) also uniformly oppose policies that would address the real underlying problem of telecom monopolization and muted competition (antitrust reform, community broadband, price regulations, crackdowns on pointless mergers and consolidation, appointing real reformers to the FCC), so this temporary discount was the best political reality achievable.
In short Republicans are going to screw over 23 million poor Americans because they don’t want Democrats getting political credit for helping them during an election season. And because our press is generally broken and afraid of calling a duck a duck, this is going to get dressed up as a genuine concern about wasteful spending by a party that’s long been a huge fan of no shortage of wasteful spending.