Broadband Monopolies Are Acting Like Old Phone Monopolies. Good Thing Solutions to That Problem Already Exist

The future of competition in high-speed broadband access looks bleak. A vast majority of homes only have their cable monopoly as their choice for speeds in excess of 100 mbps and small ISPs and local governments are carrying the heavy load of deploying fiber networks that surpass gigabit cable networks. Research now shows that these new monopolies have striking similarities to the telephone monopolies of old. But we don’t have to repeat the past; we’ve already seen how laws promoted competition and broke monopolies. In the United States, high-speed fiber deployment is low and slow. EFF decided to look into this problem, and we now have a research report by the Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic (TLPC) on behalf of EFF that details the history of our telecom competition policies, why they came into existence with the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and the Federal Communications Commission’s mistakes—starting in 2005—that eroded the law and has given us a high-speed broadband access monopoly that disproportionately impacts low income and rural Americans.