from the this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things dept
As recently noted, New York State now has a law requiring that ISPs (with more than 20,000 subscribers) offer low-income state residents a 25 Mbps broadband tier for $15. Big Telecom didn’t much like that, but their efforts to kill the law, first passed in 2021, fell apart when the Supreme Court refused to hear their challenge.
But despite several years of legal battles, New York officials don’t appear all that interested in actually enforcing the new law so far. As a result journalists like Jon Brodkin over at Ars Technica have been left with the job of reminding ISPs in the state they’re violating the law.
One Charter customer who qualifies for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the low cost tier tried to apply at Charter (Spectrum) and was refused. Ars had to not only bully the broadband provider to comply, they had to bully them to change their website to adhere with the law, since the ISP was already carving out strange exceptions for who qualifies:
“We followed up with Optimum’s PR team, and they had to intervene a second time to make sure the company gave O’Brien what he’s entitled to under the law. The company also updated its marketing materials after we pointed out that its Optimum Advantage Internet webpage still said the low-income plan wasn’t available to current customers, former users who disconnected less than 60 days ago, and former customers whose accounts were “not in good standing.” The New York law doesn’t allow for those kinds of exceptions.”
Charter is, if you recall, the ISP that almost got kicked out of New York State entirely a few years ago after lying to regulators about its broadband coverage after it merged with Time Warner Cable. It generally doesn’t offer broadband access because it has lobbied relentlessly to ensure it sees very little competition.
AT&T has protested to the New York state law by performatively pulling their home 5G service from the state entirely (they only offered it to around 2% of the population in the first place). The threat is: if you make us provide affordable broadband, we’ll make a market we’ve already broken, worse.
Big Telecom has paid big money to enjoy captured “regulatory oversight” at both the federal and state level. They’ve had great success leveraging Trumpism to wage war on pretty much any sort of federal broadband consumer protection. In many states, they all but own the state legislature, ensuring there’s very little competition or oversight in between them and predatory behavior.
So New York state is kind of an outlier. And it teeters into an era that Big Telecom hates more than anything, “rate regulation.” But again, this is a byproduct of their own actions: telecom’s attack on coherent federal oversight has resulted in a scattershot state-by-state approach. And their relentless lobbying attack on meaningful competition is what’s driving up costs in the first place.
As always, none of this would be necessary if U.S. state and federal regulators weren’t too corrupt to tackle the real underlying problem: corruption-coddled giant telecom monopolies crushing competition and oversight to the detriment of healthy markets, labor, and consumers.
Filed Under: 5g, affordable, broadband, cable, high speed internet, low income, new york, telecom
Companies: charter
