We Need Broadband Internet for All

Nearly half of Americans do not have an internet connection that meets minimum broadband speeds. Moreover, a staggering number of poor people of color do not have home internet access of any kind. And, across the board, Americans are charged some of the highest prices for internet service in the developed world. These are all symptoms of a much larger, structural problem: the corporate capture of the pipes, wires, and other infrastructure that powers the internet. As the fog of neoliberalism begins to lift and the horizons of political possibility extend forward, we should not be satisfied with dithering at the edges of the vast empires of cable and telecom monopolies. This requires not just rearguard critique of the existing communications order, but an affirmative vision of what a more democratic communication system that operates outside of the market would like.

There are strong signs that we are at the beginning of such a reckoning: in recent months, the UK Labour Party, Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and, most recently, Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have all unveiled ambitious plans to create publicly-owned broadband internet networks. Taken together, this troika of plans represents a growing rejection of what was once seen as commonsense: that internet access can only be provided by large corporations such as Comcast and Verizon, unsavory as they may be. Sen Sanders’ High-Speed Internet for All plan proceeds along three broad dimensions of action: imposing strict public interest regulations on behemoths like Comcast, using antitrust legislation to break them up, and creating publicly-owned alternatives to corporate ISPs. The latter is the most transformative plank of Sanders’ Internet for All platform, and is also the one emphasized most heavily in the proposal. We should ultimately at least have a “public option” for internet service that is available to everybody regardless of their city, state, or zip code. After all, the internet was invented thanks to massive public investment: it should be returned to its rightful owners.

[David Elliot Berman is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-author of After Net Neutrality: A New Deal for the Digital Age. This article was originally published Dec. 23, 2019]