For more than a year and a half, the nation’s top telecommunications regulator has been stuck in limbo, thanks to a combination of federal dysfunction and industry lobbying. Now the nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC is facing a full frontal assault by telecom monopolies dedicated to preventing the agency from standing up to monopoly power.

After an inexplicable nine-month delay, President Biden nominated consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to the FCC late last year. Sohn, Co-Founder and CEO of consumer group Public Knowledge and a former advisor to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, is well versed in media and telecom policy, and broadly popular across both sides of the aisle. 

Yet since her belated nomination, Sohn has been met with a bevy of telecom, media-industry, and politically constructed allegations designed to derail her nomination, ranging from false claims that she’d harm rural America, manufactured allegations that she hates police, and false assertions that she’s looking to censor conservative voices in media. 

All of these efforts serve one function: to ensure the nation’s top telecommunications regulator remains mired in partisan gridlock and a 2-2 commissioner voting split. Without a clear voting majority, the agency can’t embrace reforms that are widely popular with the public, whether that’s restoring the FCC’s consumer protection authority, or restoring recently-discarded media consolidation rules.

It also prevents the restoration of net neutrality rules designed to protect consumers and competitors from the whims of telecom monopolies. A recent poll out of the University of Maryland indicates that a broad, bipartisan majority...

This week on the podcast we're joined by Berin Szoka, President of TechFreedom, to talk about the pressing broadband issues of today and tomorrow. Christopher and Berin share what they see as the biggest barriers to universal, high-quality Internet access today, including the jurisdictional issues facing communities large and small, as well as the regulatory solutions which would facilitate more rapid and efficient infrastructure deployment.

They debate whether we should spend public dollars not just on rural broadband where there are no options, but in town centers with slowly degrading copper networks where monopoly providers have signaled little intent to ever upgrade that infrastructure.

Christopher and Berin then dive into an issue Berin has been working on for the past few years: the Section 230 debate, and what it means for the future of the Internet if content platforms become liable for the third-party content they host.

This show is 51 minutes long and can be played on this page or via iTunes or the tool of your choice using this feed. You can listen to the interview on this page or visit the Community Broadband Bits page.

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Last week, House Republicans introduced a bill package ostensibly to promote broadband expansion and competition across the country. In reality, the legislation is a wish list of monopoly cable and telephone companies that will protect them from competition and decrease their accountability to the public. It would also ban communities from building their own networks or engaging in public-private partnerships.

A Rights of Way Free-for-All

About a third of the bills in the Boosting Broadband Connectivity Agenda would preempt regulations (including application timelines and fee schedules) set by government subdivisions on wireless deployment. The major mobile carriers are already in the process of slowly rolling out 5G networks which will require the installation of hundreds of thousands of small-cell sites over the next several years. AT&T spent more than $23 billion on the recently concluded 3.7 GHz C-band auction, with T-Mobile spending $9.3 billion. Verizon outspent every other bidder combined at $45 billion. Establishing shorter shot clocks and maximum fees for the installation of new hardware in public Rights of Way would simultaneously reduce the income municipalities receive and lead to the proliferation of poles and attachments across the country with limited public input. We’ve already seen how it has negatively impacted cities like Milwaukee and Tucson. 

Another handful of bills in the package would remove environmental or historic preservation regulations for wireless and wireless providers. If passed, they would exempt from review new or replacement facilities installed in public Rights of Way and those less than 50 feet tall (or ten feet taller than surrounding buildings), as well as remove protections so that telecommunications facilities can be installed on federal lands. 

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On Episode 265 of the Techdirt podcast, Sonic CEO Dane Jasper joins host Mike Masnik to talk about how the broadband market in the United States is a failed competitive market, how the regulatory environment brought us from a place with thousands of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to one where the vast majority of households have just one or two options at basic broadband speeds of 25/3 Megabits per second (Mbps), the arbitrariness of imposing usage caps and future of net neutrality, and the array of other interrelated issues that will dictate the way Internet access looks over the next decade.

Listen to it here.

Happy Holidays!