FCC plans shutdown of Affordable Connectivity Program as GOP withholds funding
arstechnica.com
The Federal Communications Commission is about to start winding down a program that gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes, and says it will have to complete the shutdown by May if Congress doesn't provide more funding.
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I'm completely for shutting down the affordable connectivity program
The ISPs should have to provide the service at a minimal rate to same said families and also offer 100/100 minimum service to anyone in the regions they operate. It shouldn't be subsidized by the government, it should literally be the cost of doing business for the business. Write up a bill, make it law, giant fines for not keeping a certain level of 9s in terms of availability and capacity.
Fuck government subsidies to big companies with huge profit margins. I work in IT, I know how the technology works. I know what it costs. I know that they do not need to charge anywhere near as much as they charge and they'd still make a killing, even with all the boots on the ground collecting paychecks.
Maybe reverse the order of those ideas, so as not to make the lives of people who are already struggling even harder.
ISPs would then have an incentive to avoid operating in poor neighborhoods. Mitigating that could be tough, given that internet service deployments are already patchy in many places.
Another approach might be municipal broadband, which big ISPs have been lobbying against for ages, often successfully.