Competition/Antitrust

A Q&A with National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) President and Delaware CIO James Collins.

Sixty percent of farmers say they don't have enough internet connectivity to run their businesses, and that has influenced critical business decisions and overall profitability, according to a recent study funding by the United Soybean Board.

I’d like to outline a few areas of our Universal Service Fund policy that I am currently focused on and address certain matters in need of attention.

Broadband is emerging as a critical campaign issue for the US 2020 presidential election, and there’s good reason: nearly 60 million people in the US do not have broadband service at home. Despite this staggering fact, only four of the 14 presidential candidates we looked at have released fleshed-out policy proposals to expand broadband access (all of them democrats). On the Democratic side, broadband has become a central piece to many rural revitalization plans but as mentioned, only four candidates have released detailed broadband proposals.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai visited Abilene (KS) Memorial Hospital recently to observe how broadband connects the local emergency department with specialists in South Dakota.  “5G promises speeds that are 100 times as fast as 4G LTE,” Chairman Pai said. “The amount of data that you can send wirelessly will be much greater.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai spoke to a group trying to get internet access to more people in Kansas. "Bandwidth needs for rural communities are higher than people think," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said. "There has to be a business case," Chairman Pai said. "There has to be a return on investment. So that, in some cases, requires federal subsidies." "Some people, for example when they think of the internet, they might think, all the person needs to do is to download Netflix," Pai said.

Comcast offered customers in Utah a "lifetime" price guarantee in order to compete against Google Fiber, then later violated the lifetime promise by raising those customers' prices, according to a lawsuit pending in a federal court. "In 2016, Comcast was under intense competitive pressure from Google's high speed fiber-optic data service," the lawsuit says. In Salt Lake City, "Comcast engaged extra sales staff to try to effectively beat the Google Fiber sales staff as they made their way up and down the streets of each neighborhood.

Based on growing signs that platforms are tipping toward monopoly in key market functions, it is very likely that antitrust is not enough of a solution without targeted regulation that opens markets to new competition. Perhaps the most important change we need is competition-expanding regulations that address the  problems antitrust cannot solve.  A new expert regulator equipped by Congress with the tools to promote entry and expansion in these markets could actually expand competition to benefit consumers, entrepreneurship, and innovation.