Joe Biden’s campaign agreed to a skeletal broadband policy in what amounts to a peace treaty with Bernie Sanders and his supporters. The “unity task force recommendations” published on Wednesday amount to little more than a declaration that broadband is good, but it’s the first time that Biden has explicitly signed on to any conventional democratic party positions on telecommunications policy.
The document has the usual nice words about broadband being essential to life in the 21st century, with the standard nod to education. It makes a constitutionally dubious pledge to remove state bans on municipal broadband projects and to spend money on all types of infrastructure, including, particularly, muni broadband.
Network neutrality gets a mention. The “recommendations” propose to…
Restore the FCC’s clear authority to take strong enforcement action against broadband providers who violate net neutrality principles through blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, or other measures that create artificial scarcity and raise consumer prices for this vital service.
Presumably, what they really mean is that Biden will appoint FCC commissioners who will use the “clear authority” that already exists. Which means policy ping pong will continue. During the Obama administration, the democratic majority on the Federal Communications Commission classified broadband as a regulated common carrier service. The Trump administration’s republican led FCC said it wasn’t.
The recommendations don’t explicitly promise to restore broadband’s common carrier status. There are other ways of imposing net neutrality obligations on Internet service providers, as California discovered. Initially, the Obama era FCC proposed a no lobbyist left behind approach that would have allowed monopoly model incumbents to negotiate permission for decidedly non-neutral network management practices.
Direct intervention by the Obama white house put an end to that pretence. Whether a Biden administration would do the same is an open question. Biden has enjoyed a long and comfortable political career in a system fuelled by, and largely subservient to, cash from corporations and labor unions. The peace treaty with Sanders doesn’t change that reality.