With HR 3557, Broadband Monopolies Are Pushing A Bill That Would Crush Your Town’s Ability To Stand Up To Them

For thirty-plus years, giant telecom monopolies have worked tirelessly to crush all broadband competition. At the same time, they've lobbied state and federal governments so extensively, that the vast majority of politicians are feckless cardboard cutouts with little real interest in market or consumer health.

The result has been fairly obvious: Americans pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for sluggish, slow broadband with historically abysmal customer service.

Telecom lobbyists love to insist that often-shitty U.S. broadband is the envy of the modern world (it isn't). They also love to argue that the only reason U.S. broadband isn't even more awesome is because of too much government regulation," unnecessary red tape, and bureaucracy."

In this way they get to have their cake (enjoy unchecked monopoly power free from competition or regulatory oversight) and eat it too (demonize any government effort to do anything about monopoly power as the antithesis of progress). It's an endless cycle where your broadband monopoly gets more powerful and the government gets weaker. Often under the pretense of deregulation" and reform."

It's a pretty successful con. Telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T have effectively lobotomized the country's top federal telecom regulator (the FCC) for going on the better part of a decade. They also have the majority of Congress under their bootheel, to the point where we can't pass even basic consumer protection reforms, or nominate and seat any popular reformers to federal agencies.

Even when you see antitrust reform" performatively mentioned in Congress, telecom is never included. And this is all before the looming right wing Supreme Court's Chevron Deference ruling strips away any remaining independent authority the FCC (and every other federal regulatory agency) has left.

With the feds rendered useless on consumer protection and monopoly busting, telecom lobbyists have increasingly taken aim at the last vestiges of state and local government power.

During the Trump FCC, that involved stripping away your town's or city's local authority over everything from cell tower placement to utility pole rates (again under the pretense that mean ole Mayors, not unchecked monopolization and consolidation, is what's holding back better broadband).

The Ajit Pai era net neutrality repeal tried to ban states (unsuccessfully) from protecting broadband consumers. 16 States have passed laws banning your town or city from building its own broadband. House Republicans even tried to ban community-owned broadband networks entirely in the middle of a pandemic that painfully showcased the importance of affordable, reliable broadband.

The goal throughout is obvious: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, CenturyLink and other telecom giants want to be free to rip you off with high prices and substandard service. They want to be free of all meaningful competition. And they want local, state, and federal governments absolutely powerless to do anything about it. If there are any rules, they want to write them to their personal benefit.

It's a campaign they've been winning for decades.

Nineteen proposed new telecom laws just stumbled forth from the the House Energy and Commerce Committee. One of them, HR 3557 (the American Broadband Deployment Act of 2023) focus on pre-empting" any remaining local government authority over telecom giants. This is being presented, once again, as a streamlining" of unnecessarily bureaucratic government power.

In reality, HR 3557 would make it all but impossible for local governments to have much of a say in telecom infrastructure placement (regardless of environmental or historical impact), negotiate fair rates with telecom giants for things like rights of way, or utility pole usage, or have much of a any role in terms of consumer protection. From Doug Dawson, a widely respected industry consultant:

[HR 3557] Eliminates cable franchise renewals and eliminates the ability of local governments to require rules such as an ISP having to serve the whole community, the local government requiring PEG channels, or the local government requiring customer service standards."

It's worth noting that the human beings actually involved in local governments weren't invited to the single hearing on this subject, which speaks volumes:

When the committeeheld an initial hearingon broadband permitting streamlining, including a draft of the American Broadband Deployment Act, no state or local government was invited to testify."

In telecom policy conversations, local governments are always framed as some kind of faceless bureaucrats hell bent on ruining everybody's good time for no coherent reason. But a lot of the systems telecom lobbyists are trying to dismantle serve important functions:

Local permitting and cable franchising processes are intended to make sure that communications infrastructure is deployed equitably and in the public interest, that work is done safely and in a way that protects valuable public resources, including the rights of way. Local governments are the stewards of these finite public resources."

It's no coincidence that this new lobbying push comes as local governments around the country increasingly eye building their own fiber networks with an eye on affordability and even coverage (something that's very popular among long-neglected consumers). As Dawson notes, AT&T and Comcast certainly don't want your piddly Mayor standing in the way of them doing whatever they want:

The biggest killer is that the law would give holders of franchise agreements the ability to cancel the agreement without losing any rights-of-ways included in the agreement. This would also kill local franchise fees, a major source of revenue for many governments. Perhaps the most severe provision is that franchise contract holders can eliminate any contract provisions they deem to be commercially infeasible."

To be clear: some of the telecom bills winding through Congress are actually helpful. One would renew the FCC's authority to conduct spectrum auctions, bizarrely lapsed due to a recent bout of government incompetence. Another would make broadband grants tax exempt (a boon to telecoms big and small).

But as Dawson quite correctly notes, legislation like HR 3557 is seeded in there in the hopes it worms its way into a broader bill under the pretense of a broader telecom reform package. I'd be genuinely surprised if the bill itself wasn't written by an AT&T or Comcast lawyer (probably using ALEC as a proxy):

This bill is going for a home run to eliminate local regulations these big companies don't like. I've written recently about regulatory capture, and this is an ultimate example of changing the laws to get what the big monopoly providers want...This bill is the ultimate example of the biggest companies in telecom flexing their power and influence to bypass some of the last vestiges of regulation."

As the federal government becomes (quite intentionally) more dysfunctional, feckless, and corrupt, most meaningful telecom policy fights have shifted to the state or local level. In town after town, locals now find themselves fighting block by block against monopoly power, with less and less meaningful support from the feckless and captured federal government. Now, industry is eyeing the killing blow.