FCC puts political agenda ahead of regulatory relevance

10 June 2019 by Steve Blum
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Self licking ice cream cone

The Federal Communications Commission is in danger of becoming just another one of Washington, D.C.’s self licking ice cream cones. Some would argue that it has already achieved that exalted status, but until pending court challenges to recent, major decisions – net neutrality and local property rights preemption, particularly – are decided, there’s still hope.

The latest example of hype-over-substance from the FCC’s current republican majority is the annual broadband deployment report that, at times, reads like an update from the old Soviet Union about its latest five year plan for increasing tractor production. Glorious.

Democrats on the commission can be just as political, particularly when they hold the majority, but they aren’t always so (nor, to be fair, are republicans, at least not historically). Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC’s senior democrat, dissented from the report because it 1. relies on bad data, and 2. its standards are set too low…

This report deserves a failing grade…

The claim in this report that there are only 21 million people in the United States without broadband is fundamentally flawed. Consider that another recent analysis concluded that as many as 162 million people across the country do not use internet service at broadband speeds. Adding insult to injury, the same flawed data we rely on here is used to populate FCC broadband maps. For those keeping track, one cabinet official has described those maps as “fake news” and one Senator has suggested they be shredded and thrown into a lake…

It’s time for the FCC to adopt a 100 Megabits per second standard and set Gigabit speeds in our sight.

The FCC’s 2019 broadband deployment report sets a low standard – 25 Mbps download/3 Mbps upload speeds – and inflates service providers’ availability reports by assuming that if one person in a census block has access to a given speed level – the FCC’s standard for such reports – then everyone does. Rosenworcel is correct: the 2019 report doesn’t quantify the reality of broadband deployment in the U.S. And it certainly doesn’t justify the FCC’s self congratulatory hype.