In 2021, We Need to Fix America's Internet

Across the country, the Federal Communications Commission and internet service providers are pretending there’s competition in an unimaginable number of places where it doesn’t actually exist. We consistently pay more than Europe regardless of speed, according to a fascinating, approachable study you should read from the New America think tank. In fact, we pay roughly double that of Europe at the 100Mbps and 1,000Mbps tiers, and eight to 17 times more to rent a modem on average than Asia and Europe do, respectively. Only one US city cracked the top ten in affordability but only because it had an ace up its sleeve: a municipal fiber-optic network erected by the city itself, where ISPs provide their services across fiber that the residents themselves own. Those sorts of municipal networks create competition that simply doesn’t exist in many places in the US because it wasn’t designed to exist. In places that do erect municipal networks, New America shows that both speed and affordability far outpace the rest of the US. That’s why it’s a real shame many states (and telecom lobbyists) have erected roadblocks to keep those municipal networks from spreading. We need competition. We need accurate maps to clearly see just how little competition there actually is, and we need to change the laws to let citizens fed up with being unserved and underserved build their own networks instead. We need those maps to show how much people actually pay. We need to stop pouring taxpayer money into hugely profitable telecoms that claim they’ll build out internet access, since they’ve found they can often just straight-up lie or wait to be sued instead of fulfilling their obligations.