Lincoln made sure we had railroads; FDR made sure we had electricity; Eisenhower made sure we had highways. What U.S. president will make sure we make a national upgrade to competitive, last-mile-fiber-plus-advanced-wireless connections? The question has become even more vital after a disappointing recent court decision that gave the thumbs up to a tactic of big communications companies who, for business reasons, refuse to extend service to rural communities: they can continue to lobby for laws that prevent those communities from setting up their own networks. We need cheap, ubiquitous access for everything we need to do as a country: create whole new occupations (not just jobs), confront climate change, raise the level of everyone’s basic education, have the most advanced healthcare system in the world, reduce inequality, update our transportation options, care for our older relatives and friends — everything. This is so obvious that it’s almost painful to have to say it.
But I must say it, because right now we have an unacceptable patchwork of high-capacity, inexpensive connectivity in this country, with islands of competitive fiber internet access. When it comes to those islands, there is often a local hero (most usefully an elected official) who has surmounted tremendous opposition to upgrade his or her community. But large parts of land are entirely left out. Most crucially, there are rural areas in which you are 10 times more likely not to be able to buy high-capacity internet access at any price than people in urban places. As cruel circumstance would have it, sometimes the ignored parts are jammed right next door to the gigabit islands.
Consider Pinetops, North Carolina. It’s a town of 1,300 in Edgecombe County, which is next to Wilson County, the home of a municipal fiber network named Greenlight. As the New York Times recently reported, the status quo, copper-line internet sold by CenturyLink in Pinetops was both too unreliable — connections kept dropping — and too low-capacity to allow for telework or other 21st century online activities.
And so when Wilson extended Greenlight early last year to Pinetops — where it already sells power and water services — residents were delighted. They could now reliably work from home and run businesses that relied on high-capacity internet access, such as automated sorting facilities for farms.
Now Pinetops’ future is in doubt, because powerful forces are agitating in favor of maintaining the patchwork status quo of isolated, cheap, competitive gigabit islands. Indeed, it’s likely that credulous state legislators, easily convinced by lobbyists for incumbent telecom companies, will try to make the patchwork even patchier by rolling back protection for municipal networks. (“Credulous” gives them the benefit of the doubt; state legislatures are pretty easily captured by enormous dollar donations from the telecom industry.)
That brings us to the aforementioned court decision. A state law adopted in North Carolina in 2011 effectively barred the expansion of municipal networks. There are 20 or so similar state laws in the U.S. making it difficult or downright impossible for municipalities to make the decision to commission or build an alternative fiber network. What’s weird about these laws is that they have the effect of preventing cities from ensuring that their citizens have competitive, lower-priced, widely-available, and higher-capacity high-speed internet access. Which is clearly bad social policy.
These laws benefit no one except the big carriers, relieving them from having to explain why their services might cost more than the networks that communities build for themselves. (Of course, the carriers could sidestep the problem by wiring those communities themselves, but the Comcasts and Time Warners of the world need to serve their shareholders. This isn’t evil. It just doesn’t match our national economic and social requirements.)
The FCC, which has a big interest in encouraging the deployment of advanced networks (and a statutory mandate to do so), soon decided to challenge two such state laws — in North Carolina and Tennessee. The Commission’s legal argument was tricky but plausible, a kind of daisy chain of legal moves that might or might not have swayed judges.
Ruling in the North Carolina case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t buy the FCC’s logic, and said earlier this month (pointing to an earlier Supreme Court decision, Nixon v. Missouri) that the FCC needed to be told specifically by Congress to block such a state law. Because the FCC couldn’t point to a provision in its authorizing statute that clearly said state laws should be blocked if they make it difficult or impossible for municipalities to commission or build alternative networks, the FCC couldn’t prevail — or so said the Sixth Circuit.
This fine-print interpretation by those Sixth Circuit judges has consequences. And some have already happened: Wilson, NC turned off access for Pinetops right after the decision came down.
The ruling also wipes out a possible lifeline for drowning, unconnected communities, and could keep prices high and connection speeds low for the rest of us. We know that most Americans have at most one choice for what the FCC labels high-speed internet access (25 Mbps downloads — itself an underwhelming definition). We know that where competition is absent, prices are higher and adoption is lower; we also know that more competitive markets have higher shares of connections at higher speeds. We know that we’re not making an adequate move to fiber-plus-advanced-wireless: fiber subscriptions in the U.S. account for far lower percentages of overall high-speed internet access than in Korea, Japan, Scandinavia, and Switzerland.
We pay more for worse services, and we’re suffering from deep chasms of digital divides between poor, minority, rural users and wealthier urban people — and between the U.S. and countries that have treated ubiquitous, inexpensive, high-capacity access as an industrial policy goal.
Yet those state laws are still on the books, fueled by the idea that there’s something wrong with a city providing or commissioning fiber access. It’s a basic mental divide: is high-capacity internet access a luxury product or a basic need? Although there have been crucial victories in Georgia and Kansas over the last few years, that idea has been the justification (though money is probably the real reason) for the passage of more of those restrictive bills— Minnesota passed such a law recently. After that Sixth Circuit decision, we’ll see these limiting bills introduced again and again.
The temporary fix for this sorry state of affairs would be for Congress to add a few words to one of the sections of the statute that defines the FCC’s powers, making it clear that the agency can block these state laws—after all, those laws trample on national telecommunications policy. Representative Anna Eshoo and Senator Cory Booker are doing exactly this.
But even that step would leave us with a patchwork of connectivity.
The real need here is for national leadership. We need infrastructure banks writing loan guarantees that will lower the cost of accessing capital to build last-mile fiber across the land. We need to set our standards high in defining a basic internet connection that’s essential for thriving lives — and those standards will need to involve a lot of fiber. To do all this, someone needs to step up, and soon.
We need to take the burden off local heroes. It isn’t really their job to fix America’s competitive standing in the world.
It’s the job of Congress and it’s the job of the president—but it’s mostly the latter. The president has to see that this isn’t a partisan issue, and that just as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower rose to the occasion, whoever is in the White House in 2017 must also do so, to serve the nation and its people. We can’t afford another administration that doesn’t get this job done.
[Why Western Mass Doesn’t Have the Internet
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