Competition/Antitrust

Current levels of broadband deployment subsidies should be maintained or increased over the next five years, but policymakers will need to change the way these subsidies are distributed. The base for the Universal Service Fund needs to be broadened and made sustainable. Except in the most remote areas, the standard for publicly subsidized broadband networks should be set at 1 Gbps symmetrical or higher to ensure that public investments will be usable for a generation or longer.

Lawmakers and industry groups are jockeying to shape the broadband internet investments likely to be embedded in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure efforts. Senior Democrats like House Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) are eyeing a revival of their $100 billion package aimed at connecting the unconnected and funding programs to bolster digital equity, which is likely to take center stage in coming weeks. But Republicans, bless their hearts, bristle over bigger price tags and instead point to less costly ways to close the digital divide.

The ongoing challenge of regulatory oversight in an era of rapid technological change is to maintain the flexibility to deal with unanticipated developments. What is essential for the future of meaningful net neutrality, therefore, is the agility to adjust to new technology and new marketplace behaviors.

Sens Susan Collins (R-ME) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV) introduced the American Broadband Buildout Act (ABBA), a bipartisan bill to ensure that rural Americans have access to broadband services at speeds they need to fully participate in the modern society and economy. The legislation would help close the “digital divide” between urban and rural America by providing up to $15 billion in matching grants to assist states and state-approved entities build the “last-mile” infrastructure to bring high-speed broadband directly to homes and businesses in areas that lack it.The American Broadband Buildout

We evaluate the impact of mobile operator mergers on the unit price of data and voice by using country-level observations on retail revenue for data, cellular data traffic, retail revenue for voice, and outgoing voice minutes. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we estimate the effect of operator merger by comparing the difference between the non-merging countries and the merging countries before and after the introduction of the operator merger.

AT&T and Frontier have let their copper phone networks deteriorate through neglect since 2010, resulting in poor service quality and many lengthy outages, a report commissioned by the California state government found. Customers in low-income areas and areas without substantial competition have fared the worst, the report found. AT&T in particular was found to have neglected low-income communities and to have imposed severe price increases adding up to 152.6 percent over a decade.

Comcast is delaying a plan to enforce its 1.2TB data cap and overage fees in the Northeast US until 2022 after pressure from customers and lawmakers in multiple states. Comcast has enforced the data cap in 27 of the 39 states in which it operates since 2016, but not in the Northeast states where Comcast faces competition from Verizon's un-capped FiOS fiber-to-the-home service. In Nov 2020, Comcast announced it would bring the cap to the other 12 states and DC starting in Jan 2021.

On February 17, the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a hearing on COVID-19's impact on the digital divide and the homework gap. There was bipartisan agreement on the importance of expanding broadband access. Democrats focused more on affordability issues, especially during the pandemic, as well as improving data on where broadband is available and where it isn't. Republicans mostly extolled deregulation as a way to encourage rural broadband deployment and the need to streamline wireless infrastructure to facilitate buildout of the next generation of wireless, 5G.

Early in 2008, a group of people living in east-central Vermont, who understood the importance of the Internet to economic development, decided to act independently. They formed ECFiber, the EC standing for East-Central Vermont, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation with the goal of providing fiber access to every premises in 23 contiguous towns and one municipality in central Vermont. At the end of 2020, almost all of the roads in the original 23 towns have been provisioned with fiber.

House Republicans have unveiled their plan for "boosting" broadband connectivity and competition, and one of the key planks is prohibiting states and cities from building their own networks. Rep Billy Long (R-MO) is the lead sponsor. The bill "would promote competition by limiting government-run broadband networks throughout the country and encouraging private investment," without explaining how limiting the number of broadband networks would increase competition.