FCC Chairman Ajit Pai recently suggested capping the size of the total Universal Service Fund at $11.4 annually, adjusted going forward for inflation. The chairman has taken a lot of flack on this proposal from advocates of rural broadband. Readers of this blog know that I have been a big critic of this FCC on a whole host of issues. However, this idea doesn’t ive me much heartburn.

Critics of the idea are claiming that this proves that the FCC isn’t serious about fixing the rural broadband problem. I totally agree with that sentiment and this current FCC hasn’t done very little to fix rural broadband. In fact, they’ve gone out of their way to try to hide the magnitude of the rural problem by fiddling with broadband statistics and by hiding behind the faulty data from carriers that come out of the FCC’s broadband mapping effort. My personal guess is that there are millions of more homes that don’t have broadband than are being counted by the FCC.

With that said, the Universal Service Fund shouldn’t be the sole funding source for fixing rural broadband. The fund was never intended for that. The fund was created originally to promote the expansion of rural telephone service. Over time it became the mechanism to help rural telcos survive as other sources of subsidies like access charges were reduced over time. Only in recent years was it repositioned to fund rural broadband.

Although I’m a big proponent for better rural broadband, I am not bothered by capping the Universal Service Fund. First, the biggest components of that fund have been capped for years. The monies available for the rural high cost program, the schools and library fund and for rural healthcare have already been capped. Second, the proposed cap is a little larger than what’s being spent today, and what has been spent historically. This doesn’t look to be a move by the FCC to take away funding from any existing program.

Consumers today fund the Universal Service Fund through fees levied against landline telephone and cellphones. Opponents of capping the fund apparently would like to see the FCC hike those fees to help close the rural broadband gap. As a taxpayer I’m personally not nuts about the idea of letting federal agencies like the FCC print money by raising taxes that we all pay. For the FCC to make any meaningful dent in the rural broadband issue they’d probably have to triple or quadruple the USF fees.

I don’t think there is a chance in hell that Congress would ever let the FCC do that – and not just this Congress, but any Congress. Opponents of Pai’s plan might not recall that past FCCs have had this same deliberation and decided that they didn’t have the authority to unilaterally increase the size of the USF fund.

If we want to federal government to help fix the rural broadband problem, unfortunately the only realistic solution is for Congress to appropriate real money to the effort. This particular Congress is clearly in the pocket of the big telcos, evidenced by the $600 million awarded for rural broadband in last year’s budget reconciliation process. The use of those funds was crippled by language inserted by the big telcos to make it hard to use the money to compete against the telcos.

And that’s the real issue with federal funding. We all decry that we have a huge rural broadband crisis, but what we really have is a big telco crisis. Every rural area that has crappy broadband is served by one of the big telcos. The big telcos stopped making investments to modernize rural networks decades ago. And yet they still have to political clout to block federal money from being used to compete against their outdated and dying networks.

The FCC does have an upcoming opportunity for funding a new broadband program from the Universal Service Fund. After 2020 nearly $2 billion annually will be freed up in the fund at the end of the original CAF II program. If this FCC is at serious about rural broadband the FCC should start talking this year about what to do with those funds. This is a chance for Chairman Pai to put his (USF) money where his mouth is.