The Politics of Good Enough

Federal Communications Commission policies geared towards improving rural broadband deployment have failed in meaning, money, and mapping. Together they constitute “the politics of good enough” that has never delivered the broadband rural America needs to survive and thrive. By “meaning,” I refer both to the FCC’s definition of broadband (“25/3”) and its adherence to a policy of technological neutrality. The mapping failure is one that we are all familiar with, with the FCC’s Form 477 capturing self-reported industry data, census block data instead of more granular data, accepting advertised rather than actual speeds, hypothetical rather than actual service, and the lack of pricing data. he money failure refers to the FCC’s historic favoritism of the largest telecommunication companies over the smaller and much more dynamic providers such as co-operatives. The FCC has been so fixated on rapid deployment that it has ignored issues of speed, latency, price, and deployment. It is stuck in a mindset that anything is better than nothing when it comes to broadband in rural America. “Good enough” has become the enemy of great high-performance broadband.

See The Politics of Good Enough: Rural Broadband and Policy Failure in the United States in the International Journal of Communication (Volume 14).

[Christopher Ali is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia and Faculty Research Fellow at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. He is the author of the forthcoming book: Farm Fresh Broadband: the Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press).]