Los Angeles Passes Rule Banning Broadband Deployment Discrimination
We've well documented how giant telecom companies have taken billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors in exchange for fiber networks they only half deploy. We've also noted that when those big ISPs do finally deploy service, they tend to prioritize white, affluent neighborhoods - which generally see faster, cheaper, service than more diverse, poorer neighborhoods.
Broadband discrimination hews fairly closely to historic infrastructure discrimination on other fronts, whether it was the use of highway deployments to demolish long-established Black neighborhoods, or the long-established discrimination seen in the deployment and maintenance of affordable electricity service.
Back in December I wrote a longer feature for Verge about this proven and widespread digital discrimination" in broadband, and how the FCC, the nation's top telecom regulatory, only just now, in 2024, decided that it might just be something they should take a closer look at.
Civil and consumer rights activists I've spoken to at length say that the FCC's plan to crack down on the practice is a well intentioned, welcome, and overdue first step. But there's a general uneasy uncertainty about whether the agency - which has a shaky track record of standing up to giant companies like Comcast and AT&T on any issue of note - will actually follow through with meaningful enforcement.
Some activists were also quick to point out that while the FCC says it will ban future discrimination in broadband deployment, it refuses to do anything about discrimination that has already occurred. Such as AT&T's well documented refusal to upgrade poor and minority neighborhoods in Cleveland or Detroit, despite untold billions in taxpayer subsidies designed to do precisely that:
Nothing in these rules would address historical, existing and the ongoing redlining and discrimination against BIPOC and low income communities by large corporate ISPs," Brandon Forester, a media and telecom reform activist at MediaJustice, toldThe Verge. The FCC expressly declined to look at or eliminate existing discrimination."
Now it sounds like Los Angeles is following suit, with the Los Angeles City Council voting to create new rules banning digital discrimination in broadband deployment. The rules don't technically exist yet, and there are, again, questions about meaningful enforcement at scale. But like the FCC's efforts, just the act of formally acknowledging this discrimination exists is a step forward for local and federal governments:
People need to know that if they're experiencing digital discrimination that they can identify, they can call the city of Los Angeles and expect to get help with that now," said Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson of the 8th District, who sponsored the digital discrimination ordinance."
One issue with both the FCC and LA efforts to combat digital discrimination is that locals may not understand they were ever discriminated against. As we've long established, the U.S. is awash with giant regional monopolies that have spent decades undermining competition with the help of corrupt state and federal bureaucrats.
The result: high prices, slow speeds, and spotty access we've all grown used to, but isn't well explained by the press because that kind of coverage just doesn't get those clicks. So a user in Detroit, who can't get affordable fiber due to years of proven discrimination by AT&T, may not understand the origins of the problem, that discrimination played a role, or that there's any recourse.
Federal regulators not only refuse to consistently take aim at monopoly power, officials and lawmakers in both parties routinely can't even acknowledge that the problem actually exists. That they'll suddenly have the backbone to police a politically sensitive" issue like digital discrimination at any meaningful scale is asking a lot of policymakers with a 30+ year track record of rank fecklessness.
Huge swaths of LA are dominated by a Comcast or Charter monopoly, and the simple act of at least acknowledging there's a monopoly and digital discrimination problem at the heart of the lack of affordable broadband access is an important (but grotesquely overdue) first step.