California Regulators Force Verizon To Do “Woke” Stuff Like Make Sure Broadband Is Semi-Affordable To Poor People

from the basic-accountability-is-woke dept

Last year we reported how Verizon executives happily agreed to be more racist and sexist in exchange for Trump DOJ and FCC approval of their $20 billion merger with telecom giant Frontier Communications. Verizon embarrassingly said they’d cull race and gender equality initiatives, and try harder moving forward to protect downtrodden white people from the scary monster that is diversity.

But California regulators have thrown a few wrinkles into the mix for Verizon. The California CPUC has approved Verizon’s merger request after months of discussions, but required that the company engage in a bunch of stuff the Trump administration has derided as “woke,” such as (gasp) trying to make sure that the heavily taxpayer subsidized company occasionally offers broadband that’s semi-affordable:

“A low-cost Internet plan commitment centers on the Verizon Forward service that offers home Internet for as low as $20 a month. Reynolds said the deal with Verizon “locked in” the $20-per-month plans for low-income consumers for the next 10 years.”

Verizon’s also being required to (double gasp) actually invest in network upgrades to marginalized neighborhoods these companies generally like to neglect:

“At yesterday’s CPUC meeting, Commissioner John Reynolds described Verizon’s commitments. Verizon will deploy fiber to 75,000 new locations within five years, prioritizing census blocks with income at or below 90 percent of the county median, he said. For wireless service, Verizon is required to deploy 250 new cell sites with 5G and fixed wireless capability in areas eligible for state broadband grants and areas with high fire threats, he said.”

Verizon actually doing any of this will, of course, require constant monitoring by the California PUC, something that hasn’t always historically been a strong suit for U.S. regulators. We’ve reported repeatedly how the Trump administration has been waging total war against not just telecom oversight, but literally any effort to make broadband more affordable to the public.

That has even extended to illegally threatening to withhold billions in already awarded infrastructure subsidies to states that attempt to rein in the bad behavior of unpopular telecom giants like Comcast, Verizon, Charter, and AT&T. It’s even involved happily killing popular, bipartisan programs that delivered free Wi-Fi access to schoolchildren, primarily because telecom giants didn’t like it.

You know, real “populist” good faith stuff everybody in long-neglected flyover states were begging for.

Keep in mind this basic attempt to hold Verizon accountable only applies to California. And that’s, again, assuming California regulators hold Verizon accountable for following through.

Most states approved the merger with absolutely no public interest concessions whatsoever, ensuring that Verizon can leverage its even greater scale to dismantle competition, over bill customers in markets with limited broadband options, ignore low-income minority and marginalized communities, and generally behave like a predatory ass.

Because as we all know, doing absolutely anything to inconvenience America’s biggest, shittiest monopolies is woke.

Filed Under: affordability, broadband, california, cpuc, digital divide, doj, fcc, internet access, low income, mergers, telecom, wireless

Companies: verizon