Study: US telecom giants spent $234M on lobbying during the 116th Congress alone, to fight bills promoting net neutrality, local community broadband, and more
Context & Ripple Effects
The $234M figure puts hard numbers on a pattern the coverage has tracked for years: Comcast's record Q1 2015 lobbying quarter and the 2016 cycle's per-company totals showed telecom and Big Tech spending rising together. The 116th Congress was the window when net neutrality repeal and community-broadband bills were live fights, making this the peak documented spend for the sector.
The payoff shows up downstream: by 2023, reporting detailed how Big Telecom lobbied lawmakers to squeeze out new municipal networks so that much of Biden's $41.6B broadband funding flows to incumbents, and in 2024 AT&T, Charter, Comcast, and Verizon were still working to weaken the $42.5B program's rules on poor customers' bills. This study reads less as a snapshot than as the invoice for that outcome.
First-order effects
- Net-neutrality and municipal-broadband bills before the 116th Congress faced an incumbent lobby whose budget dwarfed what community broadband advocates could field, shaping which proposals even reached votes.
Second-order effects
- As federal broadband money scaled from the FCC's $1.2B+ Rural Digital Opportunity Fund awards to tens of billions, the same carriers redirected lobbying dollars toward funding rules rather than blocking programs entirely — defending their share of distribution instead of fighting expansion outright.
Third-order effects
- If lobbying intensity keeps scaling with subsidy size, federal broadband policy structurally favors incumbent ISPs over municipal and community networks, and disclosure studies like this one become the main counterweight available to opponents.
The trend: Telecom lobbying spend is scaling with the size of federal broadband subsidies, shifting from blocking regulation to steering who gets the money.