The FCC has long run an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called the Universal Service Fund. The historically bipartisan program has long been funded by a fee on traditional phone lines. But with traditional phone lines dying, there’s been a long, ongoing discussion about how to best continue to fund the program.
The program has certainly seen fraud and abuse (much, much improved in more recent years). But it’s also done a mammoth amount of good getting neglected communities connected to the internet. A lot of folks like to singularly focus on the former to support the belief that government is always inherently bad.
The program is definitely in need of reform. Enter Republicans, who aren’t so much interested in how to fix the program, as they are redirecting taxpayer funds to their friends at companies like AT&T. Republicans insist they have the fix: to impose a massive new tax on “woke” tech companies and services (read: you), then give it to telecom giants like AT&T with a long, proud history of subsidy fraud.
The Trumplican-stacked Fifth Circuit court of appeals has proposed a novel solution to the USF problem: they’ve simply ruled the entire program unconstitutional (pdf), throwing efforts to actually fix it into chaos. The ruling, which ignored past Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent, effectively declared the USF an unconstitutional, illegal tax, something seven court dissenters said was a preposterous leap.
Now the Supreme Court has stated they’ll hear the case, which will ultimately determine whether federal efforts to expand broadband access to poor, rural neglected communities is effectively illegal or not:
“The last time the Supreme Court invoked what is known as the non-delegation doctrine to strike down a federal law was in 1935. But several conservative justices have suggested they are open to breathing new life into the legal doctrine.”
The disruption to the USF and E-Rate — which focuses on connecting school and library broadband — could be massive.
Trump 2.0 will be a corruption-fueled effort to dismantle the federal regulatory state, something the press refuses to cover with any sense of urgency or alarm. All dressed up as “populist” reform despite being decidedly unpopular among those who’ll field the brunt of the harm. This fight over the USF is just one of countless cases trying to dismantle everything from federal consumer protection to labor rights.
This particular effort to “reform the USF” is framed by Republicans as a serious, good faith effort at saving taxpayer money and helping rural Americans. But the lawsuit at the heart of this was spearheaded by a Republican fake consumer group named Consumers’ Research, whose website encourages people to report “woke” companies for making bare-bone efforts at empathy and inclusivity.
Don’t worry about the USF though! Republicans have a “fix” they’ll be pushing heavily in the new year. It involves imposing steep new taxes on “woke” tech companies and their services (passed directly on to you in the form of higher bills for Netflix or YouTube), then throwing it into the lap of giant telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast. And away from more popular alternatives like community broadband, cooperatives, or city-owned utilities.
AT&T and friends have been priming the pump on this plan for several years with the help of the FCC’s Brendan Carr, who will now be in charge of the FCC under Trump. Again, his plan to offload billions from Big Tech to Big Telecom to “fix rural broadband” will be framed by the press as a good faith effort to repair a broken program, but the Republican animosity toward the poor is palpable, and the last time Carr and Trump were in charge of a government broadband subsidy program it went… extremely poorly.
With control of the Presidency, both Houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, I suspect we’ll see more than a few of these “telecom reform” efforts that are more about creating giant new slush funds for AT&T than any serious reform. And, as per tradition, a lot of corrupt Democrats, and a feckless U.S. journalism industry, will be extremely eager to help prop up the façade.
