The Senate Commerce Committee recently passed the Rural Reasonable and Comparable Wireless Act if 2018. The bipartisan bill was co-sponsored by Senators Maggie Hassan (D NH) and Shelly Moore Capito (R WV).

It’s an innocuous bill that would have the FCC compare urban and rural pricing and availability of cellular voice service, cellular broadband service and broadband internet access services. Rather than do this nationwide the bill would gather data in and around the top twenty metropolitan markets. The sponsors of the bill say it will help to close the digital divide and will provide the extra tools the FCC needs to make sure that people in rural communities get a fair shake when with access to mobile broadband.

This sounds great, but the bill does nothing more than require gathering data to point out what we already know – that urban areas have better broadband of all types, landline and cellular. The bill won’t help to close the digital divide or fix any broadband problems because it doesn’t require the FCC to do anything other than gather more data – much of which it already gathers today.

The bill doesn’t require the FCC to take action should coverage gaps be identified (which will happen in every market), and so it’s another toothless broadband bill – it’s what I call addressing the broadband problem by press release. I don’t know anything about these two Senators, but I am sure that in the upcoming elections they, and other Senators who vote for this bill will point at this bill as proof that they are trying to help fix the rural broadband problem. Instead, this bill just spends money to create another big annual report from the FCC and will not try to fix any of the problems causing the rural broadband gap.

I really didn’t intend to bust on this bill when I started writing this blog. But this legislation is another example of the toothless telecom bills we’ve seen out of Congress over the last few decades. The FCC can only do those things that Congress authorizes and Congress could tackle the rural broadband issue. Prior FCC’s have tried to do so, but without a clear edict from Congress the FCC has been forced to concoct complicated legal authority, like Title II regulation to tackle broadband issues.

I’ve seen the public mood shift drastically in the last few years in rural America. People have gone from wanting better broadband to now demanding better broadband and politicians better start listening to their constituents if they want to keep their jobs. Broadband is a non-partisan issue and rural America is ready to listen to anybody who can bring them a broadband solution.

Rural America doesn’t need more reports from the FCC telling them what they don’t have – they need funding to build rural broadband infrastructure. I travel extensively in rural America and I’ve noticed that every rural household can identify the nearest place that has real broadband. They don’t need the FCC to tell them that broadband is better in the County seat or in the nearest big city – they are well aware of it.

We are badly in need of a new telecom bill. The current FCC is now chipping away at some of the last vestiges of the Telecom Act of 1996 by killing resale and the use of unbundled network elements. This Congress sat blithely by while the current FCC undid Title II regulation of broadband. The public and the press have been attacking Chairman Ajit Pai for killing net neutrality and Internet privacy – but at the end of the day this is all the fault of Congress.  Congress could give new instructions any day on these issues to the FCC, but they’ve punted on that responsibility.

Aside from the politicians running the current FCC, who are clearly in the pockets of the big ISPs, most reasonable people would agree that broadband should be regulated to some degree. We are nearing the time when the big cable companies will have a monopoly stranglehold over broadband in most US markets. And even where they don’t have a monopoly, where they compete against large fiber builders like AT&T the two sides cooperate to keep prices high – classic duopoly competition.

Monopolies must always be regulated. With Title II regulation now dead we are going to see the big ISPs aggressively monetizing customer data. We’ll see them raise broadband rates as the easiest way to meet Wall Street earnings expectations. We’ll see them tighten and enforce data caps and use every trick available to extract as much money as they can from customers. This is what big corporations do when they are free of regulation.

The current FCC has washed their hands of even trying to regulate the big ISPs, and only Congress can create the rules that can put some reasonable curbs on bad ISP behavior. I don’t hear even one member of Congress calling for Congressional responsibility – instead of solutions that can provide better rural broadband and that controls the worst impulses of the big ISPs we will get bills like this that creates a new annual report that reminds us that broadband is not as good in rural Maryland and Virginia as it is in Washington DC.