However, in the last few decades the FCC has gotten a lot more partisan. It’s becoming rare to see a policy vote that doesn’t follow party lines. This isn’t true of everything and we see unanimous FCC Commissioner support for things like providing more spectrum for broadband. But FCC voting on any topic that has political overtones now seem to follow party lines.
The most recent example of the increased partisanship is evident with the release of this year’s 2018 Broadband Deployment Report to Congress. In that report Chairman Pai decided to take the stance that the state of broadband in the country is fine and needs no FCC intervention. The FCC is required to determine the state of broadband annually and report the statistics and its conclusions to Congress. More importantly, Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires that the FCC must take proactive steps to close any perceived gaps in broadband coverage.
In order to declare that the state of broadband in the country doesn’t require any further FCC action, Chairman Pai needed to come up with a narrative to support his conclusion. The argument he’s chosen to defend his position is a bit startling because by definition it can’t be true.
The new broadband report, released on February 9 concludes that “advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. . . This finding does not mean that all Americans now have broadband access. Rather, it means that we are back on the right track when it comes to deployment“. The kicker comes in when the report says that the FCC’s data from ISPs “does not yet reflect the beneficial effects of the Commission’s actions in 2017,” such as “ending the adverse impact on investment caused by the [2015 Net Neutrality] Order. . . For instance, several companies, including AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, and Alaska Communications either commenced or announced new deployments in 2017.”
In effect, the FCC now says that broadband deployment is back on track due to its December 2017 net neutrality repeal. But the ‘facts’ it cites don’t support its argument. First, any broadband improvements made by the cited telcos in 2017 would have been authorized and started in 2016 before this new FCC even was in place. Further, a big percentage of the recent broadband deployments of these particular telcos are due to earlier FCC decisions prior to the Pai FCC. For example, AT&T was required as a requirement of the purchase of DirectTV to pass 12 million new residences and businesses with fiber. A lot of the broadband spending made by AT&T, Frontier and Alaska Communications are using CAF II funds given to them by the Wheeler FCC and which the companies are required to spend. None of those expenditures have anything to do with the repeal of net neutrality. And since net neutrality was only reversed a few months ago, it’s impossible to believe that any of the broadband spending in 2017 was due to this FCC. It’s far too early to see if that order will have any impact on rural broadband expenditures (something no industry experts expect).
This FCC Broadband Report concludes that deployment of broadband in the country is on track and reasonable. Yet the numbers in the report show that there are still 19 million Americans in rural America without access to adequate broadband. There are 12 million school-aged children who are suffering from the homework gap because they don’t have broadband at home.
By declaring that broadband deployment is adequate, Chairman Pai has let his FCC off the hook for having to take any actions to address the issue. But his stated reasons are based upon an argument that is clearly not supported by any facts. This would seem to put the Chairman in violation of his Section 706 obligations, although that’s probably something only Congress can determine.
I’m saddened to see the FCC become so partisan. This is not a new phenomenon and we saw partisan voting under the last several FCCs. Before that we had pro-big business FCCs such as the one under Chairman Michael Powell. But that FCC was far less partisan and still basically used the facts at its disposal in making decisions and setting policy.
The FCC has a mandate to balance what’s good for both the public and the telecom companies. In an ideal world the FCC would be a neutral arbiter that listens to the facts and sides with the best arguments. This trend towards a partisan FCC is bad for the industry because it means that major policies will flip-flop when we change administrations – and that’s not good for ISPs or the public. Partisanship does not excuse this FCC from abrogating its responsibility and making specious arguments not supported by facts. This FCC has taken partisanship too far.