Experts say the $65B broadband bill Congress is finalizing has many good aspects, but won't fix the high prices that result from broadband monopolization
Experts say there's some very good things in the broadband infrastructure proposal, but it won't truly fix what ails the broken sector. Tweets: @tedcruz , @motherboard , and @karlbode Tweets: Ted Cruz / @tedcruz : Given the major flaws in the underlying bill's unworkable and devastating crypto provision, I also filed a separate amendment to strike the whole thing, in the event a bipartisan deal can't be reached. We have to act now to stop this. @motherboard : While the steady weakening of the infrastructure proposal's broadband component is often framed as “bipartisan compromise,” telecom lobbyists don't appear to be doing much of the compromising. https://www.vice.com/... Karl Bode / @karlbode : I wrote about how the steady shrinking of Biden's broadband plan is framed as “bipartisan compromise,” but there's only one side doing the compromising (spoiler: it's not telecom lobbyists): https://www.vice.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Senate's July 29 $65B broadband deal — $35B below Biden's original ask — was already a compromise before experts weighed in, and Motherboard frames its continued weakening not as bipartisan give-and-take but as telecom lobbying doing its work. The expert critique lands on a sector where the government can't even see the problem clearly: critics have long noted the FCC's National Broadband Map overstates available ISPs and omits pricing data entirely.
That missing pricing layer is exactly what this bill leaves untouched. The pattern holds after it too: Big Telecom later lobbied to squeeze municipal competitors out of the follow-on funding (municipal network restrictions) and AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon pushed to strip rules protecting poor customers' bills from the $42.5B deployment program.
First-order effects
- Roughly $65B in new federal money starts flowing into a market dominated by incumbent carriers with no attached pricing or competition conditions — so Comcast, Charter, AT&T and Verizon are positioned to capture much of it while the monopoly pricing experts flag stays intact.
- Passage itself remains contingent: Ted Cruz has filed an amendment to strike the bill's crypto provision entirely if the bipartisan deal stalls, adding a procedural threat on top of the substantive fights.
Second-order effects
- With no price rules attached, subsidies risk flowing through to shareholders rather than ratepayers — the exact outcome the carriers' later push against bill protections in the $42.5B program implies they intend to defend.
- Municipal broadband, the main non-incumbent check on local pricing, gets squeezed out of the funding architecture by telecom lobbying, leaving customers in monopoly markets with subsidized infrastructure but no cheaper alternative to buy from.
Third-order effects
- If every broadband funding round ships without competition policy attached, federal spending structurally entrenches the monopolization it's meant to remedy — each infusion raises the incumbents' moat faster than alternatives can form.
- A regulatory apparatus that can't measure price or verify availability (per the FCC map critique) will keep mis-targeting funds toward areas claimed served but effectively uncompetitive, making the gap between dollars spent and bills paid a permanent feature of US broadband policy.
The trend: US broadband policy keeps cycling through large capital infusions to incumbent carriers while the pricing, competition, and measurement reforms that would discipline them are lobbied away — money without market structure.