Coalition Letter Opposes Biden Administration Push for Broadband Rate Regulation

We, the undersigned advocates for responsible government, write to express our concern with the Biden Administration’s blatant disregard for Congressional intent in its attempts to impose price controls on broadband Internet access service. These attempts exhibit a pattern of behavior whereby Administration officials say one thing while doing the opposite. In the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), Congress spoke its bipartisan will: there shall be no rate regulation of broadband. Indeed, the bill as signed by the president included an amendment expressly prohibiting rate regulation. It is alarming that despite the letter and spirit of the law, and multiple statements from Administration officials opposing rate regulation—including statements under oath—that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) continues to impose price-setting measures through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. The first sign of a disconnect between Congress’s written word and NTIA’s implementation of the law was the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) that the agency released in 2022. The NOFO required states to include a “middle class affordability plan,” even though Congress included no such requirement in the statute.  While NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson has, on multiple occasions, stressed that states will have “flexibility” in implementing BEAD plans pursuant to the NOFO, in practice, that has not been the case. In Sept 2023 during a session on Virginia’s BEAD plan, Chandler Vaughn, Broadband Policy Analyst at Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development, indicated that the state sought the flexibility not to rate regulate gigabit broadband plans. However, NTIA communicated that the state must do so. He said, “We were pointed back to the NOFO and politely told that that was the way we are to score affordability criteria … how close you are to a hundred dollars on that price point.” In other words, states are required to rate regulate—and NTIA will make sure they do so.