Trump’s FCC Just Scrapped Its Most Ambitious Broadband Goal
It’s just one word, but it changes everything. In its latest broadband deployment report, the FCC quietly backpedaled on its mission to expand high-speed internet to every American and eliminated an ambitious gig-speed goal entirely.
“High-speed broadband is often essential to full participation in modern society,” the opening sentence of the Aug. 14 report reads.
That sounds pretty uncontroversial at first glance, but it stands in stark contrast to the previous report issued under President Joe Biden’s FCC, which called access to affordable, reliable broadband “essential to full participation in modern life.” The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres went even further, calling the issue “a matter of life and death” in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That word ‘often’ — the fifth word in the whole report — just sets the entire tone that suddenly broadband is not as important as it was five years ago,” Christopher Ali,...
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