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"We’ve noted for decades how, despite all the political lip service paid toward “bridging the digital divide,” the U.S. doesn’t actually have any idea where broadband is or isn’t available. The FCC’s past broadband maps, which cost $350 million to develop, have long been accused of all but hallucinating competitors, making up available speeds, and excluding a key metric of competitiveness: price.
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You only need to spend a few minutes plugging your address into the FCC’s old map to notice how the agency comically overstates broadband competition and available speeds. After being mandated by Congress in 2020 by the Broadband DATA Act, the FCC struck a new, $44 million contract with a company named Costquest to develop a new map, just unveiled for the first time in November.
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FCC’s Attempt To Finally Map Broadband Continues To Be A Hot Mess
from the too-many-cooks dept
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THIS: The new map has a useful feature: it lets third parties challenge the FCC data. And with more than $42 billion in federal subsidies on the lines, states are challenging the FCC’s data in droves. Colorado, New York, and Vermont have all filed complaints stating that the FCC’s data misrepresents, or just entirely omits, data at hundreds of thousands of locations. . .
In Vermont, for example, state officials say their own data indicates that a whopping 18.6 percent of state residents still lack access to any broadband whatsoever. The FCC’s new and updated broadband map claims that just 3 percent of state residents lack access to broadband, a huge disparity. Much of it caused by the FCC overstating the availability of wireless broadband access:
“From our initial analysis, we feel that wireless coverage in particular is vastly overstated,” says Rob Fish, deputy director at the VCBB, in part because it doesn’t take into account mountains, trees, and other obstructions that block transmission in many locations. He also says the board is checking the map’s claim that many people with slow DSL internet are receiving 25/3 Mbps speeds. The map also shows coverage in locations where ISPs don’t currently offer high-speed service but say they will soon. In many of those neighborhoods, he says, “evidence being gathered on the ground may suggest a different story.”
After releasing its biggest mapping update in agency history last November, the FCC only gave states until January 13, 2023 to challenge the data. That’s clearly proving to be not enough time to get it right, and the Senate Commerce Committee has written the FCC asking it to extend the challenge deadline an additional 60 days:
The legislators cited some examples where the FCC maps don’t jive with a Microsoft analysis of where broadband is and isn’t, and are clearly troubled by the disparity. For example, they say, in Washington state, 60% of the residences and businesses in one town on Tribal lands were missing from the FCC map, while in Mississippi, the state broadband office says a “tremendous amount” of addresses were missing in “high-growth” areas.
✓ Frustrated by decades of FCC apathy and incompetence, many states spent millions of dollars to map broadband access themselves. And many state leaders have told me the FCC hasn’t really been making full use of that data. Some states, like Texas, say their arrangements with their own mapping companies have created additional roadblocks in working with the FCC’s chosen vendor, Costquest.
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Keep in mind this is all occurring while incumbent monopolies do everything in their power to ensure that the coming historic wave of broadband funding created by the Biden infrastructure bill goes into their pockets, and not to creative competitive alternatives. This has involved lobbying for restrictive new state laws, or filing costly, onerous challenges against anybody who applies for a broadband grant.
(One small aside: it remains amazing to watch Republican lawmakers, who lament all government spending as “socialism,” trip over themselves to grab federal telecom subsidies only created by an infrastructure bill they voted against. Then pretend they came up with the plan).
✓✓✓ To be clear, this is all a significant improvement from our previous mess. The FCC’s at least embracing a greater variety of crowdsourced and third-party data. And Congress forced the agency to eliminate a hugely problematic FCC methodology that declared an entire census block “served” with broadband if a regional monopoly claimed it could deliver broadband to just one home in that block.
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So we’re seeing progress, but it’s still a convoluted process, and incumbent monopolies, as usual, are going to have a disproportionate impact on where money winds up. The majority of this incoming money is already being gobbled up by cable giants like Comcast, leaving a growing roster of creative cooperatives, municipalities, and utilities (many eagerly expanding access to locations those monopolies have refused to serve) out of luck.
> While improvements have been made, every step of this process still tends to favor entrenched monopolies. They’re still being allowed to overstate coverage, conflate advertised speeds with available speeds, avoid even mentioning pricing data, and file costly grant challenges against the growing number of municipalities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities disrupting their dominance.
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While any progress is great, it’s important to remember that decades of important federal telecom policy was based on terrible data. And it remains fairly stunning that we’ve spent an estimated $400 million on mapping broadband and we’re still making these kinds of mistakes in 2022, decades after broadband became not just mainstream, but an essential utility.
Filed Under: bead funding, broadband, broadband mapping, broadband maps, competition, digital divide, fcc, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, subsidies, telecom
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With Billions of Dollars of Broadband Funding at Stake, the Timing of the Challenge Process to the FCC’s Broadband Map Under Increasing Scrutiny
Thursday, December 22, 2022
Just over a month ago, the FCC released its pre-production draft of its new Broadband Maps. The initial map is based on service availability data collected from broadband providers through the ongoing Broadband Data Collection (“BDC”) and reflects services available[1] as of June 30, 2022.[2]
The release of the Broadband Map initiated a process for individuals and other entities to submit challenges to the accuracy of data for single locations, both in terms of the availability of service and serviceable locations.[3] The FCC has released guidance on how to submit an Availability Challenge and how to submit a Location Challenge. Since the release of the map, the FCC has indicated that it has received thousands of individual challenges.
The Broadband Map will play a fundamental role in identifying “unserved” and “underserved” locations and, thus, how much funding each State will be eligible to receive under the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (“BEAD”) program established under the Infrastructure Jobs and Investment Act. The NTIA has stated that it “expects to” announce the allocations from the BEAD program by June 30, 2023.
