Court Partially Reverses Trump Attacks On Law That Tried To Make Sure Broadband Deployment Isn’t Racist

from the affordable-fiber-optics-is-woke dept

Earlier this year the Trump administration decided to illegally dismantle the 2021 Digital Equity Act, which was intended to help push internet access into long-neglected parts of the U.S. The Act took very vague aim at digital redlining, or the longstanding practice by telecom giants of refusing to upgrade (or at times even timely repair) broadband service in minority and low-income neighborhoods.

Big ISPs like AT&T have long been caught not only refusing to upgrade or repair broadband access in minority areas of cities like Detroit and Cleveland, but charging minority neighborhoods more money for slower service than their less diverse, more affluent counterparts.

Here’s the thing: the Digital Equity Act barely mentions race; it simply included some vague language stating that deployments and broadband grants must be even and non-discriminatory. The law identified minority status as one of eight nonexclusive indicators of barriers to digital access, while separately prohibiting discrimination in programs receiving funds.

As it has done with numerous other programs of this kind aimed at lowering broadband bills, the Trump administration clumsily — and quite illegally — tried to dismantle the whole law last year, insisting it was somehow racist against white people.

Last week, the DC District Court issued a ruling that allowed the Act to survive, but stripped out the already modest race-based components of the law, declaring them unconstitutional.

Groups like the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, which had done a lot of good studies on broadband redlining, celebrated the decidedly mixed bag:

“We are proud to have pushed to keep the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program alive. This crucial program provides communities across the country not just with access or technology, but the skills, confidence, and pathways necessary to fully participate and thrive in our digital age. We fundamentally object to the government’s position that empowering Black and Brown communities is unconstitutional.“

So the competitive grant program at the heart of the law will continue, but there’s no real consensus on what that will look like or how helpful it will be under a federal government too racist and corrupt to function in the public interest. And there’s not much left to address the very real issue of broadband digital discrimination, which runs parallel with racial discrimination in other U.S. infrastructure sectors like energy.

The Infrastructure Act not only featured $42.5 billion to expand broadband access, it featured a lot of included (and adjacent) legislation intending to address racism in broadband and broadband affordability more generally. Most of that’s been brutally stripped away by the Trump administration, which is instead funneling billions of dollars to Elon Musk for costly Starlink service, then declaring the problem solved.

It’s a lovely bundle of corruption, racism, and regulatory/court capture all thrown into a stew by a bunch of zealots keen to pretend they’re engaging in policy reform and serious legal analysis.

Filed Under: broadband, digital discrimination, digital equite act, fiber, illegal, racism, redlining, ruling, telecom