"Billions for broadband" are about to pour out of Washington. That sounds good, but it is not aligned with the reality faced by many individual states, counties and towns. In rural – as well as some poor urban – areas, the "business model" for private ISPs “prevents” them from offering service. That is to say, they can’t make the minimum profit margins that they require. And they're right. They can't. For these areas (like mine in Maine, one of America's most rural, least wealthy and oldest-in-average-age states), the result is no choice of ISP. If we accept the mantra of post-COVID America that fiber broadband is essential to 21st century living (education, remote work, telehealth, entertainment and the rest), then we have to find a solution to this problem that affects huge swaths of both urban and rural America. 

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society has identified the solution: public-private partnerships where public entitles – mostly states, counties and towns – work with private ISPs to "top up" service in unserved or underserved areas. The "public" part of this new kind of collaboration would rely on towns, groups of towns and counties adopting the "municipal broadband" model and working with existing and prospective internet service providers. Municipal broadband has been demonstrated in dozens of counties, towns and zip code tracts in larger cities to be the best way to provide high-quality broadband to unserved and underserved areas. Both Congress and the relevant executive branch agencies that will be responsible for the management of allocating funds need to adopt clear, strict rules directing that these public-private partnerships be fully explored. Examples of ways to do this include giving preference to public-private partnership funding requests, requiring a certain percentage of all taxpayer monies to flow to public entities and requiring fully transparent, public processes in the decisions to allocate such taxpayer funds.  

[Steven Koltai is a member of the Lincolnville, Maine, and Midcoast, Maine, Broadband Committees, a research affiliate at MIT’s Center for International Studies and a non-resident senior fellow in the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution.]

The Biden administration's push to increase competition in the technology industry could be on a collision course with a formidable obstacle: the courts. As president, Donald Trump appointed 226 federal judges, leaving a huge mark on the judicial system, particularly appellate courts. Conservative judges on benches across the country tend to take a narrower view of antitrust law focused on proving "consumer harm" to justify antitrust enforcement. Proponents of taking antitrust measures against Big Tech were dealt a huge blow last month when a federal district judge dismissed the Federal Trade Commission's December complaint against Facebook, which asked the court to unwind Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp, among other things. As the FTC's experience has shown, strong action targeting Big Tech will be hard to sustain without legislation according to Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. "Even before the influx of new Trump judges and Justices, the courts have been getting tougher and tougher on economic regulation issues," he said. Despite the headwinds, Schwartzman added that agencies still have a chance of winning in appellate courts by building strong factual records and staying within the lines of legal precedent.

Few probably would have guessed that the telecommunications industry would still be waiting around in late July for the Biden Administration to name a permanent Federal Communications Commission chair, but that’s where things stand. One name that has been floated in recent weeks is that of long-time public activist Gigi Sohn [a senior fellow at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society], who was on the staff of former Chairman Tom Wheeler and led the consumer group Public Knowledge for more than a decade. While analysts cite Acting FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel as the slight favorite for permanent chair due to her current interim position and Democratic connections, they believe Sohn and Free Press CEO Jessica González are in the mix. A possible compromise scenario would be Rosenworcel for chair and a progressive for the open Democratic seat. Parul Desai, a former FCC staffer with activist roots, may also be a candidate.