A Wide, Diverse Coalition Agrees on What Congress Needs to Do About Our Broadband
A massive number of groups representing interests as diverse as education, agriculture, the tech sector, public and private broadband providers, low-income advocacy, workers, and urban and rural community economic development entities came together on a letter to ask Congress to be bold in its infrastructure plan. They are asking the U.S. Congress to tackle the digital divide with the same purpose and scale as we did for rural electrification. It also asks Congress to focus on delivering 21st century future-proof access to every American. While so many slow internet incumbents are pushing Congress to go small and do little, a huge contingent of this country is eager for Congress to solve the problem and end the digital divide.
For months Congress has been hounded by big ISP lobbyists interested in preserving their companies’ take of government money. However, the big ISPs—your AT&Ts, Comcasts, and the former Time Warner Cable—want to preserve the monopolies that have resulted in our current limited, expensive, slow internet access. All Americans have the opposite needs and interests. We need a strong focus on building 21st century ready infrastructure to everyone.
At the core of all new networks lies fiber optic wires, which is an inconvenient fact for legacy monopolies that intended to rely on obsolete wires for years to come. And all this opposition is happening while a billion fiber lines are being laid in the advanced Asian markets, primarily led by China, calling into question whether the United States wants to keep up or be left behind. They’ve argued that broadband is very affordable and that efforts to promote the public model to address rural and low-income access was akin to a “Soviet” take over of broadband.
