Deeplinks

Podcast Episode: Why Does My Internet Suck?

Read the original article: Podcast Episode: Why Does My Internet Suck?

Episode 002 of EFF’s How to Fix the Internet

Gigi Sohn joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss broadband access in the United States – or the lack thereof. Gigi explains the choices American policymakers and tech companies made that have caused millions to lack access to reliable broadband, and what steps we need to take to fix the problem now. 

In this episode you’ll learn:

  • How the FCC defines who has broadband Internet and why that definition makes no sense in 2020;
  • How many other countries adopted policies that either incentivized competition among Internet providers or invested in government infrastructure for Internet services, while the United States did neither, leading to much of the country having only one or two Internet service providers, high costs, and poor quality Internet service;
  • Why companies like AT&T and Verizon aren’t investing in fiber;
  • How the FCC uses a law about telephone regulation to assert authority over regulating broadband access, and how the 1996 Telecommunication Act granted the FCC permission to forbear – or not apply – certain parts of that law;
  • How 19 states in the U.S. have bans or limitations on municipal broadband, and why repealing those bans is key to increasing broadband access
  • How Internet access is connected to issues of equity, upward mobility, and job accessibility, as well as related issues of racial justice, citizen journalism and police accountability;
  • Specific suggestions and reforms, including emergency subsidies and a major investment in infrastructure, that could help turn this situation around.

Gigi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy and a Benton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate.  She is one of the nation’s leading public advocates for open, affordable and democratic communications networks. From 2013-2016, Gigi was Counselor to the former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler. She advised the Chairman on a wide range of Internet, telecommunications and media issues, representing him and the FCC in a variety of public forums around the country as well as serving as the primary liaison between the Chairman’s office and outside stakeholders. From 2001-2013, Gigi served as the Co-Founder and CEO of Public Knowledge, a leading telecommunications, media and technology policy advocacy organization. She was previously a Project Specialist in the Ford Foundation’s Media, Arts and Culture unit and Executive Director of the Media Access Project, a public interest law firm. You can find Gigi on her own podcast, Tech on the Rocks, or you can find her on Twitter at @GigiBSohn.

Below, you’ll find legal resources – including links to important cases, books, and briefs discussed in the podcast – as well a full transcript of the audio.

Please subscribe to How to Fix the Internet on Stitcher, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your podcast player of choice. You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive. If you have any feedback on this episode, please email podcast@eff.org

Resources

Current State of Broadband

Fiber

ISP Anti-Competitive Practices & Broadband Policy

Net Neutrality

Other

Transcript of Episode 002: Why Does My Internet Suck?

Danny O’Brien:
Welcome to How to Fix the Internet with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a podcast that explores some of the biggest problems we face online right now, problems whose source and solution is often buried in the obscure twists of technological development, societal change, and the subtle details of Internet law.

Cindy Cohn:
Hi, everyone. I’m Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and, for purposes of this podcast, I’m also a lawyer.

Danny O’Brien:
And I’m Danny O’Brien, and I work at the EFF, too, although they have yet to notice I’m not actually a lawyer. Welcome to How to Fix the Internet, a podcast that explores some of the more pressing problems facing the Internet today, and solves them, right then and there.

Cindy Cohn:
Well, or at least we’re hoping to point the way to a better future with the help of some experts who can guide us and, sometimes, challenge our thinking.

Danny O’Brien:
This episode, we’re tackling a problem that has been a blatant issue for years here in the United States, and yet no one seems able to fix. Namely, why does my broadband connectivity suck? Cindy, I live in San Francisco, supposedly the beating heart of the digital revolution, but I’m stuck with a slow and expensive connection. My video calls look like I’m filming them with a potato. What went wrong?

Cindy Cohn:
Well, maybe take the potato away, Danny. But, you know, it’s a recurrent complaint that the home of the Internet, the United States, has some of the worst bandwidth, the highest costs in the developing world. And that’s a problem that our guest today has been tackling for much of her career.

Cindy Cohn:
Gigi Sohn is one of the nation’s leading advocates for open, affordable, and democratic communications networks. She is currently a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy. Previously, she was counselor to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and she co-founded and led the nonprofit Public Knowledge for 12 years. And I’m proud to say that she’s currently a member of EFF’s board of directors.

