Team Biden Celebrates Broadband Accomplishments, Yet Is Leaving FCC Nominee Gigi Sohn Hanging Out To Dry

This week the Biden administration spent some time celebrating its accomplishments on broadband. The nation’s about to invest $42 billion in expanding broadband access (even though we still haven’t mapped broadband accurately). The administration also implemented the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which doles out a $30 discount on broadband for qualifying low income households.

In an announcement, team Biden celebrated the fact that it got the nation’s biggest telecom giants to reduce broadband prices $30 for low income Americans:

$30 off broadband access will go a long way in households where affording basic food needs is a challenge. Though it should be noted that several of these companies heralded by the Biden administration abused a previous version of this program to try and upsell struggling Americans to more expensive broadband plans (and faced NO penalty for it).

It should also be noted that the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) effectively takes a limited pool of taxpayer money from the infrastructure bill, gives it to regional monopolies that caused the problem (high prices) in the first place, then lauds those companies for temporarily lowering prices for low income Americans. If you step back a bit you’ll notice this is kind of a weird band aid.

When the press picks up this kind of framing, you’d hardly know that regional monopolies caused most of this problem in the first place by relentlessly crushing competition:

Biden gets credit for fixing a problem (spotty, expensive, monopolized access) this program isn’t actually fixing, and the telecom industry gets credit for heroically helping low income people (who wouldn’t be suffering if they hadn’t monopolized access and crushed competitors in the first place) by passing on taxpayer subsidies to them.

Here’s a fact: U.S. broadband is extremely expensive because of government-sanctioned telecom monopolization and limited competition. The GOP has rubber stamped telecom monopolization at every turn for 40 years. The DNC, which professes to be much better on this subject, is rarely willing to acknowledge these monopolies exist, much less that they’re documentably harmful (seriously, try to find a Democratic FCC official in the last 20 years that has clearly criticized monopolization).

Which is to say you wouldn’t need band-aid low income discount programs if the U.S. government was willing to tackle the actual problem: broadband monopolization and the state and federal corruption that protects it. We not only don’t tackle it, we don’t acknowledge it exists; often framing spotty, expensive Internet access through nebulous, causation-free references to an ambiguous “digital divide.”

One of the leading advocates for monopoly reform is Gigi Sohn, the Biden’s nominee for the empty FCC Democratic Commissioner slot. Sohn was nominated by the Biden team after an inexplicable nine month delay. Sohn has since spent the last 6 months mired in grotesque attacks by the telecom lobby and the obstructionist GOP, without a single word of support from the Biden administration or FCC staffers.

With the GOP’s opposition to Sohn in the bag, the telecom sector is trying to scuttle support for Sohn among Senate Democrats by, among other things, waging covert proxy attacks falsely claiming she’s bad for Hispanics, hates cops, and doesn’t care about rural America. Again, I’ve yet to see a single instance of support for Sohn from the Democratic FCC, Biden administration, or DNC. Not a peep.

The telecom industry’s goal is obvious: scuttle the Sohn nomination to keep the nation’s top telecom regulator mired in 2-2 partisan gridlock so it can’t implement popular telecom monopoly, media consolidation, or consumer protection reform. They’ll eventually support a replacement, centrist Democratic nominee with a general disinterest in genuine monopoly and consolidation reform.

Again, I don’t want to dump on low income broadband discount programs or the $42 billion broadband infrastructure investment because I believe they’re genuinely good things and laudable accomplishments.

But it’s indisputable that the real reason U.S. broadband sucks is due to unaccountable monopolies we’ve let run amok, building regional fiefdoms in which they’re free to deliver spotty, overpriced, unreliable broadband. If you’re unwilling to tackle (or again even address) that problem, and refuse to even defend the reformer you belatedly nominated to a major post — you’re not actually taking the problem seriously.