One of the federal government’s most ambitious broadband targets may soon be abandoned. On August 7, the FCC will vote on a proposal to drop its goal of gig speeds for every American.
In March last year, the Democratic-led group voted to raise the definition of minimum broadband speeds from 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speed to 100/20Mbps. It also set a more ambitious long-term goal of increasing the benchmark to 1,000Mbps download and 500Mbps upload speed.
Trump’s pick for FCC chair, Brendan Carr, has consistently advocated for a “technology neutral” approach to broadband subsidies. There’s only one broadband technology that can currently reach 1,000/500Mbps, and that’s fiber internet.
Carr’s proposal repeatedly points to the previous, Democrat-led FCC’s goals as outside the bounds of Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which requires the FCC to “encourage the deployment” of telecommunications service “on a reasonable and timely basis” to all Americans.
“Not only is a long-term goal not mentioned in section 706, but maintaining such a goal risks skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers,” Carr’s plan says.
While Carr was critical of the increase to the minimum broadband threshold when it passed last year, there is no mention of rolling back the 100/20Mbps requirement.
Changes in how we measure broadband progress
Another notable departure from the 2024 report is how the FCC could measure broadband deployment going forward. Last year, for example, the Commission determined that 7% of Americans did not have access to 100/20Mbps speeds. Carr’s proposal argues that this is a flawed way to measure progress toward closing the digital divide.
It all hinges on one key sentence used in Section 706: “The Commission shall determine whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.”
Carr’s proposal argues that the FCC has been (wrongly) measuring where broadband has been deployed already, not where it is in the process of being deployed.
“We believe that the prior Report’s binary interpretation of the threshold for issuing a passing or failing grade in the ultimate section 706 finding effectively read the ‘reasonable and timely’ language out of the statute,” Carr’s proposal says. “That interpretation seemingly found anything short of 100% was insufficient to warrant a passing grade and thus disregarded Congress’s use of the present progressive tense in ‘is being deployed.’”
The interpretation of that phrase could have huge repercussions. Section 706 requires that if broadband is not being deployed to all Americans, the FCC must “accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition.”
With $42.5 billion in federal funding through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program currently being deployed to states, the FCC can reasonably argue that broadband is in the process of being deployed to all Americans. If the question was whether all Americans have access to broadband speeds — as the Democratic-led FCC previously interpreted — the answer would be a resounding no, and the FCC would be required to take concrete action to achieve that goal.
Broadband affordability is no longer an FCC goal
It’s easy to miss the affordability aspect in Carr’s proposal, but it could have far-reaching impacts. It says that the previous FCC read “several extraneous universal service criteria” into section 706. In a footnote to that sentence, it defines these criteria as “deployment, adoption, affordability, availability and equitable access.”
In last year’s report, the FCC determined that, “The legislative history of section 706 further supports the view that Congress expects us to examine more than physical availability, and explicitly identifies affordability in describing the goals of section 706.”
Carr vehemently disagreed with this interpretation, writing in a dissenting statement, “That cannot be right. For one, those terms appear nowhere in Section 706.”
Most broadband experts agree that cost is the main reason people don’t have home internet, not a lack of availability. That was borne out when 23 million Americans enrolled in the Affordable Connectivity Program, a federal subsidy to help low-income families pay for internet that expired one year ago.
“As folks in this space like to say, if it’s not affordable, it’s not accessible,” Sean Gonsalvez, a director of communication with the advocacy group The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told me in a previous interview.
A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that one in five people who don’t have a broadband subscription cited cost as the main reason — the highest of any answer and well above the number who said service isn’t available. Another study found that “for every American without broadband service available, up to twice as many have service available but still don’t subscribe.”
Even though affordability was outlined as a goal in last year’s report, the previous FCC did not make much progress on the issue. Instead, it’s been largely left up to states to legislate.
In New York, for example, internet providers are required to offer low-income residents plans as low as $15 per month. In mid-December, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the law. One month later, AT&T announced it would be removing access to its AT&T Internet Air service in New York.
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