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After a decade+ of ridicule and dismissal, it's no longer possible to deny that broadband is a human right, nor is it possible to deny that private monopolists suck at safeguarding this right.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#fiber-now
To understand how badly broadband monopolists failed, just look at the bankruptcy docs from Frontier. The company chose not to make a $800m profit providing 100gb fiber to its customers because making long-term investments would hurt its stock price.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/icann-can-and-did/#fiber-now
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As these failures become more manifest, even the FCC has finally acknowledged that it has to do better in providing broadband to underserved communities, pledging $9b to this effort.
Unfortunately, nobody knows where those underserved communities are, because the FCC has allowed monopolists to draw up deceptive and inaccurate coverage maps for years.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/16/new-old-apples/#not-the-territory
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For example - as the WSJ writes - the FCC allowed carriers to claim that they covered a whole neighborhood if they provided broadband to a single home.
And as if that wasn't grifty enough, the carriers were allowed to draw their own maps of what constituted a "neighborhood," ensuring that each neighborhood boundary captured one house where they could provide coverage without any capex.
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The Journal calls this "flying through a fog." The fraudulent coverage maps have left regulators and lawmakers with nothing but (ghastly) anaecdotes, and only the carriers know the true state of their coverage.
Unfortunately, it's vanishingly unlikely that Ajit Pai, the most captured FCC Chairman in a generation, will demand that they turn those accurate maps over. Instead, he'll just insist on apportioning billions in broadband subsidies without know where they're needed.
eof/