When Comcast’s Business As Usual Turns Out to Limit Minority Access

[Commentary] Late in Jan, CTC Technology & Energy, an independent consulting firm that had been retained by the state of Connecticut, released a report that included some shocking stories about business connectivity in Hartford (CT), the capital of the state. Connecticut has the highest per capita income of all fifty states. Hartford is largely black (38%) and Hispanic (43%). Connecticut as a whole is mostly white (69%). CTC found that high-quality fiber and cable high-speed Internet access services did exist close to the business locations in Hartford that the firm visited. But close doesn’t mean connected. And the businesses CTC talked to said that they’d have to pay sky-high amounts to Comcast to get hooked up — and after that it would cost them enormous monthly fees to have a persistent connection.

For all my own inveighing in the past few years against the unconstrained power of Comcast in America, I’ve always said the company is acting rationally — it’s not, itself, evil. Plutocrats are not necessarily prejudiced. But Comcast is a dividend-generating machine, an ATM with lawyers on top, whose reasonable, presumably benevolent actions over time are resulting in grave problems for areas that just “happen” to be non-white. Does motivation excuse consequences? What will America do about the reality that a basic utility — world-class access to the Internet — may be prohibitively expensive for businesses in low-income-area buildings Comcast has chosen not to serve? The answer is cheap, open wholesale fiber networks in every neighborhood and city — facilities that, just like street grids, enable retail competition to thrive.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School]