Every President Promises Broadband. Biden Might Deliver

Plus: A national failure, a software workaround, and an unusual survival technique.
biden in front of flags
Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times/Redux

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the cruelest month. Unless you’re vaccinated. Hurry up, please, it’s time.

The Plain View

In a 2004 speech to Hispanic lawmakers in New Mexico, President George W. Bush made a promise. By 2007, he said, all Americans would have affordable broadband internet access. He was running for reelection then. He won. 2007 came and went. And 2008. Many Americans still did not have high-speed internet, even using a charitable definition of “high-speed.” His successor, Barack Obama, made a similar promise and did not deliver. That’s eight more years. Trump didn’t connect all of America, either, despite his vows. (Surprise.)

Now it’s Joe Biden’s turn, and while he too is promising to fill the broadband gap, he’s asking for something that none of his predecessors did—$100 billion to extend connectivity. And laws that introduce real competition to drive prices down.

It’s true that more Americans are online than they were 15 years ago. But we still have huge connectivity deserts, particularly in rural areas. Also, compared to the rest of the world, we pay far too much for bits that get to us way too slowly. Millions in the US who connect wirelessly face punitive caps on data. This exacerbates a problem known as the digital divide, where less-well-off folks, especially communities of color, can’t afford or aren’t provided with high-speed internet, which has become a basic necessity. Of the 33 relatively wealthy countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the US pays the second most for broadband, behind only Mexico. (South Korea pays a third as much.)

Before last year, this failure was a serious issue that held back our national productivity and held down key segments of our citizenry. But during the pandemic this became a full-blown crisis. Kids suddenly schooled at home had no access to Zoom classes. People working from home were shut out of meetings. Folks in quarantine struggled to virtually order food, get benefits, and see their doctors. Even people who are supposedly well served were exposed as being internet laggards. How often have you watched a remote-locations talking head on cable television suddenly explode into a messy parody of a Georges Braque painting because of their lousy internet connection?

As with other parts of his infrastructure plan, Biden wants to go big. Besides all that money to help wire the unwired and close the digital divide, he’s proposing a “future proof” upgrade to infrastructure that will reach everyone in the country. He also wants to ensure that people can pay for it, at first through subsidies but eventually breaking the mini-monopolies that providers are abusing.

Currently, powerful telecom companies dominate regions, leveraging a lack of competition to overcharge and underserve. They have managed to frustrate previous presidential promises by striking down laws, manipulating the Federal Communications Commission, and funding legislators to maintain status quo. They’ve even worked behind the scenes to pass state legislation that bans internet-starved municipalities from acting on their own to get broadband. It’s not enough that they refuse to serve all rural areas—they don’t want anyone else to step in, even local governments. (The Biden plan specifically proposes to lift those barriers and encourage community-built systems.)

Not surprisingly, the entrenched powers and their enablers are squawking about the Biden proposal. Senator Roger Wicker from Mississippi—a state that’s not exactly known for swimming in low-cost internet—commented that the Biden proposal “opens the door for duplication and overbuilding.” And the Internet Technology & Innovation Foundation, a trade group funded by the likes of Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T, issued a statement for the ages: “Biden’s broadband infrastructure plan goes overboard and threatens to undermine the system of private competition that successfully serves most of the United States,” says its aptly named policy director Doug Brake. “No doubt, the United States sorely needs subsidies for rural broadband, but this isn’t an area to turn all the dials up to 11.”

You don’t need a high-speed connection to understand that our “system of private competition” has actually stifled competition and failed to serve the United States. I find it particularly offensive that the ITIF statement invokes a joke from the excellent movie Spinal Tap. Sorry, Brake, but you are no Nigel Tufnel. More like Snidely Whiplash.

After all these years of failure, we can’t get too excited yet. So far, this is just one more promise. And if you read the fine print, the president seems to fall short of an absolute guarantee of high-speed internet for all. But if his plans work, and Americans are at last fully connected at reasonable prices, it will be $100 billion in cash and an immeasurable amount of political capital well spent.

Turn the dial to 20, Joe.

Time Travel

I may sound like a broken record on this broadband problem, but that’s because it still needs fixing. Here’s a Newsweek column from 2007—the year Dubya promised broadband for all—about an OECD report that underlined our national failure, rating us lower than Estonia. Note that then, just as now, the industry keeping our internet expensive, slow, and often unavailable, was soft-pedaling the problem. (As was our FCC chair at the time, Kevin Martin, who now works for Facebook.)

Maybe our proud nation is going through some rough spots, but at least we have one shining and perpetual triumph: the internet. People may refer to it as the World Wide Web, but its capital is Silicon Valley, and the United States is the big dog tapping the global keyboard. At least that's what we thought, until the news broke in April of a report by the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that ranked the high-speed broadband adoption of 30 countries in the developed world. The United States was not first. Or second, or third. It ranked 15th.

This was a continuation of a trend: Only a few months ago the OECD ranked America 12th. Even more mortifying, when ranked against all countries on broadband penetration (percentage of homes connected), the United States came in 24th—behind such powers as Iceland, Finland and, yes, Estonia. FCC commissioner Michael Copps called the OECD report "a national embarrassment ... In broadband, we're not even an also-ran …"

Critics say the root of the problem is extremely limited competition: Most Americans' choices reside in a cozy duopoly of a single cable company and a single telco provider. It's no surprise that those selling high-cost, low-speed broadband defend the status quo. (AT&T says it's committed to providing broadband to all; Verizon touts its new premium fiber-optic service, but what you'll pay depends on where you live: in a few locationss, people can buy "up to" 50 Mbps for $140 a month; in others, you'll pay $180 a month for 30 Mbps.) But the administration, supposedly dedicated to pumping up our broadband muscle, also maintains that things are hunky-dory. "I think our policies are a success," FCC chairman Kevin Martin said at a conference last week, citing increases in the number of broadband homes. (Just imagine what he would have said if we had Korea's numbers.) "We have the most effective multiplatform broadband in the world," says John Kneuer, the Commerce Department's head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

Ask Me One Thing

Phil asks, “Would it be possible to crowdfund a Chromebook-form-factor laptop with a full Linux on it customized to work well on Chromebooks? My question is less about whether it's physically possible to do this, but whether Google and Google hardware partners would impede the production of such a device. I'd love to have a Chromebook-form-factor laptop—without any Google on it.”

Hi, Phil. The short answer is yes. There are two flavors of the Chrome OS—the one that Google owns and controls, and an open source version called Chromium. Google won’t stop you from making hardware that runs on your version of the Chromium OS. Others are trying this as well, including an effort called Fyde OS, which is mainly for Chinese users. But Google would also probably argue that a “Chromebook-form-factor laptop” is not a Chromebook. So don’t call it that. And don’t use any code from Google Chrome OS. Then you should be OK. But be warned—Google will be disappointed in you! Google thinks that its Chromebook offers stability, security, and automatic updates that a Chromium-based crowdfunded laptop would be hard-pressed to match. But then, that’s what Google would think.

You can submit questions to mail@hyzs518.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

End Times Chronicle

What do you do when a volcano erupts in your neighborhood? Why, play volleyball, of course. Note that these smart-alecky Icelanders are playing without a net.

Last but Not Least

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant told me not to wait around for herd immunity. But he does have a playbook for us to get back to normalish.

You think dating is hard during a pandemic? What if you ran the world’s biggest collection of dating sites?

Add this to your list of problems: sexually abusive Minecraft videos on YouTube.

Ikea is making an air purifier. It’s called Förnuftig. Of course.

That’s it for this week. Anyone for volleyball?

Steven

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