Congratulations! The US Is 32nd Worldwide On Broadband Affordability

I’ve spent the better part of two decades writing about how telecom monopolization (and the corruption that protects it) results in expensive, spotty, sluggish, broadband and historically terrible customer service. The cause of our substandard broadband isn’t much of a mystery, but because of these companies’ political influence, state and federal policymakers often lack the courage to do much about it.

So the problem persists. One recent study found that the U.S. was currently ranked somewhere around 32nd globally, behind countries like Russia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria (you can find the full breakdown here):

“The United States and Canada both have one of the highest internet costs,” Alex Tofts, the Broadband Expert for Broadband Genie, said in a summary. “It’s driven by a lack of competition and bigger distances to connect, with lower population density than other developed countries. However, both have average wages in the top fifteen in the world, compensating for the high cost of internet.”

For decades, people (mostly the industry) tried to suggest the problem was because America was just so gosh darn big. But you’ll notice that China and Russia, (ranked 25th and 17th, respectively) still perform better. Data routinely shows that affordability is the key obstacle to access, yet it’s only been in the last few years that you’ve started to see this reality reflected in U.S. policymaking.

Usually after a study like this appears, telecom monopoly lobbyists and think tankers will subsequently try to claim that U.S. broadband is actually super affordable if you stand on your head, squint, and only look at the metrics in some bizarrely specific way, like only looking at relative value in cost-per-Megabits per second in some markets at certain times of day. I wish I was kidding.

But again, the cause of this problem is very clear: monopolization and consolidation, protected by corruption. Few U.S. markets have the choice of more than one broadband provider at next-generation speeds. And that’s because federal and state lawmakers are so comically corrupt, they routinely let AT&T, Comcast, Charter, or Verizon lobbyists endlessly merge, crush all competition, then literally write state or federal legislation and policy over several decades.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Decades of federal policy corruption and dysfunction have created an extremely strong, local, bipartisan grassroots movement for better broadband access. In countless towns and cities, municipalities, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, and creative new partnerships are building new, open access fiber networks with an eye on competition and cost.

The federal government hasn’t proven to be entirely useless. Both COVID relief and infrastructure bill legislation are delivering more than $60 billion to fix the problem. And yes, while a big chunk of this money will be dumped in the back pocket of telecom monopolies responsible for spotty access and high costs in the first place, a big chunk will also be headed to these community-built alternatives.

Still, it’s comical and grotesque that it’s 2023 and a country that fancies itself a technology giant still can’t meaningfully tackle equitable broadband access and affordability. And that telecom and media policy has basically become a boring afterthought in the era of “Big Tech.” Ensuring equitable access to an essential utility is just too boring for most 2023 policy circles, much less the modern attention economy.

The FCC has made it very clear it’s an agency staffed by careerists who don’t really care about monopoly power or broadband consumer protection. Most of the agency’s Democratic policy proposals are (sometimes) well intentioned regulatory theater. Most GOP proposals don’t even bother with the illusion that consumers matter (see: Ajit Pai). When anybody tries to disrupt that dynamic, you generally get treated the way Gigi Sohn was when her nomination was scuttled earlier this year by industry.

As a result, all the interesting telecom policy is happening locally, block by block by communities pissed off by decades of neglect and overbilling. And the entrenched monopolies they’re taking aim at deserve every last bit of the long-overdue disruption headed their way.