The Internet is a public utility
If there is anything that the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, it is that we depend on reliable, high-speed access to the Internet as an essential utility to our lives, not unlike electricity and water. But even as millions of Americans have been forced to work from home or study from home, there are still millions of Americans who lack reliable access to the Internet, particularly in rural areas.
The problem has been difficult to quantify because different studies have employed different measurement tactics, some of which are rather questionable. According to Ars Technica, a study conducted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) indicated that "21.3 million Americans live in areas without access to fixed broadband with 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds". However, this is widely considered to be a gross underestimation because the FCC "counts an entire census block as served even if only one home in the census block can get service". Ars Technica reported on a different study that went conducted by a company called BroadbandNow which indicated that the number is closer to 42.8 million. (This was obtained by going to the websites of nine major internet service providers (ISPs) and using their online tools to check whether given addresses and areas were serviceable by those ISPs.) The Wall Street Journal, in a video published August 31, 2020, also referred to these two studies, but also stated that yet another study conducted by Microsoft that includes connections that are "slow and unreliable" places the number at about 157 million (the total population of the United States is about 382 million). Indian-American political comedian Hasan Minhaj also discussed this issue in an episode of his Netflix show Patriot Act (which was sadly cancelled recently)—see the last episode of Volume 3.
In the video published by The Wall Street Journal, a woman explains how she needs to travel several miles from her house each day to a mobile home that has Internet connection, simply because the broadband companies will not spend the money to deliver a broadband connection to her house. Why spend all that money constructing the infrastructure to deliver Internet to these rural homes when that same money could be spent delivering infrastructure to countless more homes in urban and suburban areas? What's more, even in some areas that are lucky in enough to have broadband access, customers are still getting screwed over because only one Internet service provider is able to provide reliable Internet to them. The Wall Street Journal video explains how for a while Frontier Communications was one such Internet service provider that monopolized reliable Internet access in many of these rural locations. Incidentally, amidst the COVID-19 recession Frontier declared chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2020.
Expanding access to reliable Internet is one of the very few (and getting fewer every year) areas of American politics that is actually bipartisan. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have announced support for expanding broadband access to rural communities, but while both sides have announced proposals attempting to fix the problem, not much has actually been accomplished. According to BroadbandNow, one of the companies that has collected statistics on Internet access in the United States, "One of the Trump campaign’s key promises in the 2016 election was to expand broadband availability in rural areas." However, BroadbandNow also states that "little has actually been done".[1] Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign announced an infrastructure bill that specifically provides $20 billion for rural broadband access. However, BroadbandNow states, "Like the incumbent President’s proposals, Biden’s are light on specifics. It is unclear how a potential Biden administration would tackle the challenging problem of delivering robust broadband to America’s hardest-to-cover areas, nor is it clear how long it might take to do so."
Admittedly, I personally have not performed nearly enough research to come up with a concrete better infrastructure proposal within the space of this blog post, but I do agree with a fundamental idea that I think sits near the core of the problem: the Internet is, and therefore should be, regulated as a public utility. We have been able to provide most rural areas with other kinds of public utilities, such as electricity, running water, and landline telephone connections (yes, landline phones, remember those?). Why not reliable Internet?[2]
This idea briefly rose to the forefront of public debate around 2014, when the FCC was considering a proposal supported by the Obama administration to reclassify Internet access under Title II of the Communications Act, which, according to Ars Technica, "gives the Federal Communications Commission power to regulate telecommunications providers as utilities or 'common carriers.' Like landline phone providers, common carriers must offer service to the public on reasonable terms." This reasonable proposal faced opposition from Internet service providers because it would codify a concept known as "net neutrality". Net neutrality essentially is the principle that ISPs should treat all Internet connections equally. For example, net neutrality means that ISPs should not be able to charge you more or less money based on the content or destination of your Internet communications. The big ISPs are generally opposed to net neutrality and also opposed the Title II reclassification for various other reasons reported on by Ars Technica. In 2015, the FCC adopted the Title II reclassification, but in 2018, the new chairman of the FCC appointed by Trump, Ajit Pai, deregulated ISPs and reversed bans on net neutrality. These rules (or lack thereof) remain in effect.
In my view, we should be standing up against Internet service providers, who frequently monopolize entire regions and deny to rural communities reliable access to broadband. As with many of my blog posts as of late, I like to quote the Supreme Court of the United States, and as I mentioned in my blog post about onion routing a few months ago, in 2017 the Supreme Court recognized the critical importance of the Internet in our twenty-first century lives in a decision called Packingham v. North Carolina:
A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more. The Court has sought to protect the right to speak in this spatial context. [...] While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace—the “vast democratic forums of the Internet” in general, Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U. S. 844, 868 (1997), and social media in particular.
See Packingham, 582 U.S. ___, slip op. at 4–5. With many Americans now working from home as a result of the current pandemic, it has become extraordinarily obvious that reliable Internet access is essential to our livelihoods in the twenty-first century. As Packingham demonstrates, Americans have a right to Internet access, especially because today it is so inseparable from the exercise of the fundamental right to free speech. It is inexcusable that for millions upon millions of Americans, we have not lived up to this ideal.
Footnotes
[1] In the President's defense, he has taken some executive action, primarily directing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to invest in rural broadband access (in June 2020, for example, the USDA handed out $86 million in loans to six telecommunication providers in eight states for the purpose of expanding rural broadband access). However, as the current pandemic and the recent Wall Street Journal video illustrate, these measures are insufficient. In 2018, POLITICO reported that the Trump administration proposed a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill that includes rural broadband access among many other infrastructure improvements, but POLITICO also stated that the bill "faces tough odds in Congress" because on the one hand Republicans are "expressing shock at Trump’s total price tag", and on the other hand Democrats say that "the share coming from the federal government would be too little" (only $200 billion of the $1.5 trillion would come from federal funding; the rest would be "in investments from cities, states, private investors and other sources").
[2] I use the phrase "reliable Internet" to distinguish high-speed broadband connections with other kinds of Internet connections that rural areas may theoretically already access, but are simply unreliable. For example, in the Wall Street Journal video, a woman explained that she had tried to subscribe to Internet via satellite, but it was slow and unstable because if it was rainy or snowy, then there would no longer be a connection. Dial-up connections, which involve receiving Internet via landline telephone connections, also still exist, but those have historically been slow and strictly inferior to broadband. The more resource-heavy and modernized the Internet becomes, the more it will become practically unusable on anything other than broadband.