The FCC Disqualified Some Rural Communities from Receiving Internet Funding After Some Companies Said They Already Have Internet

The Federal Communications Commission is about to hold an auction used to dole out grants to companies to build internet in rural America. But now, a bunch of items are off the block: Companies and co-ops, big or small, will no longer be able to apply for money to build internet infrastructure in many of these regions, because Big Telecom says there’s already internet there.

At the end of 2017, the FCC released the final list of areas in the country that are eligible for grant money under the Connect America Fund—a grant program that provides subsidies to businesses willing to build internet infrastructure in some of the country’s hardest-to-serve areas. This was an update to the preliminary list released in 2016, but with several regions no longer eligible for funding. The data the agency used to make this decision was based on 477 forms—semi-annual filings that telecom companies have to submit, indicating their service coverage areas—which eliminated wide swaths of rural communities across the country. The end result is that some rural areas of the country will be ineligible for the grants even though they might need them.