Why advanced telecommunications infrastructure subsidies don’t make Internet service available to all Americans – explained in five points

1. For many decades, federal and state governments surcharged phone bills to subsidize infrastructure for voice telephone service in high cost areas. These subsidies paid to telephone companies made sense because the companies had an obligation to honor reasonable requests for service – the universal service mandate for telecommunications services under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. But that requirement does not apply to advanced telecommunications delivered by Internet protocol because the U.S. Federal Communications Commission does not consider advanced telecommunications to be a telecommunications service but rather an optionally provided information service under Title I of the Communications Act akin to America Online and CompuServe in the early years of mass Internet access.
2. Current federal and state subsidy programs don’t directly subsidize the construction of infrastructure in high cost areas. Instead, there exists a mishmash of programs designed to deliver various arbitrary throughput levels, known as “broadband speed.” Instead of determining where to subsidize infrastructure, federal and state governments attempt to map a moving target of advertised broadband speeds in order to determine where to direct subsidies.
3. Without a universal service mandate, investor owned advanced telecommunications providers have little incentive to seek subsidies since they can instead direct capital investments to lower cost and more immediately profitable infrastructure deployments.
4. Since high cost subsidies are available to various actors including non-incumbent investor owned providers, cooperatives and state and local governments, incumbent providers often oppose the award of subsidies within their nominal service territories and “footprints.” They regard these geographical areas as proprietary and other would be providers as interlopers. 
5. The amount of available subsidy funding is too little relative to need and there is inadequate monitoring of how it's spent.