The U.S. Digital Divide Got Measurably Worse After Republicans Killed A Popular Low-Income Broadband Program

Last year Trumplicans killed a popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak.

At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, of course, was that the ACP was popular with their constituents (the majority of ACP participants were in red states) and they didn’t want Dems to take credit during an election season.

A recent report by The Brattle Group actually found that the $7-$8 billion annual taxpayer cost of the program generated between $28.9 and $29.5 billion in savings thanks to expanded access to affordable internet, remote work opportunities, online education tools, and remote telehealth services. In other words: the program more than paid for itself via downstream benefits (something DOGE dudebros and other Trump cultists refuse to think about).

But new data coming out of Ookla indicates that the Republican attack on the ACP had a measurable, harmful impact on the U.S. broadband digital divide. Ookla’s full data shows some progress in connecting urban residents to speeds of at least 100 Mbps, but major problems in shoring up access to rural communities, especially in rural parts of Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Missouri and New Mexico:

“We suspect that some of this [broadband divide] was attributed to the ACP ending,” Sue Marek, editorial director at Ookla and author of the report, told CNET. “We might see some more examples of that by the end of 2025.” 

These are, once again, many parts of the country that tend to vote in favor of Trump. In large part because we’ve been slowly killing off critical journalism and replacing it with either corporatist infotainment or right wing propaganda that obscures the impact of their voting choices.

But the truth is, a lot of recent broadband progress has been made thanks to legislation passed in 2021 that Republicans opposed. That includes the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which included $25 billion in subsidies that have gone to a lot of community-owned or cooperative fiber expansion efforts. In many of those markets, rural users are seeing dirt cheap gigabit fiber access for the first time ever.

We’re also poised to see an infusion of fiber expansion thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill and BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) program, which is leveraging an additional $42.5 billion in subsidies flowing to the states. There’s been some fussing (by both the GOP and pundits like Ezra Klein) about the delays in getting this BEAD money to market; though a big reason for said delays was the need to completely remap U.S. broadband access after years of corruption-plagued policy failure.

BEAD money should start flowing this year, with a high discrepancy state by state based on which party is in control. Republican-controlled state BEAD money is more likely to be thrown in the lap of Elon Musk or AT&T and Comcast. Democrat-controlled state BEAD money is more likely to be leveraged to build open access middle mile networks, fund popular community owned broadband, or bolster local competition.

So U.S. state broadband data in ten years or show should tell a very interesting story.

These programs–from the ACP to ARPA and BEAD–were almost exclusively the byproduct of Democratic policy (not to suggest Democratic broadband policy hasn’t been without its own ugly problems and corruption issues). Republicans voted against all of them — yet will routinely try to take credit for the programs among their local, rural constituents.

Democrats at least make an effort. Republican telecom policy has involved either coddling monopoly power, destroying the regulatory ability to hold shitty telecoms accountable, or taking an illegal wrecking ball to Congressional-passed laws like the Digital Equity Act (which mandated that government and industry must make very basic efforts to ensure affordable broadband is deployed equitably).

Right now, a key priority for the administration is rewriting key parts of the infrastructure bill in a bid to redirect billions of subsidies away from better alternatives to Elon Musk’s expensive, congested, and environmentally harmful Starlink satellite broadband service. And lobotomizing whatever’s left of federal broadband consumer protection standards.

Official Republican policy on telecom is cronyism, corruption and making everything shittier and more expensive to the benefit of a handful of rich men and their companies (see: Ted Cruz’s latest effort to make it harder for rural school kids to get broadband). Yet when you read the vast majority of mainstream corporate journalism on telecom policy, this undeniable fact isn’t made clear to readers or the electorate.

Republicans rarely have to take agency for poor and unpopular telecom policy in most of the U.S. press, even when data repeatedly shows said policies documentably and intentionally harms their own purported constituents. It is, as they say, why we can’t have nice things.