Title V and specifically Section 60506 of the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) enacted in November 2021 contains provisions titled “digital discrimination.” They state federal policy that “insofar as technically and economically feasible— subscribers should benefit from equal access to broadband internet access service within the service area of a provider of such service.” Section 60506 defines ‘‘equal access’’ as “the equal opportunity to subscribe to an offered service that provides comparable speeds, capacities, latency, and other quality of service metrics in a given area, for comparable terms and conditions.”
It directs the Federal Communications Commission to take steps to ensure that “all people of the United States benefit from equal access to broadband internet access service” and adopt rules by November 2023 to facilitate equal access to broadband internet access service, “taking into account the issues of technical and economic feasibility presented by that objective, including— preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin and identifying necessary steps for the FCC to take to eliminate discrimination.”
That definition sounds in language similar to provisions of Title II of the Communications Act that regards telecommunications as a common carrier utility and mandates reasonable requests for service to be honored while barring neighborhood discrimination. The FCC’s Open Internet rulemaking adopted in 2015 applied Title II to Internet protocol-enabled advanced telecommunications services. It was repealed and replaced in 2018. The Biden administration in a July 2021 executive order urged the FCC to readopt the 2015 Open Internet rulemaking.
The IIJA also requires the FCC to report to Congress on the FCC’s options for improving its effectiveness in achieving the universal service goals. The report, due by August 15, “will focus on examining options and making recommendations for Commission and Congressional actions toward achieving those goals,” according to a proceeding the FCC opened to gather public comment.
The administration was more likely to move the nation toward universal service as it was initially inclined to do by subsidizing public sector and consumer cooperative owned advanced telecommunications infrastructure, aptly noting these entities don’t operate with the economic burden of earning profits for their shareholders. The administration abandoned that stance in negotiations leading up to the IIJA’s enactment last year.
While few would object to Section 60506’s provisions, they are essentially happy talk with no real world impact. In the predominant market-based U.S. telecommunications landscape, commercial providers have incentive to discriminate since their shareholders naturally object to serving neighborhoods that are less profitable. That’s why only about a third of American homes that should have been connected to modern fiber optic delivered advanced telecommunications infrastructure at least a decade ago are not and still have copper telephone connections.
Section 60506’s language while nominally barring “digital discrimination” gives commercial deployers an out with exculpatory language, applying only where “economically feasible.” Fiber connections simply aren’t economically feasible within the business models of investor-owned providers, an economic reality seemingly unacknowledged by Section 60506. Digital discrimination is baked into the market segmentation strategies of those business models that favor newer and more densely developed neighborhoods in urban and suburban areas. Additionally, commercial providers have and will continue to argue it’s not technologically feasible to deploy fiber connections to homes and businesses within their service territories citing challenging geography.
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