from the one-for-you,-five-for-me dept
There are more than $42.5 billion in broadband grants headed to the states courtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The GOP voted against the bill, but have repeatedly turned around and taken credit for its looming benefits among our broadly misinformed electorate. And, as we long predicted, they’re now redrafting key components of the program to the direct benefit of Elon Musk.
That was again confirmed by the departure last week of Broadband Equity, Access, And Deployment (BEAD) boss Evan Feinman, who had some pointed words on his way out the door:
“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington.”
Given the problems with past broadband subsidy efforts, BEAD had more than a few conditions. Including requirements that states try to spend taxpayer money on affordable fiber networks wherever possible. And some light conditions that big ISPs at least try to provide one affordable broadband tier for poor Americans if they’re going to take taxpayer money.
Feinman’s letter hints many of these requirements are decorative. I suspect most would have never been enforced in any serious way anyway by our dying regulators. But they’re still being declared “woke” by the Trump administration, which is changing key parts of the grant program to the direct benefit of Elon Musk. They’re even removing “equity” from the name of the program in many states because they’re ignorant bigots.
Under a functional broadband grant program, states would push fiber as deeply into rural communities as possible, ideally in the form of “open access” fiber networks that generate local competition. From there, you’d address the rest of the gaps using fixed wireless and 5G, then fill in the remaining holes with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband options like Starlink.
You’d also spend time to confirm that the companies you’re giving taxpayer money to can actually deliver what they’re promising. The Trump FCC didn’t do that with an earlier program (the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, RDOF), resulting in a whole bunch of companies (including Musk’s Starlink) gaming the system to get money for projects they didn’t deserve or couldn’t finish.
BEAD also required that we improve broadband mapping; you don’t want to throw $42.5 billion dollars at a problem you haven’t managed to measure yet. That last bit is a major reason why the program has been slow to result in real-world access (scheduled to start this year in many states).
But Musk being Musk, and the GOP not really being interested in doing the reading, want to simply throw Starlink at as many Americans as possible, ignoring the service’s congestion problems, high costs, and environmental impact. They want to act as if Starlink is magic, slather their favorite conspiratorial billionaire with subsidies, then declare U.S. broadband effectively fixed to thunderous public applause.
But Starlink struggles to scale without slowdowns. It’s not affordable to the people who need it most. Its customer service is basically nonexistent. Its LEO satellites are not only ruining astronomical research, they’re potentially eroding progress we made repairing the ozone layer. And the company is run by an unabashed white supremacist with a head full of pudding and YouTube conspiracy videos.
Which again is a shame because this amount of broadband grant money is historic. And any grants that get doled out to Musk for Starlink are grants that will need to be taken away from small businesses, local rural providers, popular local cooperatives, or popular local community-owned broadband networks, which tend to be more affordable, and better at serving the needs of their own neighborhoods.
The Trump administration and Musk may find this a more difficult task than they assume. Countless states are already well underway with planning for major fiber expansion, and stealing that money back from locals so it can be thrown at inferior satellite access will piss a lot of people off.
But the effort to game the system is another splash of rank hypocrisy by Musk, who pretends to hate subsidies right up to the point where his companies are showered in them, and claims to hate “government waste and fraud” unless he’s directly and personally involved.
Filed Under: bead, broadband, broadband equity access and deployment, evan feinman, fcc, fiber, grants, ntia, satellite, starlink
Companies: spacex, starlink