The challenge process will remain open and ongoing in order to improve the accuracy of the Broadband Map. The NTIA, however, has announced that challenges must be submitted by a deadline of January 13, 2023, in order to be considered in the version of the map that will be used in allocating the BEAD funding.[4][5]
In the month since the first draft was released, a wide range of public and private entities have asserted that the data is inaccurate and would result in significant misallocations of broadband BEAD funding if errors are not corrected.
Several state and local government entities have raised concerns that the January 13 deadline does not provide sufficient time to submit challenges.[6] While the NTIA has acknowledged these concerns, the NTIA has not, as of yet, indicated a willingness to extend the January 13 deadline.[7] Similarly FCC Chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, counseled, “[w]hile we will take a close look at any availability challenges filed at any time, because of the time frames for availability challenges set forth under the rules and the law, you will have the best opportunity for your availability challenge to be resolved ahead of NTIA’s planned funding time frame if you file it by January 13.”[8]
[1] A broadband service is considered “available” if a provider currently provides broadband service of at least 25/3 Mbps, or could provide such service, as part of a “standard broadband installation” within ten business days following a request.
[2] For more information on the FCC’s Broadband Data Collection, please see the rest of our BDC blog series: The FCC’s New Broadband Data Collection is About to Launch | Beyond Telecom Law Blog; The Who, What, When, and Where of the FCC’s New Broadband Data Collection | Beyond Telecom Law Blog; Overview of the FCC’s Broadband Data Collection Resources | Beyond Telecom Law Blog; Overview of the FCC’s Broadband Data Collection Bulk Fabric Challenge Process | Beyond Telecom Law Blog.
[3] State and local governments, as well as other entities, have already been able to submit “bulk” challenges to the broadband map since September 2022.
[5] Note, the January 13 deadline relates to the date that the NTIA has established for challenges to the Broadband Map in order to be included in NTIA’s allocation of BEAD Act funding to the States. Each State will in turn be required to establish its own process under which challenges can be made to the State’s initial determination as to whether a particular location or community anchor institution within the jurisdiction of the State is eligible for such grant funds.
[6] For example, the Vermont Congressional Delegation and the Vermont Community Broadband Board have indicated that 22% of the addresses in the Vermont Public Service Department’s database are not listed on the Broadband Map. They have indicated that there is not sufficient time to make all of these corrections by the January 13 deadline and have requested a thirty day extension. https://publicservice.vermont.gov/announcements/vcbb-and-vermonts-congressional-delegation-ask-fcc-more-time-challenge-its-maps
[8] https://www.fcc.gov/about/leadership/jessica-rosenworcel#notes
Liam Fulling also contributed to this article.
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THAT: ". . So this bill serves no legitimate interests, is on very shaky constitutional grounds, and seems to only encourage nuisance lawsuits against internet companies and settlements in response to those lawsuits...[ ]
All in all this is a silly bill that doesn’t help anyone other than lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits. So why do Cicilline and Buck think this is necessary?
And why did they release it as the last Congress closed out?"
Filed Under: 1st amendment, david cicilline, force v. facebook, ken buck, knowledge, section 230, terrorism
As Old Session Of Congress Closed, One Final Bipartisan Bill To Pressure Websites To Censor Controversial Content Is Introduced
from the not-how-any-of-this-works dept
A new Congress has begun, but in the waning days of the last one, we got one final bipartisan bill to “amend” Section 230. It officially died with the last Congress, but it sure is a sign of what to expect from this new one (introducing it at the very end of the session with no chance to go anywhere is known as a “messaging” bill, alerting others in Congress about legislation these troublemakers are interested in pushing). In this case, the bill is bipartisan, coming from Reps. David Cicilline and Ken Buck, who teamed up in their seething, unmoored-from-reality, moral-panic hatred of “tech” multiple times in the last Congress.
This bill is called the Platform Integrity Act and the very fact that they released the bill without releasing the actual language should suggest how serious they are about it.
However, the description of the bill in Cicilline’s press release is pretty clear (and, not for the first time, suggests that Cicilline and Buck both need remedial education on how the 1st Amendment actually works).
The Platform Integrity Act would:
- Offer a simple and common-sense clarification of the scope of 47 U.S.C. 230(c)(1) by removing a bar to recovery for victims who have suffered harm from acts of terrorism, hate, or extremism enabled by online platforms’ content suggestions.
- Reject the judicial misinterpretation of 47 U.S.C. 230(c)(1) whereby courts have concluded, for example, that the statute bars victims of terrorist attacks from seeking relief from a social-media company for its proactive role connecting the perpetrators through friend- and content-suggestion algorithms.
- Adopt the correct interpretation of the statute reflected in the separate opinion of the late Honorable Robert Katzmann in Force v. Facebook, Inc., 934 F.3d 53 (2d Cir. 2019), wherein he concluded that “it strains the English language” to construe 47 U.S.C. 230(c)(1) “to say that in targeting and recommending [extremist] writings to users,” “thereby forging connections” and “developing new social networks,” online platforms are protected from liability by the statute.
- Apply only to content that the platform actively promotes, leaving in place Section 230(c)(2)’s protection of platforms’ good-faith application of terms of service and community guidelines.
We’ve heard suggestions like this before from others, and it shows a profound lack of understanding about how any of this actually works.
Let’s go through each of the bullet points to explain what the
confusion is (though, honestly, in an ideal world, I shouldn’t be
explaining how the 1st Amendment works to two sitting Congressional
Reps.). . .
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