Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Amnesty

I have been asked my opinion several times about Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) amnesty—letting RDOF winners walk away from their obligations without big penalties. There is no easy answer to the question. It’s certainly a timely topic, since we are seeing internet service providers (ISPs) walk away from RDOF. There are several good arguments to be made that favor some kind of amnesty. Inflation spiked shortly after the RDOF auction closed, and making it significantly harder for an RDOF winner to build the markets it won in the auction. Another argument that can be made for amnesty is that RDOF was never enough funding to build rural networks. While RDOF wasn’t a grant program, many companies who took the funding treated is as such. Perhaps the best reason to allow RDOF amnesty is that there is a good chance that anybody asking for amnesty might walk away. The immediate issue with RDOF amnesty is the impact it could have on Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants. It’s completely unfair to states to ask them to toss new locations into the BEAD process at this late date. I believe that at this late stage, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) needs to own the consequences of ISPs abandoning RDOF. The FCC broke RDOF, and whether they allow amnesty or ISPs just walk away, the FCC needs to be the one to fix the problems caused by RDOF defaults.