Danny O’Brien:
Welcome, Gigi. When we talk about broadband policy, what we’re really talking about is fast Internet, home and business Internet that’s speedy enough to do what we need to do these days online. Yet, I was looking and the FCC, the regulator in charge of such things in the U.S., Defines broadband as 25 megabits per second down and 3 megabits up. That seems a little low to me.

Gigi Sohn:
Yes, it is very slow. But before I start on my rant and rave, I just want to say how delighted I am to be with you guys today. Very socially distant, 3000 miles away, but also how proud I am to serve on EFF’s board, so thank you, Cindy, for asking me to do that, and I love being part of this organization.

Gigi Sohn:
So, yes, 25 megabits per second down, three up. That is the definition that was set in 2014, when I worked at the FCC. And now we are in 2020 and we are in the middle of a pandemic, and it is quite clear that, if you, like me, have three people working from home, on Zoom calls, at least two of us on Zoom calls at the same time and another doing her homework, that 25 megabits per second down and, particularly, three up, which nobody ever focuses on the upload speed, is just wholly inadequate.

Gigi Sohn:
So, let me tell you a story. Up until about six weeks ago, I had 75 megabits per second symmetrical at the low, low price of $80 a month. I called my broadband ISP, Verizon, and I said, “There’s three of us in the house and we’re all working at the same time. I need 200 megabits per second symmetrical for an extra $30 a month.” And the tech told me the truth and said, “Yeah, 75 symmetrical, that’s not enough for three of you.”

Gigi Sohn:
So, that’ll tell you a bit about how outdated the FCC’s definition of broadband is, when a company representative is telling you that 75 megabits per second symmetrical isn’t enough for just three people.

Danny O’Brien:
And I mean, what’s crazy to me, and we’re going to be talking in this show primarily about the United States experience, but I use what bandwidth I have to talk to people in the rest of the world, and it seems most countries, or a lot of countries, I should say, have far better connectivity at a far lower price. So, it seems crazy that the United States, which is certainly one of the origins of the Internet, has struggled to provide that Internet to its own citizens.

Gigi Sohn:
Well, I think there’s a very simple explanation for that. In the other countries, the countries have either made, like South Korea, a major investment in broadband. They consider it infrastructure. They consider it, if not a public utility, like a public utility. Or, in places like England, the policy permits great competition. And we have neither of that.

Gigi Sohn:
The investment that this government has made in our infrastructure, in our broadband infrastructure, has been nominal. Now, there’s some proposals out there I’m happy to talk about to up that number considerably. But perhaps even more importantly, the policy that we had, which promoted competition in the narrow band world, in the dial up world in the late 90s and the early 00s, the average American had access to an average of 13 different ISPs. Today, you’re lucky if you’ve got two.

Gigi Sohn:
It does amaze me how little competition there is in San Francisco. So, there’s a recent study out from a group called the Institute for Local Self Reliance, and it showed that nearly 50 million Americans have a choice of only one broadband provider, and that’s using the FCC’s really lousy data, which grossly overstates who has access to broadband. And that Comcast and Charter, the two largest cable companies, have a monopoly over 47 million Americans and another 33 million on top of that have only digital subscriber line, or DSL, which is not even 25/3 most of the time, as their competitive choice.

Gigi Sohn:
So, because we got rid of policies that promoted competition, we now have a series of regional monopolies, and they can charge what they want. And they could serve who they want.

Cindy Cohn:
So, how did we get here, Gigi? How did we end up with this lack of choice in the United States?

Gigi Sohn:
I think it’s two reasons. Again, we let the private sector take over what is essentially public infrastructure. The government said, this was Democrats and Republicans, this is not partisan, “We should let the free market, so to speak, flourish. We should let the market flourish.”

Gigi Sohn:
And for a while there, again in the late 90s and early 00s, it did. But then the FCC deregulated broadband and eliminated the requirement that dominant telecom providers in a community had to open up their networks to competitors. And

[…]

Read the original article: Podcast Episode: Why Does My Internet Suck?