Dear Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, FCC Ajit Pai, Mike Doyle, Et Al: Follow the Money to Solve the Digital Divide.

First, the only way to fix the Digital Divide is to deal with the fact that America has paid multiple times for fiber optic deployments, upgrades of the state-based telecommunications utilities that are mainly controlled by AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink. Unfortunately, for the most part, the companies never delivered and this, in part, created the Digital Divide. Second, at the core — IRREGULATORS v FCC is new, current challenge to expose one of the largest accounting scandals in American history. We uncovered that the Federal Communications Commission's accounting rules, either by design or happenstance, have been manipulated; they now put the majority of all wired expenses into the state utility’s local service, and this made the entire US wired state-based public utility infrastructure to appear unprofitable. At the same time, it has allowed the companies’ other lines of business, including wireless, or even the internet, to be cross-subsidized, funded by charging local phone customers, and inflating the retail prices of almost all other services, including wireless, broadband or phone service. This must be addressed and fixed immediately, before the FCC completes the dismantling of the state utilities (in conjunction with a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, “ALEC”), shuts off the wired retail services and hands over the publicly-funded state utilities to their wireless (5G) companies as private property for private use, while making sure that the wired and wireless customers pay multiples for all services.

[Bruce Kushnick is the executive director of New Networks Institute]