Study: 76% Of U.S. Residents Want Government To Do Something About Soaring Broadband Prices

A new U.S. News And World Report survey of 2,500 Americans across the five most populous U.S. states (PA, TX, NY, CA, and FL) found that U.S. broadband prices continue to soar for most users. Most of the survey’s findings aren’t surprising; broadband access costs are reaching $100 for most users, and Americans continue to pay some of the highest rates for access in the developed world.

As usual the study doesn’t bother to actually explain why (lest industry get offended): regional monopolies, protected by regulatory capture and corruption, routinely carve out uncompetitive regional fiefdoms, from where they face little real pressure to compete on price, speeds, availability, or quality. This lack of competition also incentivizes bad behavior like privacy and net neutrality abuses.

One interesting part of the survey: 76 percent of Americans want the federal government to cap the cost of broadband access. Such “rate regulation” is routinely portrayed as the most extreme sort of draconian anti-free-market overreach by U.S. telecoms and libertarian types, though I can’t recall any point in the last thirty years where it’s been seriously considered by even the more regulation-enthused Democratic party.

“Rate regulation’s” primary function in U.S. telecom policy has been a telecom lobbyist and libertarian think tank bogeyman leveraged to fend off any competent consumer protection enforcement. For example, see how telecoms are using the threat of it to suggest that the FCC’s effort to crack down on harmful and pointless broadband usage caps is somehow “radical rate regulation.”

Once they were informed what it actually is, the survey also found that 86 percent of Americans think the government should restore the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provided a $30 discount off the broadband bills of low-income Americans.

The ACP, formalized by the 2021 infrastructure bill, was killed last April when House Republicans refused to continue funding it, leaving 22 million struggling Americans suddenly facing higher broadband bills. When most press outlets explained why the program was killed, they oddly avoided making it clear it was a Republican decision (again, you wouldn’t want to upset industry by explaining causation clearly).

Now there are multiple (and probably better) ways to fix America’s expensive broadband without restoring to price caps and rate regulation, which, to be clear, are difficult to define, implement, and enforce.

Policymakers could, for example, take direct aim at the roots of consolidated monopoly power by boosting antitrust enforcement, blocking pointless mergers, broadly supporting community owned broadband networks, not letting AT&T dictate the entirety of U.S. policy, and adequately funding federal consumer protection efforts. But most U.S. policymakers can’t even admit monopoly power is a problem, much less propose a solution.

Seriously: find me the last time an FCC official even publicly acknowledged that consolidated power at the hands of AT&T and Comcast harms competition and consumer welfare. Instead, the “solutions” usually involve regulatory performances fixated on “transparency.” Such as the FCC’s new “nutrition labels” that help you clearly see you’re being ripped off, but do nothing about you actually being ripped off.

Republicans have spent the last 40 years crushing any and all consumer protection efforts and letting AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon dictate all state and federal policy, with the expected results. Democrats have spent most of that time saying all the right things about “bridging the digital divide,” yet repeatedly failing to fixate on the core source of the problem: corruption-coddled, consolidated monopoly power.

Democratic FCC regulators, worried about imperiling future political or industry think tank employment opportunities, absolutely adore politely nibbling around the fringes of the actual cause of shitty U.S. broadband. At some point I’d love to live to see an FCC that can even admit that corruption-coddled monopoly power is a serious problem, but I long ago stopped holding my breath.