Trump FCC Weakens U.S. Broadband Speed Goals To The Benefit Of Elon Musk And Comcast

from the who-needs-standards? dept

I’ve spent the better part of a lifetime studying and writing about the way corrupted lawmakers and U.S. telecom giants work hand in hand to erode U.S. broadband standards and mapping so they can obscure the way corruption and monopoly result in limited broadband competition — resulting in shitty, expensive, spotty, and slow U.S. internet access (check out my Techdirt/Copia paper about it).

The Trump administration has certainly been no exception. After some modest improvements in broadband mapping and standards made possible by the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Trump administration has been working overtime to revert things right back to the status quo (read: shitty and broken).

Case in point: this week the administration abandoned the FCC’s goal to nudge broadband connectivity toward 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) downstream and 500 megabit per second (Mbps) upstream, a dramatic improvement to the FCC’s current base definition of 100 Mbps downstream, 20 Mbps upstream.

FCC boss Brendan Carr falsely claimed in a statement that this downgrade was necessary because the faster standard was not “technologically neutral,” and having higher standards would be an overreach for the agency:

“As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we adopt our proposal from the Notice [of Inquiry] to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500 Mbps established in the 2024 Report,” the order said. “A long-term goal is not mentioned in Section 706 and could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner. At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences.”

I hope you’ll notice that Brendan Carr has absolutely no problem violating or ignoring the law when it comes time to censor free speech or destroy U.S. media consolidation limits, but when it comes time to push giant U.S. telecom monopolies to try harder, or to enforce any meaningful consumer protections (like net neutrality), Carr is always suddenly concerned with taking things too far.

The downgrade was part of the FCC’s annual Section 706 Report (required by Congress), in which the captured agency unsurprisingly declares that U.S. broadband deployment is great and there’s really nothing that needs fixing.

Why is Carr suddenly concerned about having high standards? Well, a 1 Gbps goal would cause problems for Elon Musk, whose increasingly-congested Starlink low-Earth orbit satellite broadband system will struggle to reach that goal. While Starlink is great for remote users with no other options, it’s generally too congested to scale and is too expensive for people most in need. It’s also run by a white supremacist.

That hasn’t stopped Republicans from hijacking huge swaths of the $42.5 billion set aside for broadband access and redirecting it to Elon (see my feature at The Verge from last June). A lot of that money is being redirected away from better, faster, community-owned fiber networks or cooperatives, and toward a billionaire in exchange for much slower and more expensive LEO satellite service he planned to deploy anyway. Musk is poised to see a multi-billion dollar windfall for doing nothing differently.

The FCC’s abandoned gigabit speed goals is also of benefit to giant cable monopolies like Comcast, whose lack of network investment has long resulted in dated upstream speeds.

I’ve long covered how even pushing the FCC to adopt the faster 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up speed standard took more than a decade due to lobbying pressure. Big ISPs have also endlessly undermined efforts to more accurately map U.S. broadband access, well aware that better data would only serve to highly monopoly domination and private telecom market failure.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, elon musk, fcc, fiber, gigabit, infrastructure, internet access, maps, slow