Internet service providers have argued that net neutrality protections for consumers were like a communist pillow smothering the free market joy big telecoms wanted to bring to the world. They weren’t a utility, they argued, and being treated as such by the Obama-era FCC amounted to letting Karl Marx write your tax law. Well, guess who’s telling everybody that they should be treated like a “common utility” now, and asking for taxpayer money to do the things they promised they would be able to do without net neutrality regulations? You guessed it.
"Like electricity, broadband is essential to every American," USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter and NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield wrote Monday in an op-ed for The Topeka Capital-Journal. "Yet US broadband infrastructure has been financed largely by the private sector without assurance that such costs can be recovered through increased consumer rates."
Here’s AT&T scaring the sheep about net neutrality regulations a few months ago.
Consumers will, however, see enormous benefits from the FCC’s actions. Utility regulation over broadband can only inhibit incentives for network investment. By lifting that cloud here, the FCC will restore the bi-partisan, light-touch regulatory structure that made the United States the world leader in mobile broadband infrastructure.
Oh yeah, right.
But when the removal of utility regulation translates into greater broadband investment and increased innovation on the internet…well, everyone will eventually notice that.
Sorry, should have let you finish bullshitting us. Anyway, the broadband industry wants more subsidies in order for them to build out the less populated rural areas of our country.
Apparently, “greater broadband investment” meant “by the U.S. tax payers,” and “innovation” must mean ways in which telecoms can be blindingly hypocritical while screwing the United States out of money. For his part, FCC chair Ajit Pai has repeatedly cut away low-income subsidies for broadband while promising that the free market would provide. Now, the “free market” wants to provide, with our money, and then not be regulated in how they take that money—including, according to Arstechnica, how much they can charge areas that we subsidize the infrastructure for.
The report notes that, historically, telecommunications networks were subsidized in order to establish universal phone service, and carriers were subject to rate-of-return regulation that limited the amount they could charge consumers. Unlike today's broadband providers, prices charged by electric companies and other utilities are still regulated in many US states.
But the increased subsidies for private ISPs proposed by the USTelecom/NTCA report apparently wouldn't come with any limits on what carriers can charge consumers; the report states that rate-of-return regulation would be "unsustainable in modern competitive communications markets."
Remember how telecoms and their internet service providers (ISPs) said that they needed to be completely unregulated in order to continue to build out the infrastructure that they have repeatedly taken tax breaks for and not built out? Remember how Ajit Pai, Republican chair of the FCC, explained how doing away with all of this government handout “waste” and regulations would allow these businesses to expand and build up? Remember how that big corporate tax break that the Republican Party gifted the richest companies was going to lead to a world made of money for everyone? Yeah, about that ...